Category Archives: projects

17 September 2019
english, epistemology, projects, resources, science life

Threads

I’ve been using Twitter (@awojdyla) more frequently over the last 3 years, finding a lot value in this tool which allows to address a worldwide audience and reach out to people in a very effective way.

Straight goals

Twitter is a very strange medium, in that it can be extremely helpful to reach out to people (the six degrees of separation collapse to one, basically), but whose rules and purpose are hard to understand.

Here’s a few remarks on my experience, and some resources if you’re interested in engaging the tweet game!

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7 July 2019
english, projects

Poetry as philosophy in action

Every now and then, I read bits of poetry. Lately, I nibbled on Apollinaire, whose Alcools my father offered me, and I discovered W. H Auden’s Sonnet from China thanks to Shoshana Zuboff:

Falling in love with Truth before he knew Her,
He rode into imaginary lands,
By solitude and fasting hoped to woo Her,
And mocked at those whose served Her with their hands
— W. H. Auden

While I enjoy reading poetry, it only occurred to me recently that poetry is more than a thoughtful collection of word. Poetry is actually philosophy in action —  and even the Greeks knew that: ποιεῖν (poiein) means “to make”.

poenies

The reason for that has to do with the distinction between axioms and theorems (if you want to learn about that, I have an excellent book for you), or between things that are self-evident and things that are derived. Philosophy, being very rigorous, deals with theorems. Poetry enunciates subtle truths and help us navigate the blind spots of philosophy, such as beauty, love and meaning: everything that sets us in motion.

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3 May 2019
english, epistemology, projects, resources, science life

Wokipedia

Wikipedia is probably the best thing on Earth after sunsets, but it’s still far from perfect. Some articles are quite amazing, but oftentimes article about science topics or science personalities are nowhere near where they should be, and it seems that researchers should spend more time trying spread knowledge. Unfortunately, two things are in the way: the writers never get credit for it, and it’s bad optics in science to be the judge of notoriety for others.

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
– Harry S Truman

Recently I became aware of an effort to improve the representation of scientists on Wikipedia, which is the go-to place to look up someone and evaluate their authority – in a world when men seems to preternaturally commend more than women. Let’s fix this!

Here’s a few people for who I have started a page (I’ll keep this list updated as I go – yes, I do take credit, on a page no one will ever read in hopes this may inspire some wandering soul.)

  1. Sophie Carenco (French Chemist)
  2. James Mickens (Computer Scientist, very witty)
  3. Carolyn Larabell (Biologist, UCSF; director of BCSB)
  4. Felicie Albert (High Power Laser, Livermore)
  5. Linda Horton (head of DOE Basic Energy Science, Material Science)
  6. Hope Ishii (University of Hawaii)
  7. Tabbetha Dobbins (Light Sources for Africa, Americas, Asia and the Middle East)
  8. Yves Petroff (synchrotron pioneer)
  9. Athena Sefat (Physicist, ORNL)
  10. Susan Celniker (Biologist, LBNL)
  11. David Veesler (Biologist, UW)
  12. Regina Soufli (Physicist, LLNL)
  13. Hatice Altug (Physicist, EPFL)
  14. Boubacar Kante (Physicist, UC Berkeley)
  15. Fadji Maina (Hydrologist, LBNL)
  16. Harriet Kung (Physicist, DOE)
  17. Elaine diMasi (Physicist, LBNL)
  18. Hélène Perrin (Physicist, Paris-Nord)
  19. Susan Celniker (Biologist, LBNL)
  20. Sakura Pascarelli (Physicist, EuXFEL)
  21. Regina Soufli (Physicist, LLNL)
  22. Pascal Elleaume (physicist, ESRF)
  23. Na Ji (Physicist, UC Berkeley)
  24. Anne Sakdinawat (Physicist, SLAC)
  25. David Attwood (Physicist, UC Berkeley)
  26. Sasa Bajt (Physicist, BESSY)
  27. Henry Chapman (Physicist, BESSY)
  28. Nathalie Picqué (Physicist, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics)
  29. Anne-Laure Dalibard (Physicist, Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions)
  30. Céline Guivarch (Climate scientist, CIRED)
  31. Irene Waldspurger (Mathematician, CEREMADE)
  32. Sandrine Leveque-Lefort (Physicist, CNRS)

Translations

  1. fr: Boubacar Kante
  2. fr: David Veesler
  3. fr: Fadji Maina
  4. fr: Ibrahim Cissé
  5. fr: Stéphane Bancel
  6. fr: Kizzmekia Corbett
  7. fr: Janelia Research Campus
  8. en: Centre for Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies

Scientific Topics:

People than need to be put on Wikipedia:
  • Daniela Ushizima – https://crd.lbl.gov/departments/data-science-and-technology/data-analytics-and-visualization/staff/daniela-ushizima/
  • Haimei Zheng – https://haimeizheng.lbl.gov/
  • Pascal Elleaume – synchroton radiation pioneer; https://www.esrf.eu/news/general/elleaume-obituary/index_html https://docplayer.fr/62415068-L-archicube-numero-special.html
  • Bianca Jackson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1515-9650
  • Ashley White (AAAS Fellow, scientific communication)
  • Lady Idos (DEI Officer at Berkeley Lab)
  • Tara de Boer (CEO) –  BioAmp diagnostics
  • Chrysanthe Preza – Computational Imaging, University of Memphis https://umwa.memphis.edu/fcv/viewprofile.php?uuid=cpreza
  • Teresa Williams (TechWomen/AAAS fellow) – https://today.lbl.gov/teresa-williams-helps-to-inspire-a-culture-of-mentorship-and-networking-in-egypt/
  • Tokiwa Smith  – https://www.blackengineer.com/news/tokiwa-smith-changing-world/
  •  – https://sites.google.com/a/lbl.gov/women-at-the-lab/p/susan-celniker-ph-d
update August 2019
I went to a workshop organized by SPIE and led by the very Jess Wade; it was quite useful.
Here’s what I learned:
  • Do not paraphrase bios found on other website –– but you somehow can. Better than nothing!
  • You can use pictures from governmental sources for illustration, it’s always ok to use them (copyrights)
  • You can help with translating pages to other languages.

Also, if you wonder what other people will think of you for doing the right thing, remember:

7 April 2019
english, epistemology, projects, resources, science life

Kolmogorov Access

Back in undergrad, I remember being fascinated by the notion of Kolmogorov complexity in computer science.

Put simply, the Kolmogorov complexity is the minimal length (number of lines) of the code needed to generate a signal, would it be a mathematical sequence (such as one listed in the OEIS) or an image, irrespective to the size needed to store it. It bears deep relations with the notion of entropy (a great book on the topic is Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms by the late David MacKay.)

For example, a series of eight billion ones in a row would require 1GB of memory, but can be written in a few lines of code:

for i in 1:1e9; print 1; end

(To some extent, this is why computer science is often problematic, since one of the goal of a good code is sometimes to reduce its Kolmogorov complexity, but the final code does not show all the lines that have been erased to get there…)

In the field of arts, culture and science, this description seems naive: can you really generate a book based on a script, or has it infinite entropy?

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
– Immanuel Kant

In the age of the Internet, can we do better?

update 6/10/2019: I’ve seen recently on Twitter the embodiment of these ideas, see Nicole R.‘s thread. Way to go!

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21 February 2019
art & science, english, projects, science life

Vision+Light

Somehow my art piece has been accepted! A delightful play on the wavelike behavior of light, and the particle0like behavior of silicon atoms, in a tribute to Malevich. Instant Classic!

Incoherent on coherent

You can now see it at the Vision+Light exhibition on Berkeley Campus, from February 20th to March 14th, 2019

25 October 2018
art & science, english, gallery, projects, science

Art & Science (X) – Science pictures

Vision, and the means to capture it – photography – plays a momentous role in science.
I was much impressed by a remark of Aldous Huxley, that we owe our civilization largely to the fact that vision is an objective sense. An animal with an olfactory sense or with hearing, however well developed, could never have created science. A smell is either good or bad, and even hearing is never entirely neutral; music can convey emotions with an immediateness of which the sober visual arts are inca pable. No wonder that the very word “objective” has been appropriated by optics.
Dennis Gabor – Light and Information
It is therefore fitting to take a look at all the great pictures that have been recorded by all means.
Here is a selection of scientific picture competitions and galleries you might want to have a look at:
I found that The Atlantic and The Guardian usually have beautiful galleries.Astronomy is an obvious domain where picture are breathtaking, but more so is space imaging.
Here are some amazing pictures from the past few years:

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12 September 2018
english, mood, projects, resources

Albany Bulb

Once upon a time near Berkeley, there was the Albany bulb, a place where homeless people would build their own house out of the scrap they could find. All these stricture have since been demolished (ca 2014.) Here’s a few memories.

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19 August 2018
english, projects, resources, science, science life

dlsr.org

Hi there!

Preparing for the new generation of synchrotron light source, I’ve just started dlsr.org (Diffraction-Limited Storage Ring), and created relevant articles on Wikipedia (entries for (Diffraction-Limited Storage Ring  and Beijing’s High Energy Photon Source.)

The goal is to have platform to share knowledge and ideas in a format more flexible than conferences and papers (it takes inspiration from Rüdiger Paschotta’s momentous Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology, though it does not aim to be as comprehensive!)

Let me know if you’re interested in contributing!

18 August 2018
français, projects, resources

Confédération des Associations Centrale-Supéléc – San Francisco

(Dear English reader, this post relates to an association of French Alumni in the Bay Area.)Depuis quelques temps, j’aide à organiser le réseau des Centraliens dans la Baie de San Francisco, faisant suite à la réunion des Centraliens a San Diego l’an passé où j’ai fait de très belles rencontres. Cela nous à donné l’envie de renforcer le réseau en l’étendant à toutes les Écoles Centrales, en particulier celles de Pékin, Casablanca et Hyderabad, afin de permettre aux jeunes diplômés et entrepreneurs attirés par la baie de rencontrer des personnes susceptibles de les aider à s’intégrer, leur fournir de bons conseils et à comprendre l’état des affaires (il y de centraliens au sein de nombreuses grandes entreprises comme Apple, Lyft, Google, Uber, Airbnb, Sony or Western Digital.)

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17 June 2018
art & science, english, projects, resources

Art & Science (XI) – Resources in the Bay Area

Here’s a short list of Art & Science resources in the Bay Area.
It is not comprehensive, and I will augment it as I go!

In San Francisco

Grey Area (2665 Mission Street) is a space dedicated to art and technology (lots of VR and visual art.) The Exploratorium (Pier 15) has a lot of very neat experiments that do have an artistic component to them, while the  Cal Academy of Science (Golden Gate Park) sometimes run events based on art and technology.
For 2018-2019, the French Embassy is assembling a series of events around arts and science called After Tomorrow. There’s been events at the Cal Academy of Arts and Gray Area, but oftentimes they’re here to promote a French artist, rather than giving a systematic treatment of art and science.
There’s also Leonardo/ISAST (International Society for Art, Science and Technology), which is based in the Bay Area and organizes event, such as the LASER talks, The Convening (for their 50th birthday.)

At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

There is a large source of content at Berkeley Lab, especially given it’s the host of national user facilities:
the Advanced Light Source (x-ray imaging), the Molecular Foundry (electron microscopy), NERSC (computer simulations) and Joint Genome Institute (biology), each with over 1000 users per year from all over the world, and a rich history (including 12 Nobel Prize laureates). Over the past year I’ve tried to consolidate the material available. Here is some things you can find online:
I’ve been collecting data (art-at-lbl-gov goes straight to my mailbox,) and I have a bunch of scientific friends who are themselves artist, such as Sinead Griffin. I even ventured into this myself; the following picture was made by superimposing partially coherent light on atomic scale variations of a substrate seen with an x-ray microscope (a tribute to “Suprematist Composition: White on White” by Vladimir Malevich):

Incoherent on Coherent (Antoine Wojdyla, 2015)

I believe there are many cool things in tandem with BAM/PFA or SFMOMA, or even CalPerf: the music venue should try to get closer to what people are doing in the EECS department — and I believe the University of Michigan should do the same with UMS.
I’m not very familiar with what happens at UC Berkeley or Stanford in that field, apart from are a few independent events, such as this one. I would love to invite David Stork, Edward Tufte and others, and I’m sure that there are many ways to bring in other national labs, Bell Labs (Bell Labs researchers basically fled to national labs when things went down, but there seems to be a revival nowadays.)
And there’s of course some art on novel unusual media (silicon wafers or EUV photomasks) that could be used!
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