My partner is co-founder of a company named EcoTrove, whose goal is to replace your utility bills with a fixed-price, clean energy subscription up to 10% cheaper.
![](http://antoine.wojdyla.fr/blog/wp-content/uploads/ecotrove_logo.png)
My partner is co-founder of a company named EcoTrove, whose goal is to replace your utility bills with a fixed-price, clean energy subscription up to 10% cheaper.
Last week I hosted Leo Violini, the founder of the Centro Internacional de Física in Bogotà (Columbia), and a proponent of the the Greater Caribbean Light Source
Big science in Latin America: accelerate particles and progress – Nature (March 2024)
Here is a video of his talk on the proposal for Greater Caribbean Light Source:
And a video of his second talk on science diplomacy:My last internal combustion engine died on me, and I bought a new car. That was the plan all along – I wanted to keep my convertible as long as possible for I really enjoyed driving with the roof down, and get an electric car as a replacement– but the engine failure came as a surprise.
In a sense, it came at just about the right time. I don’t have a garage, so I need to rely on the public charging infrastructure. I decided to buy a Ioniq 5, for its has an intriguing design, a very decent range (300 miles), and it has fast charging capabilities, an interesting feature when fast charger are starting to materialize all over California. The best thing is that I get 2 years of free charging – so I drive essentially for free.The various steps of making a new material (from Szymanski et al.)
Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future– Niels Bohr
Actibus immensis urbs fulget masiliensis“The city of Marseille shines through his great achievements”
The issue of Synchrotron Radiation News I had the honor to co-edit with my colleagues Lucia Alianelli from Diamond Light Source is out – hot off the press!
Table of Content – Synchrotron Radiation News 36-5 issue on New Developments in Beamline Design Tools (2024)Guest Editorial – Antoine Wojdyla and Lucia Alianelli
https://doi.org/10.1080/08940886.2023.2274751
A lot has been said on the death of Twitter, a medium I enjoyed.
But Twitter was always more than a news source, or a conduit for information. It was a place where a sense of goofiness and comfort allowed communities to form—Weird Twitter, Philosophy Twitter, BTS Twitter. Such communities allowed users to find the platform endearing, even as they called it the “hellsite.”
What We Lost When Twitter Became X – Sheon Han, The New Yorker
You can now follow me on Threads, at @anto_nymous.
These days things are getting pretty busy on my end – so many cool projects to engage with and only 24 hours a day.
If you estimate it will take one unit of time to complete a task, the task will effectively take 3.14 (≈π) times more than you initially anticipated.
The reason for the difference between dream and reality is that we generally do not factor in:
Taken together with the times its take to accomplish a task, you end up with roughly a factor three – and you end up feeling terrible during the week-ends trying to catch up what you were set to do during the week, but got busy doing (1) or (2)
A corollary of the pi rule is the “next up” rule: if you work on project with a relatively large team, it generally takes the next unit of time to complete it (e.g. one hour become one day; one day becomes a week; a week becomes a months), generally because of the friction at the interfaces. Reducing these frictions at the interfaces should therefore be a priority.Weekends are a constant battle between “I should do all the work I put off during the week!” and “taking time off is important to recharge!” but it’s okay because I usually find a nice compromise in which I lounge around feeling guilty and accomplishing nothing
— Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) August 15, 2021
I recently learned that my colleague Bertrand Nicquevert has worked extensively on a model to describe interactions between various counterparts:
Modelling engineering interfaces in big science collaborations at CERN: an interaction-based modelI was lucky to meet the President of the University of California Michael V. Drake, in my capacity of co-chair of the Berkeley Lab Global Employee Resource group (global.lbl.gov), dedicated to providing support to international employees at the national laboratory.
I made the point the re-building communities should be a priority after the pandemic, and particularly early career scientists, who do not have family or go to school where they could thread their social fabric. The participation of international scientist at Berkeley Lab is an important strength, because the national lab is de facto at the center of international research, and that gives it a competitive edge compared to other countries such as China or Saudi Arabia, where large research expenditure cannot compensate the lack of free flow of ideas.
I think my talking points were well received, and president Drake encouraged collaboration on these topics with the University of California, Berkeley