New Horizons

Each morning, as soon as I arrive in front of my computer, I generally spend a couple of minutes browsing articles of the day on arxiv.org , in particular in the "Numerical Analysis" section (and sometimes on Computational Physic, but that's when I'm in tramping mode). This systematically browsing might look a bit fastidious, but I like to have an large overview of the newest developpements. In that topic I came across an article named "General Complex Polynomial Root Solver and Its Further Optimization for Binary Microlenses" which has a very interesting appendix (B, page 20) about the utility of patenting algorithms, in particular the discussion stands on the classical book "Numerical Recipes". In fact the author happened to write this article because they needed a different method to compute roots of complex polynomials than the one proposed in the NR book, because of copyright violation. So in some sense, they argue that "copyri...

This magnifical (I had english lessons with Sarkozy) sculpture is the artwork of one of my co-worker, Alexandre. He got the blueprint from here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjOOhemquss Think it's better than post-it war! http://www.postitwar.com/page/2

from: www.fubiz.net/2011/04/06/underwater-experiments/

This week I went to the dentist for a routine check-up. By inspecting his waiting room I should have guessed that my dentist was a Jeovah witness. The book questioning the existence of pardise should have warned me. After a while the dentist came in and I sat in the scary chair with pipes and syringes all over. I looked at my wisdom teeth that I should remove because there is no place left for them in my mouth. I mean really no place, one is pushing against my jaw and it make a terrible infection. The dentist began to explain me that I should open my mind, that I should make some work upon myself and give a place to those teeth, that they were here for a REASON. It was not a matter of surgery, just a matter of faith and self opening to the world. Seeing that I was more and more sceptical, he mistakingly took the example of homepathy to explain me that OTHER WAYS exist. "Yeah, I replied, I know that. It's the placebo effect. But it work only if you believe it". At that p...

Software programming and design is an amazingly complex task. Specially when it concerns numerical applications, that generally require optimization to get results in a reasonable time. For that purpose the basic pattern is usually to write the code as simple as possible, debug it and when it works to begin the optimization process. This asks for some nerves, and patience, two things I usually don't have in real life , but for programming yes. This design pattern makes sense because we are doing things really sequentially. You first wrote some c++ class and then add some feature progressively, and when you come up with essentially different concept (I mean a concept that should be well separated from the first one), you write an other class and so on... Usually the class-writing process follows the solving process you have in mind. For instance you have to make some initialization on your model first, then you declare some variables for the computation, the computation then f...

When you do informatics codes, sooner or later you are concerned with data containers and their associated complexities for inserting, getting, sorting or whatsoever. Some of them are lists, vectors, map, set etc... Sometimes you use a container for some stuff and you get unexpected low behavior. Then you go into your manager's office and ask for complexity of what you are doing. By the way, he convinces you that you are the last of the idiots of computer scientists (thing I take as an honor), and you just change your container. But the people who are working on containers (have you ever looked to the STL (standard template library) to see how containers are implemented ? Not sure those people are human...) should try to investigate how my desk is working. It is very messy, there is a lot of stuff on it (even food sometimes) but I always find my items in a constant time . Well, almost always. Notably when someone put it in order (presumably the housekeeper or some terribly i...

Bertrand Russel used humour to show that whatever is logical is not necessary true. He was saying the following Do you pretend that if 2+2=5, then Bertrand Russel is the pope ? Suppose that 2+2=5 Let's substract 2 from each side, then 2=3 By symmetry we have 3=2 If you substract 1 on both sides, 2=1 Now the pope and I are two distinct people, since 2=1 the Pope and Russel are one.