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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Hi there!
Preparing for the new ge
neration 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!
(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.)
A bit wonky, but here’s where you can get x-ray data, how to use it in python, and some common conversion.
Here are two important database to know:CXRO databaseNIST database Continue readingIn 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 reading