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I have been reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky over the past few weeks. More than a novel, it is a psychological journey. Dostoyevsky manages to place the reader inside the mind of a person enduring what seems like an endless internal conflict. Perhaps the greatest punishment we can receive is the one we impose upon ourselves, and Rodion Raskolnikov has done so in many ways. I nonetheless have a peculiar way of approaching Dostoyevsky. While Raskolnikov lies in bed lamenting and suffering alone, I cannot help thinking about what else must be done. Suffering may reveal the conscience, but it does not necessarily repair the harm. ...

As I was scrolling through twitter, I happened to come across this beautiful thread that spoke of the lessons learned by a researcher while contemplating his research in the grand scheme of things. Though he was passionate about his research and the questions he was trying to answer, there would come a time when future researchers - with the advantage of hindsight - would contemplate his work as obsolete and irrelevant. But the truth is that we all have to come to terms with this situation. ...

Last week I attended the OSA Latin America Optics and Photonics Conference in Lima, Peru. I had a great time, but above all, this was my first conference, since I started my lab, in which I didn’t feel so out of place. Let me elaborate. I knew several people that were attending the conference, I knew the work of some of them, and I was also comfortable talking to old and new acquaintances. What I felt was more reassuring, was presenting some of the work we’ve been doing in our lab for the past two years. I was proud to be presenting the work of my students, what we have accomplished with the available resources. ...

I like to do presentations. I really do. It’s not my favorite thing, but I sure love inspiring others from the work I do. Ever since I learned of many creative ways to prepare a presentation, I’ve liked to undertake the task with a sense of commitment and a great dose of creativity. I read the Presentation Zen book. The The Non-Designer’s Design Book. I learned about Sketchnotes, I also read about academic presentations and cooking ideas, and many other things. Not in a single stretch, but as a constant search for getting better at something I value. So I’ve come to realize a couple of things. A presentation is definitely not prepared in the computer or presentation software. A computer per se is not good for the creative endeavor, but paper and pen are. ...

These are basically notes for my future self, but it may sort of work out for someone else, so here it is. I’m currently working on a project in which we obtain a large number of images all stored within a single folder. However, it would be ideal to store them on separate folders. The file names are like this export0_Lastname_FirstName_1.jpg, and there are several files per person. What I basically wanted, was to organize the mess of files into something like the following: ...

So, I was preparing my clases for the upcoming semester and I wanted to produce an outline of the lectures with the corresponding date and topic. For instance I have a class that’s once a week every Friday. I could look up the calendar and write every date, which is what I initially did. But then I though, I could write a script for this. And that’s when I entered the rabbit hole.1 ...

Despite all the tools and applications at my disposal, I like to write my comments, feedback and grade the lab reports I get from my students using plain text files. To be precise, markdown formatted plain text files md. I typically write in a plain text file using nvalt or textmate as my text editor. With the help of a TextExpander snippet I print out the class list and the other fields I must fill out, typically a general comment/feedback and the grade. The snippet produces something like this:1 ...

We often live worrying about the future and longing for a less troublesome past; like when we were kids. I know that not everyone had a perfect childhood. I certainly did not, but I still had my moments in which my joy was true and worry free. Those moments are precious to me. Adulthood has many upsides when viewed from a teenager’s perspective; the opposite is also true. If only they could talk to each other.

I have a recurrent discussion with my wife. She likes to do most things as fast as possible. I like to pause and think about things, and do them often slowly. At my pace. I think that if you do things too quickly you might not be fully aware of what you’re doing. You might feel that you are not really in charge of your life. You might feel that you can’t really remember things truly. ...

My favorite topic in an introductory differential equations course is mechanical and electrical vibrations. I enjoyed learning about it as a student and I enjoyed teaching it later. (Or more accurately, I enjoyed being exposed to it as a student and really learning it later when I had to teach it.) John D. Cook on Mechanical vibrations I’ve always thought that education is about learning, as much as parenting is about maturing and growing up. On the parenting side, you can’t really teach your kids how to live – you can’t even imagine the kind of world they will have to live from the time they’re born – but you can expose them to the best things you know. In doing so, they can at least have the chance to form an opinion on the many matters of life, they’ll surely make mistakes, but I bet they won’t regret much. ...