Juan Convers

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Basel Herbstmesse. This year, I had the chance to ride the Ferris wheel again, which they usually set up in Münsterplatz. From the top, I snapped this picture—showing the cathedral and the Rhine River in the background. The view is amazing, and it gives a nice vie on the city!

Even though I've been going to this fair for years, I realized I’d never actually read up on its history. Turns out, it’s not just any fair; it’s the oldest and largest in Switzerland. It’s been held in Basel since 1471! The fair was first allowed by Emperor Friedrich III and started out as a market for selling goods and livestock. Hard to imagine that now, with all the rides, food stalls, and fun attractions we see today.

The fair’s changed a lot over the centuries, but it’s amazing how it still feels like a local tradition and brings the whole city together every year. If you’re ever in Basel during Herbstmesse, I definitely recommend a ride on the Ferris wheel for those city views—it’s worth it!

AnimeGAN is a deep learning model designed to convert real-world images or videos into anime-style artwork. Using this model, it's possible to transform photos into nice anime-style images that look like they were taken a Japanese animation.

A couple of weeks ago I passed by this place early in the morning I was able to capture a nice photo of the beach. I decided to use the Tenorflow.js version of this AnimeGAN model to convert the photo into an anime-style image. The result is quite interesting as you can observe in the image above.

One of my favorite plans is to jump on a train and head to Geneva. I always walk along Quai Gustave-Ador to the Jet d'Eau, enjoying the nice path along Lake Geneva.

A couple of days ago, I did this again. After passing the Jet d'Eau, I looked back and noticed the setting sun creating a beautiful backlight behind the fountain. It was a view that I tought it was worth a picture, so I quickly captured the moment with my camera.

This unexpected photo turned out to be one of my favorites on that spot, so I'm sharing it here with you.

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit the village just before the Vallorbe station, thanks to a kind invitation from a friend and former work colleague. He invited me for dinner at his house, which is conveniently located right next to the station 'Le Day'. Not only was it a very pleasant evening with excellent food and company, but it was equally interesting to get to know this region of Vaud.

Before heading to his place, he suggested that we take a walk near a meadow where we spotted some chamois grazing on the cliff near the viaduct. These animals are indeed very interesting. We then went through the tunnel under the viaduct, where I had the opportunity to take the photo above.

It’s a very nice region, and I will definitely come back again.

Last week, we were walking near Schützenmatt Park when we stumbled upon an unusual sight in the middle of the central meadow. One of the storks that typically wanders through the park in the early morning was having a confrontation with a bird of prey, which looked like a falcon. The scene unfolded over a few minutes, during which the stork protested with its distinctive "clack-clack-clack-clack." Finally, the falcon got fed up and flew off to a branch of a nearby tree, close to where we had parked our bikes.

I discussed with L. how unusual this situation was. It's rare to see such wildlife behaving this way in the middle of an urban park. It made me wonder if the argument had started earlier, perhaps in the sky, between these two fascinating birds.

A few weeks back, I visited a dear old friend, a guy that I know from our school days, who now is living close to me in Vaud, Switzerland. My routine for these visits usually involves taking the train on to Montreaux and descending at the Burier station. This time, everything aligned perfectly, allowing me to witness a really nice sunset painting on particularly quiet lake Leman a set of vibrant colors.

It is almost 9 years since the last time I had the opportunity to visit Locarno. This is a beautiful city in southern Switzerland, located on the northern shore of Lake Maggiore. It is known for its mild climate, its mediterranean air and its amazing landscapes. Last night I took this picture in the Piazza Grande which is the main square in the city center. I was remembering that just on that occasion in 2016, I attended a screening of the movie "Lo chiamavano Trinità" in this square.

Augusta Raurica is an ancient Roman archaeological site located near the modern town of Kaiseraugst, Switzerland. It was once a thriving Roman settlement and served as the capital of the Roman province of Rhaetia. Augusta Raurica was founded in the 1st century BCE and reached its peak during the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.

The proximity to Basel, along with convenient transportation options, makes this place an excellent destination for a day-trip excursion, especially when the weather is nice. Last weekend we visited again this place and enjoyed the did a walkround the site. It's interesting because it contains a number of well-preserved ruins, including the theater, the temple, and the forum. It's recommended if you are visiting Basel.

Yesterday we were celebrating the New Year's Eve in Switzerland with a delightful Bogotanian dish called Ajiaco con Pollo. We placed the steaming pot at the center of the table and everyone pour a good amount of it, adding capers, cream and the important avocato slices. This Colombian dish always bring some nice memories of my childhood so I was delighted to discover that we still had some dried "guascas" to recreate it as close as possible to the real deal. Wishing everyone a Happy New Year 2024!

A few weeks ago, Basel experienced an unusually chilly couple of days, including a particularly frosty weekend that gave us a fresh layer of snow. This wintry weather was the perfect excuse to enjoy classic winter activities such as crafting snowmen, engaging in friendly snowball battles, and enjoying some fun ice sliding.

The following day was bright and sunny, and as a result, the lingering cold ensured the snow stuck around a bit longer. These moments presented some interesting photo opportunities, as the example captured in the image above. The photo showcases the sun's rays creating interesting patterns on the snowy rooftop.

Every time I visited the city of Geneva, whenever I had to wait at the train station platforms, I always noticed those luminous works of art in the street in front, and I always wondered what the story behind them was. Even the last time I visited Geneva, I took the photo you find above, when I was passing by

Some days ago I was reading the story of those displays and it's as interesting as beautiful they are: In December 2016, this work, titled "Pinta Cura", created by the local artist Frédéric Post, was setup in the center of Geneva for the 3rd edition of the Geneva Lux Festival. The work details the shamanic symbolism of Yage medicine among some indigenous people in Colombia, featuring the figures of the anaconda and the jaguar, two animals of power linked to healing and care.

The Eurostats website published an interesting article that emphasizes the increasing importance of digital skills in response to technological advancements. It discusses how the EU aims for at least 80% of adults to have the minimum basic digital skills by 2030.

It also describes how even if around 90% of EU citizens are using the internet weekly, only 54% in average had basic or above basic digital skills in 2021. Finland and the Netherlands led with 79%, followed by Ireland (70%) and Denmark (69%), highlighting disparities in digital proficiency across EU countries.

As more and more of our traditional activities move even further online, investing the digital skills education since early age would seem to be wise decision. I hope the EU goverments will prioritise it.

A couple of days ago when I was coming back from work and I was arriving to the picturesque city where I live, I started to think: What would happen if I told one of the AI tools to paint this place using the impressionist technique, and then told it to describe it? Well here is the result of this experiment:

"In an impressionist painting of the Swiss town of Morges, we are transported to a tranquil and picturesque scene next to the pier of Lake Geneva. The essence of the Impressionist style is to capture the fleeting moment, the play of light and color, and the atmospheric ambiance. In this particular painting, the artist has masterfully conveyed these elements.

The canvas is alive with vibrant, dappled colors that dance across the scene. The shimmering waters of Lake Geneva, in soft shades of blues and greens, extend toward the horizon, creating a reflective surface that mirrors the world above. The surface of the lake is beautifully textured with strokes of various shades, conveying the rippling movement of the water..."

This is just an excerpt, because then the machine started to describe parts of Morges that are not in the painting, but still this visual and textual test was quite interesting.

I've been fortunate to explore several European cities showcasing remnants of Roman civilization, such as the Colosseum in Rome, the Library of Celsus in Turkey, the Theater of Merida, and the city of Augusta Raurica. However, Pompeii undoubtedly stands on a different league altogether. Last weekend I had the opportunity to go there and it was a truly fascinating experience

Since this Roman city was frozen in time after the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and it took multiple to centuries to discover it, the extend of its preservation is remarkable. It's surreal to find yourself walking along the original Roman streets, where once the horse powered carriages use to ride. These narrow, cobblestone streets are flanked by impeccably preserved remnants of residences, stores, and public structures, such as the Amphitheater, the Forum, and even the impressive Tower of Mercury, which offers a panoramic view of the vast archaeological park.

Quite a magical place!.

A couple of days ago I had the opportunity to visit Geneva again, with a good friend of mine who was visiting me for the first time in the region. We decided to pay a visit to this interesting city, without definite plan, just chill and walk around the city. When we were passing near the cathedral I noticed there were some people up there in the tower and I proposed her to go up to have a panoramic view of the city (I had never done it before).

The plan turned out to be very interesting one, offering beatiful views of the different parts of the city with a clear and sunny sky. One of those views is captured in the previous photograph: The iconic Jet d'Eau in the middle of the clear water from the lake Geneva.

Saint Suplice, a beatiful village in close proximity to Lausanne and Ecublens, has some amazing scenery along its lakeside promenade. One of the landmarks in this nice place is a meticulously well preserved 12th century church, that you can oberve in this backlight picture taken a couple of days ago.

This picture taken in Morges last weekend features an amazing landscape with an interesting composition: In the foreground, there is an group of multicolor tulips arranged in a nice lane, in the middle ground, there is the Leman lake with some boats and the reflections on the lake and finally in the background, there are the alpine mountains with snow-capped peaks.

I think the contrast of colors in this picture is particularly nice, with the bright colors of the tulips contrasting with the blue and green hues of the lake and the earthy tones of the mountains, combined with the perfect sunset light. Nice!

A couple of days ago, while strolling through the center of Geneva city, I stumbled upon a fascinating sight: In the background, I noticed an interesting composition with the Jet d'eau visible in the distance, seemingly on the verge of reaching the grey clouds before it started to rain.

The Tulip Festival in Morges is an annual event that takes place in this pictoresque vadois. The festival is dedicated to celebrating the arrival of spring and the blooming of thousands of tulips that adorn the parks and gardens of Morges.

A couple of days ago, as I was strolling near the lake, my eyes caught this intesting sight. The scenery, which featured the lake and the mountains in the backdrop, with the bright yellow tullips on the stage. I couldn't help but think that it would make an nice composition for a photo, such as the one I attempted above

One of the advantages of the EPFL campus is its location relatively close to lake Leman. Sometimes the landscapes that can be seen in the background are really spectacular and this was indeed hat happened last week: I was on the esplanade walking towards the library when I noticed in the background this composition that I thought definitely deserved a photo and a post about it.

As the sun began to rise over the horizon, the sky above the town of Morges was awash with some brilliant shades of pink and orange. The tranquil waters of Lake Geneva below reflected these vibrant hues, creating a stunning and serene scene.

The calm waters of Lake Geneva stretched out into the distance, their surface rippling gently in the light breeze. As the sun continueed to rise, the colors of the sky deepened and the reflections on the water became even more pronounced, creating a breathtaking visual spectacle."

... and all this text was AI generated just by asking the model to describe this picture. I had to make some corrections but still, quite impressive :)

Last week I was at the office, when suddenly it started to snow heavily and you could see the snowflakes falling very quickly through the window. I thought at that moment that it would be worth taking a picture and you can see the result above this text.

Sometimes taking a good picture involves a bit of good luck and being in the right place at the right time and that's just what happened in Morges, Switzerland a couple of days ago. I was riding back on my bike after buying some coffee, when I noticed the silhouette of the Morges church reflected in the lake, with that spectacular sunset in the background. Definitely a moment that called to stop and take this shot!

Yesterday when we were on our way home, my gf pointed out the window and said "look, look there in the background". I couldn't see at the beginning what she was talking about but then yeah, the amazing Bernese Alps where on full display there in the background. I quickly snapped this shot with my phone that you can see in the picture above. Really nice!.

A couple of days ago I was testing my electric bike, doing a ride from the university to Vevey (about 25 km). At some point when the sun light was getting started to dim, I decided to stop and look back and I saw this beautiful sky that I captured in the photo you find in this post.

This morning, before starting work, I noticed that the day was quite beautiful with a bright sun, so I went for a short walk to the lake here in Morges, and when I was passing by the harbor I captured this image with an interesting composition.

Nice picture of the moonlight through a tree branches shadow a couples of days ago in Morges, Vaud, Switzerland

The city center of Morges can be quite beautiful when there are snowy days in these winter months. That was the case a couple of days ago as you can see in the photo above this post.

On this first day of 2022 I had the opportunity to enjoy this beautiful sunset on the shore of Lake Geneva, with the church of Morges in the background. I felt at that moment that in spite of the difficult beginning of 2022, I have hope that everything will be better and that it will be a great year!

Last week when I was leaving work the light was just perfect to take this snapshopt at the EPFL Campus.

Lausanne is a city that can be quite photogenic, and one of my favorite areas for taking photos is the Ouchy area. This area has stunning views of the lake with the alps in the background. A couple of weeks ago I took this photo of the Éole sculpture created by Clelia Bettua in 1995.

Last week I went out at lunchtime to do a little walk to the lake that is quite close to my home office setting and although the day was quite cold, the sun reflected on Lake Geneva created a beautiful view that I captured in the photo you can see above.

The number of cases of covid-19 in Switzerland increased dramatically in November, reaching more than 10,000 at the beginning of the month which forced the cantonal and federal authorities to take strict measures to prevent contagion.

One of the main differences with respect to the wave that occurred during the spring time, is that the number of hospitalizations has increased significantly as can be seen in the graph above. We hope that those measures taken by the authorities will help to control this new peak. Of course everybody has to their part: #wearamask.

Both in Basel city and Zurich it is required to wear facemask with the objective to reduce the COVID-19 transmission. The country flattened the curve but as soon as it began to reopen, the cases started to up again. The cantons of Geneva, Vaud and Zurich are the most affected as it can be observed in the previous graph.

There have been a some articles in the news lately discusing how the current occupant of the white house is losing ground against his democractic rival including: The remarkable collapse of Donald Trumps polling numbers and States that Trump won easily in 2016 are looking tight for him in November. The news are not surprising, giving the horrible COVID-19 numbers on the USA, its ecnomic impact and the wave of protest againts police brutaliy. The data from realclearpolitics seems to confirm this trend.

The US democratic primaries are around the corner with the first state voting next monday. I was curious how the Google Search Trends in the last 7 days, reflect on each one of top tier candidates. Bernie Sanders is clearly winning on that “interest” field. Interesting to see what will happen in the actual Iowa caucuses.

On the 25th of April, Joe Biden announced he was joining the crowded democratic primaries race. The aggregate polls show an interesting trend. Even before his announcement he was leading the polls, but there was a clear but in his numbers afterwards. It's interesting to see what will happen in the months ahead. Will those trends continue and the main race is going to be between him a Bernie Sanders? or will there be another candaidate getting into the top spot?. Time will tell.

The official FX Data from the bank of england site, shows the changes related to the whole Brexit process. Yesterday it was reported that MPs have voted overwhelmingly to hold Theresa May to her commitment to give them a vote on delaying Brexit if her withdrawal agreement fails to win a majority within the next two weeks.. It's interesting how everytime Brexit seems to be further away ... the better the British currency performs.

The previous charts show the US Senate and US House party control over time since the 19th century.

Yesterday I noticed the Autumn colors are already here. It's beautiful as you can see in the picture above, but with the crazy weather this year and the temperature going up and down I hardly noticed this season is already here.

I always believed one the main problems with the presidential elections in Colombia, held every four years, is the timing: They always coincide with the Football World Cup!. Football is an extremely popular sport in the country and when the national squad qualifies to the tournament, the country turns the attention away from everthing except to this event.

The previous graph generated with Google Trends Search Data, relate to this point at least on the online sphere: The Colombian people are more interested in searching information about topics regarding the World Cup, than topics related to the presidentials.

The first round of this election will take on the 27th May and the second round on the 17th June (the World Cup starts on the 14th). Just saying ...

A couple of weeks ago an article in business insider stated that Apple’s iOS was losing market share in Europe's four largest markets (Great Britain, France, Italy, and Spain) besides Japan. I haven't checked the mobile global market in a while and today checking the starcounter stats, Android is clearly dominant on a global scale. It's true Android has some issues, including the well known fragmentation, but I still prefer the flexibility of this OS over the iOS one.

Some weeks ago when I finished working, I was about to leave the building and I saw in the wall a sheet of paper with information about a vue.js meetup here in Berlin. I thought I have never heard about this vue.js and the more I read, the more interested I became into this front-end javascript framework.

Google Search trends show vue.js has been the post popular framework in the last 12 months. Vue.js is self described as "a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Unlike other monolithic frameworks, Vue is designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable". I gave it a go and it's quite interesting.

When Theresa May announced her intention to seek a general election back in April, the conservative lead on the polls over labor was around 21%. As you can see in the graph above this lead has been shrinking over time. It's very interesting to see what is going to happen in this election next month.

Today the French are voting in their presidential elections and the possibility of having a far right president, who has campaigned against Europe and NATO brings dark clouds to the European horizon. I'm hoping the french people will reject those proposals. Allez le bleus!

A couple of days ago, on march th 8th, it was the international women's day. I was chatting with some family member about this day should exist at all (there were arguing that the day should be everyday). I was checking the pay gap between Man in Women in the European countries and I think there is still a reason to celebrate this day.

Wikipedia provides an article containing a list of the top 100 sites in the world in terms of traffic, using Alexa and SimilarWeb as sources. The chart above shows the type of sites count based on that list and Search Engines is the top category by far. Now, it's interesting to see how the main reason of this finding is due to the massive popularity of Google around the world: Its localized version on all this countries make it to the top 100 list:

Sometimes you look and the window and the view is so nice that it doesn't look like a normal window but rather as a picture that was presented to you instead. That was the case today.

The polls aggregates from Real Clear Politics shows that Trump opinion has never been more favorable than unfavorable. In fact it has been reported he assumed office as one of the most unpopular presidents in the modern history. The trend show it's again down after a short increase following the election.

Wikipedia has a useful page with a lot of stats about Switzerland Statistics. The chart above shows the number of live births per year. Very relevant information today.

Looking at the final 2016 US presidential election results, it's remarkable how bad trump lost in California. 8.7 million vs 4.4 million votes. It's not surprising that on the days after the election the #calexit hashtag started to trend. Clinton won the popular vote, so many Americans will feel underrepresented based on the electoral college system they have in place, but nowhere this is more dramatic than in California.

Not surprising. The earth temperature measured by NASA in September was the highest ever warmest month. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts.txt. This follows the same pattern as every month this year. The Paris climate agreement clearly recognized the wide impact of Global Warming, but with the recent results of the US Elections, this issue needs to be raised all the time.

This morning I woke up very early feeling a bit uneasy. I started to follow the live US presidential transmission and then slowly, it began to be clear that the Republican nominee was going to win. I was mentioning a couple of days ago, the main danger with this outcome is that the nationalists groups might feel empowered to spread and promote their hate speech. I'm really hoping this won't happen. And it was definitely a complete poll miss. A dangerous one.

Alright, the last 4 way presidential polls still put Clinton slightly ahead. Crossing the fingers the lead will hold. Yesterday the FBI director sent a letter clarifying there was nothing new in the emails from last week, so I hope the voters in the US will be able to compare the flaws of the democratic nominee against the real sexists, racist, protectionist and xenophobic positions of the Republican nominee.

I haven't checked the Mobile OS market share in a while. According to net market share Android has 68.5% and IOS has 25.8% in the last month. I'm curious how this will be affected with the whole Note 7 issue. But still it's impressive the growth compared with just 2 years ago.

Yesterday I saw the excellent documentary "Hate Rising" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOsRktPBNhI), a film where the journalist Jorge Ramos, explores how the current US election has empowered white nationalist groups, leading to a rise of hate in that country, including attacks to minority communities. This documentary brought memories back of my mother because I'm sure she would be extremely disappointed. Before she got sick and passed away, she worked with the Girl Scouts of the USA, setting up programs to make the Latino girls proud of their heritage and to help all the girls to feel equal and part of one nation.

"The most important task in my job is to make one world, It's important for the Latinos and it's important for the American people.", my mom used to say. I have been following close the US presidential elections, not only because I have many relatives and friends living in that country, but also because I truly believe, its outcome will have important repercussions around the world.

If you don't want to live in a country where hate is normalized, where sexist and misogynist views come from the top of the leadership and where your liberties and rights get curtailed under the "law and order" sophism, please vote on this binary election!. As an European I followed the Brexit vote closely because I still think the European Union project has brought a lot stability and peace to this continent and I thought it would be bad for my adoptive Irish nation. As you know the yes camp won mainly on “immigration control” grounds and unfortunately the attacks against immigrants communities increased immediately after the vote. The future of this nation looks gloomy, since most of the promises of the yes camp where not attainable.

On the other hand as a Colombian I was extremely hopeful about the referendum to accept the peace agreements signed in Cuba to put an end to the oldest civil conflict in the Latino American continent. For the first time of the civil war the two sides were serious about ending the conflict and didn’t use the talks as an strategy of war.It pained my heart to see how a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the opposition, helped the No camp to obtain victory. Now this conflict affecting mainly the minority populations living in the most remote and poorest parts of the country, is in a very dangerous stalemated situation.

As an immigrant on the other side of the atlantic, I'm really hoping the people appearing in Jorge’s documentary are a minority and that they don't reflect the United States population overall. And I really hope the outcome of the US presidential election will reflect this statement.

So please don't fall into the fear trap and go out and vote to make a stand against the people attacking the diversity that’s so needed in this world.

I have been using Python for many years and I recognize how powerful it is with libraries like Pandas and Scikit-Learn for Data Science. In a previous I have the opportunity to use R, but I haven't touched it in a while. I was curious to see what is the interest between in R vs Python in the Google Search Trends and you can see the graph above plotted with this data source.

Last weekend I finish converting the FX calculator I developed during my career break to React.js. I have briefly touched some code at work but I wanted to get my hands dirty and understand better the advantages and the challenges of this library.

I was also checking today some interesting [Google Trends data](https://t.co/aCOxxTOhUo) about the most popular Javascript frameworks in terms of search interest and React is definitively winning the interest war.

FiveThirtyEight, the interesting site focused on opinion poll analysis, has become of the most quoted sites in political news. A couple of days ago the published an interesting article on how the USA election electoral map would look like if only women voted, based on their polls models. It's interesting on how it would be landslide defeat of Donald Trump!

According to Nielsen, the presidential debates number of viewers are out, for the first debate between Trump and Clinton, and this was the most viewed debate in the history of the presidential debates (84 Million viewers). The second closest was the one that happened in 1980 between Reagan and Carter.

I haven't checked the global search engines market share in a while because clearly Google dominates in almost every country but yesterday I heard an interesting podcast on BBC about the power of Google and I was curious about the position of the 2nd and 3rd players. The chart above is generated with data from startcounter.

Alexa and Similar web rank Wikipedia as the 7th and 9th most visited site on the web, so the visit statistics produced by the foundation are a good proxy for getting data on the most popular platforms on the web. The previous chart shows the visits by OS family. As you can observe there windows 7 is the most popular desktop OS, but the mobile OS (Android and IOS) are responsible for almost 40% of the visits to those sites.

The US presidential election is far from over, since there are still some days ahead until November, but it's comforting to see evidence in the polls that Trump's divisive campaign is not 'winning' at all.

The map aboves shows the countries that currently have or ever had a female head of state. It's true the historic nomination of Hillary Clinton is a milestones achieved in the USA politics, but not in many countries of the world.

Last weekend we did a long weekend trip with my girlfriend to the Ticino region of Switzerland, staying in Locarno. I wasn't aware but the Locarno Film Festival was starting this week and part of this event was a preview showing of a movie on Sunday night open to the public.

The organizers decided to honor Bud Spencer, one of the classic italian actors from the 70's in the action-comedy genre who passed away earlier this year. They featured Lo chiamavano Trinità, one of the best examples of the "Spaguetti Westerns". I really enjoyed this movie!. It brought really nice memories since the movies featuring the duo Bud Spencer / Terence Hill were one of my grandpa's favorites.

This morning I was reading in the fivethirtyeight site an interesting section dedicated to the US elections. They try to predict who will win the election based on the polls and historic data. They have been very accurate in the past so there are definitely an interesting source.

One of the articles linked on this site was a post titled why obama might be trump's biggest challenge where they discussed how president Obama is enjoying a high approval rate. The chart above is generated with the >>>Real Politics>"http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obama_job_approval-1044.html" data they were mentioning in the post.

I was discussing it with a colleague a couple of days ago. The Facebook React is definitely going to stay around. Look on the previous graphs the wikipedia page views increase during the last year and the trend increase in stackoverflow.

In the Canton of Solothurn, Switzerland, relatively close to Basel there is a Benedictine monastery, called Mariastein. Apparently this place is a must for the catholics, but it's also a nice to walk around in the fields as you can see on this picture we took yesterday."

Browser usage according to the Wikipeida article on browser usage and the global stats reported by W3Counter. Not surprising Chrome is the most popular browser today and fortunately IE is in a complete decline.

Yesterday I did I nice bike ride from Berlin to the Wandlitzer lake, located some 30 km north of the capital city. The area is really beautiful as you can see in this picture.

If you analyze the last 30 days of the tweeter feed between Trump and Sanders and plot the word frequency on a word cloud. It's revealing what do they candidates stand for. Guess which one belong to whom?

Last night when I was reading about the EgyptAir hijacking I was thinking that fortunately these type of incidents are now very rare. I remember when I was a kid that these was one of the cliches in the American movies of the 80's (ie. Delta Force), but with the tough security measures in place in most of the airports, this doesn't happen as often.

Wikipedia has a detailed compilation on the aircraft hijacking incidents and there is defintively a decrease compared to the peak on the 70s.

Wikipedia has a list of the terrorist incidents that happened during the current year. Based on this information those are the countries most affected by number of terror incidents:

Asylum is defined as the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee, mainly for fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion. The raging conflict in Syria there has been sharp increase in the number of refugees coming to Europe.

The last quarterly data report by Eurostat demonstrates this upwards trend. Germany and Sweden have been the countries who have welcomed the highest number of asylum seekers.

I haven't check the operating systems market share in Desktop and Mobile and based on the data from starcounter the usual suspects: Windows and Android dominate in each sector respectively.

The last episode of the excellent show Last Week tonight from John Oliver dealt with a very contentious issue in the US: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRauXXz6t0Y". I really like the approach that he took on this matter, acknowledging there are different positions on this topic, but hammering the "hypocritical" laws that under the umbrella of protecting the "Women's health" target="_blank">The abortion laws crear barriers for people who need this medical procedure and unfortunately don't have the money to go somewhere else.

The next map shows the US states that had enacted laws to force the women requiring an abortion for see an ultrasound on the unwanted pregnancy:

Yesterday at the office we were discussing the issue about the possibility of the UK leaving the European Union. Actually we wrote in our company blog, what this brexit would mean for European workers, some time ago. But with all this brexit discussion, we forget the UK is actually one of the oldest members of the European Union (1973).

You can check this map in detail here

It is hard to assess what are the most popular programming languages because there are multiple ways to measure them but none of the are perfect (ie. Repositories, lines of code, occurrences in job offers, etc). For example if work with embedded systems C is very popular, but if you work on the web the history is very different.

One interesting measurement of popularity of a language are the questions related to the language. Stack Overflow features questions and answers on a wide range of programming languages and compiles a list of the most popular tags with total, today and this week breakdown.

This data is a nice proxy on how popular are the different programming languages.

Last night I was reading in Business Insider the headline about how Bernie Sanders just melted away a 30-point Hillary Clinton lead in a new poll, related to the US presidential elections. Wikipedia has a useful article where they track the different polls for both parties. The results of those polls are reported here on that page: Democratic Primaries.

It's true that the last poll conducted by the Quinnipiac University shows a preference of: Clinton: 44% and Sanders 42%, and with a 4.5% margin of error, they are virtually tied. There is even a newer one performed by "Reuter/Ipsos" showing a similar trend: Clinton: 48% and Sanders 45% (with a 5% margin of error).

It's fascinating to see how this candidate without any of the infamous [superpacs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee#Super_PACs) behind him has been able to attrack so much attention and how it has become a real contender in the US 2016 presidential elections.

Yesterday I was reading the news about the Apple: On Tuesday they reported the financial results of their fiscal first quarter. One of the conclusions from this event is that even if they had records on profits, on the other hand the iPhone sales rose less than 1 percent from a year earlier.

I was checking the Mobile & Table operating systems market share data published by netmarketshare.net and this trend downwards is clear:

I never owned an iPhone. I really like the quality of the hardware and software produced by this company (In fact I'm writing this post on a macbook air), but I don't like the closed restricted ecosystem associated to their business model. It's refreshing to see so many different android devices on the market.