In the past twelve months, I’ve seen 15 of my close friends living in the Bay Area having kids. That’s a lot, with more than one new cute little name to learn (Felix, Moritz, Ilya, Oliver, Hendrix…)
Since most of my friends are about my age or older — 35 on average — and often in a stable relationship for many years, I am left wondering why the sudden spike.I came up with two reasonable explanations and a ton of thoughts! Continue reading
Who’s afraid of being bored?
Incoherent on Coherent (Antoine Wojdyla, 2015)
During the five years (already!) I’ve lived in Berkeley, I’ve always be faithful to the East Bay Express (EBX), which stayed strong when the Bay Guardian went down. I have great memories of columns from Anna Pulley, the culture notes from Sarah Burke, and the movie critics from Kelly Vance.
In these years, I’ve collected a cuts from the paper, which I believe capture the atmosphere of the East Bay ca 2015. Here’s a few:
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Around me, all I see is the blue glow of phones illuminating the faces of people.
These days, we get so many things to discover, information to watch, and we’re getting addicted.What I fault newspapers for is that day after day they draw our attention to insignificant things whereas only three or four times in our lives do we read a book in which there is something really essential. – Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
This is a continuation of a series of blog posts, written mostly in French, about arts and science
In the past few years, we’ve seen the emergence of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), and the latest developments are Generative Adverserial Networks (GAN), where the goal is to pit two neural networks against each other so that they find the best way to generate an object from a label or a simple drawing, or mimick the style of an artist.The first ripple in the vast ocean of possibility was Deep Dream, though it wasn’t technically a GAN: Now, things have evolved even more, and you can not only generate trippy videos, but also use neural network to emulate the style of an artist and generate from scratch content that is indeed appealing! Continue readingThis year I’m chairing the Computational Imaging session at the SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing, in Orlando, Fla., April 16-19, 2018, together with Aamod Shanker. We have invited a lot of amazing speakers and we are organizing a panel discussion on the trends in computational imaging.
Here’s the program:SESSION 6 TUE APRIL 17, 2018 – 11:10 AM TO 12:00 PM
TUESDAY POSTER SESSION TUE 6:00 PM TO 8:00 PMSESSION 8 WED APRIL 18, 2018 – 8:00 AM TO 10:05 AMWith increasingly tight beamline specifications, optical modeling software becomes necessary in order to design and predict the performances of conceptual beamlines. This becomes particularly true with the advent of highly coherent light sources (such the proposed upgrade of the ALS), where additional considerations such mirror deformation under heat load and effects of partial coherence needs to be studied. Luca Rebuffi will present the latest features of OASYS/Shadow, an optical beamline modeling tool widely used in the synchrotron community and show how to get started with beamline simulations.
https://github.com/awojdyla/ALS-U_Examples
Program: Continue reading
Screen capture from a presidential stump speech
Self-reference is cornerstone in Hofstadter’s Godel-Escher-Bach, a must read book for anyone interested in logic (and we shall rely logic in these days to stay sane.)
Here’s a bunch of examples of self-reference that I found interesting, curated just for you!Barber’s paradox:The barber is the “one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves.” The question is, does the barber shave himself?
Self-referential figure (via xkcd):
Tupper’s formula that prints itself on a screen (via Brett Richardson)
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