Following the 8/10 discussion, some politicians now advocate that all hand-luggage should be prohibited on airplanes. What will happen if all frequent traveller scientists are no more allowed to take anything inside of planes? No laptop, no organizer, no paper to read, nothing to review, nothing to administrate? Imagine that the inflight magazine is only good for 5 minutes and that there are no interesting flight attendants anymore. Just a pencil and a barf bag in front of the seat. Would that revolutionize science?

One of my favorite stories that I heard in Venice two years ago (and recall it only from memory, please correct me if I am wrong): The rich Venice merchandiser Labia arranged big parties for his guests. With his temper at height, he was throwing golden plates through the window, crying: “Le abia, o non le bia, saró sempre Labia” – “if I have them or if I have them not, I am always a Labia”. (It turned out that some of his servants were waiting at Canale Grande to pick up the golden plates coming through the window). Yea, yea.

Setting up this blog was a matter of 10 minutes while filling it will probably take some more time. I have been a net citizen since its beginning. Having sent out my first (stored) email on Jan 18, 1993, while my first web page dates back to Feb 1, 1995. I was running one of the worlds largest websites on asthma and also a gene database for many years but haven’t done anything useful during the past years.

Addendum

This blog serves as a testbed for the next few months if this kind of information exchange is of any use (except for paying bills of a lawyer). I will broaden here my view on science and refer to my archive of ~16,000 scientific papers that I have collected since 1986 when starting my thesis.