Emmanuel Dumont

This is the first post

The ambi­tion of this web­site is to enter­tain its vis­i­tors, mostly from a visual per­spec­tive, and engage conversations.

It is divided into two cat­e­gories: my “Works” (things that I actu­ally did) and my “Blog” (things that I did not do). Please feel free to com­ment on any entry, dis­cussing — and argu­ing — is much fun to me.

What can baby aspirin do for us?

So, last year there was some big news in can­cer research. A team at Oxford in the UK led by Peter Roth­well found that peo­ple who take “baby aspirin” (80 mg) every­day have 40% less chance to develop can­cer tumors.

Con­sid­er­ing the efforts made on the war on can­cer since the National Can­cer Act in 1971, it is quite ironic that one pre­ven­tive med­i­cine for can­cer might just be our 100-year old favorite aspirin.

The unstable equilibrium of the banking system

Bat­tis­ton and his col­leagues just pub­lished a beau­ti­ful paper in Nature about our bank­ing sys­tem. They offer a new way to eval­u­ate the “sys­temic risk” — i.e. the risk that sev­eral banks col­lapse all together — by look­ing at data freshly made avail­able by the FED for the 2007–2010 period.

Should we add water in cigarettes?

So I would like to present here in world­wide (web) exclu­siv­ity a pos­si­ble future for smoking.

We all like to believe that shisha smok­ing is more cool and less dan­ger­ous than cig­a­rette smok­ing. After all, shisha does not have a big “Smok­ing kills” label on its side.

What do you wear in bed?

In 1960, when asked what she wears in bed, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe answered “CHANEL no 5″.

It was too good of  a story — CHANEL just made this beau­ti­ful com­mer­cial using the bewitch­ing song by Avia, West­ern­ize.

What do you wear in bed?

The Quantum soul theory

Each time there is the word “quan­tum”, it seems that we are approach­ing a new truth…

This time, it is noth­ing less than the dis­cov­ery of our own soul. This hilar­i­ous arti­cle reports a the­ory by two sci­en­tists, Stu­art Hameroff and Roger Pen­rose, who say that our soul resides in some pro­teins of our neurons.

A man from the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow

This is how Andre Mal­raux defined Charles De Gaulle. De Gaulle was indeed raised by ultra-conservative catholic par­ents who did not cel­e­brate July 14 and, yet, he built our 5th republic.

Yes­ter­day, I attended a talk by Jonathan Fenby at the Mai­son Fran­caise at Colum­bia University.

My Data is Bigger than yours

Yes­ter­day, I went to Ignite’s event about “Big Data”. A dozen speak­ers came to tell a story dur­ing 5 min each about sur­pris­ing things we find in data. In par­tic­u­lar, James Pat­ten showed a few exam­ples of art inspired by big data… Lis­ten­ing to James made me feel a bit like Mon­sieur Jour­dain in Le Bour­geois Gen­til­homme by Moliere (17th cen­tury): I actu­ally did a sculp­ture based on big data with­out know­ing it.

Economics Nobel for matchmakers

Algo­rithms are very pop­u­lar in dat­ing web­sites and are at the core of their mar­ket­ing: Match.com, OkCu­pid, eHar­mony will all apply match­mak­ing sci­ence to help you find your soul-mate.

So as it turns out, match­mak­ing is a fancy sci­ence that is not only applied to dat­ing: it is also used to match interns with hos­pi­tals for instance. This year, 2012, Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shap­ley won the Nobel prize “for the the­ory of sta­ble allo­ca­tions and the prac­tice of mar­ket design”.

Erotic architecture

Two words that are not used very often together are “eroti­cism” and “architecture”.

Erotic archi­tec­ture is a dan­ger­ous asso­ci­a­tion though because what comes to mind first is prob­a­bly all these phal­lic struc­tures shown for instance in this blog. Yet, phal­lic struc­tures are to archi­tec­ture what sex is to love — sen­su­al­ity is another world.

What reality TV is really about

Real­ity TV is only about one thing for either the con­tes­tants or the audi­ence: fig­ur­ing out who is REALLY fake and who is REALLY real.

Thank MTV, we still have the 6th sea­son (final sea­son) of Jer­sey shore to fig­ure that out about the Sit­u­a­tion or Snooki.

The more friends you have on Facebook, the smarter you are

There are many rea­sons face­book users evoke for their addic­tion to THE social net­work (stay in touch with friends, find­ing old friends, stalk­ing a roman­tic inter­est, etc.) but you may be inter­ested in hear­ing another one.

The more friends you have on Face­book, the smarter you might be.

Molecular Machines

Movie extracted from “The inner life of a cell”, by Bio­vi­sions at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity.

Evo­lu­tion has designed the most sophis­ti­cated and small­est machine: the motor pro­tein “kinesin”. In all of our cells, kinesins are able to walk on pro­teins called “microtubules”.