Ana Ivanovic

Something curious happened today in the Linz tennis WTA tournament during the second round match between Ana Ivanovic and Barbora Zahlavova Strycova: after the first game the Serbian felt a little sick and asked the chair umpire to go to the toilet but when she came back she discovered she had been sanctioned with a penalty game.

Caroline Wozniacki

Today Caroline Wozniacki officially becomes number 1 in the WTA ranking. The Danish player, though she’s from a Polish family, made the last step she needed to reach the first position thanks to the results she achieved in the Beijing tournament – in fact there was a little celebration on court – but world ranking is updated at the start of every week so only today Serena Williams’ dethroning is registered in the official ranking.

Rollback

In “Rollback” Dr. Sarah Halifax is the scientist who in 2010 manages to decipher an alien message arrived from the Sigma Draconis system and gives her contribution to create an answer that is sent to the aliens, who unfortunately live almost nineteen light years from Earth.

Frank Herbert in 1978

Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr., better known as Frank Herbert was born on October 8, 1920. Herbert’s first career was in journalism starting from the ’40s. Herbert started a research for a magazine article about the sand dunes near the city of Florence, Oregon, but he ended up with far too much material to write about and the interest in the desert derived from the research led him to develop during the early ’60s what became his masterpiece: “Dune”, a very long novel for the standards of the time, one of the reasons why after it was serialized in Analog in two parts it was then published in book only by a small publisher after being rejected by many other ones.

Autoritratto di Vincent Van Gogh

Starting from October 8 and until February 6, 2011 Rome is going to offer and extraordinary exhibition at the Vittoriano complex: a lot of Vincent Van Gogh paintings but also various ones by Gauguin, Cezanne, Pissarro and Millet. The title is “Vincent Van Gogh: timeless country and modern city” to point out the artist’s favourite subjects.