I’ve been out of playing PC games for a long time and it’s been even longer since I last kept up with what 3D engines are able to do. I’ve played with an Oculus Rift coupled to a Leap Motion device and it’s easy to see how it opens the door to a whole new set of mixed-mode real and virtual experiences. But I was never quite as blown away by a 3D rendering as I was by Benoit Dereau’s latest demo that he created using Unreal Engine 4. The film takes the viewer for a walk through a 19th century parisian Haussman-style apartment.

We’re not yet reaching photo-realistic levels yet but this is so very close. The lighting is spot on, the textures are vivid but there’s something that is missing (or maybe that needs to be taken away) - it’s hard to put the finger on it. But in any case, this is the kind of demo that makes Hololens incredibly exciting to me.

Microsoft’s new tech is impressive and promising in and of itself but the prospect of including extremely high quality 3D rendering makes it even more appealing. I imagine visiting an open house and being able to place furniture around the rooms then being able to share that with people you’re going to be moving in with. We’re in 2015 and finally reaching 1999-levels of technology.

I’ve just published a new recipe to my online cookbook: mi-cuit tuna, cucumber spaghetti and grilled Cayenne pineapple. The main piece of the dish is a tuna steak served seared on a single side while the other one is left raw. It makes for a really great contrast on the tongue – freshness and warmth at once.

It’s a recipe I’ve been trying to perfect for a few months and it’s reached a point where I feel like it’s good enough to be shared. It’s as much of an original as I’ve ever done – most of my culinary works are heavily inspired by things I see or taste and then try to reinterpret or recreate. But I personally hadn’t ever tasted a tuna cooked on a single side before the idea came to me.

I originally had asparagus on the side but decided not only that it wasn’t enough but that I also wanted to add a little bit of fantasy to match the novel way of cooking the fish. I have tasted vegetable spaghetti in the past but it’s nice to work with a plant that is usually served cold. As for the pineapple, the charring and pungency brought by the Cayenne pepper only serve to reveal the sweet layer of the fruit.

Olivier Tonneau, a French blogger writing on the Mediapart platform, published an outstanding blog post touching to the very same topics I was writing about in the past week. Starting with an explanation of what Charlie Hedbo is, he then dwelves into how France is unique in that the State strives to disentangle race and religion – and how it has spectacularly failed to accomplish not only that goal, but also that of dissociating religion and extremism. Our opinions are largely aligned but his eloquence outranks mine by an order of magnitude.

On the complete absurdity of the attack:

This being clear, the attack becomes all the more tragic and absurd: two young French Muslims of Arab descent have not assaulted the numerous extreme-right wing newspapers that exist in France (Minute, Valeurs Actuelles) who ceaselessly amalgamate Arabs, Muslims and fundamentalists, but the very newspaper that did the most to fight racism. And to me, the one question that this specific event raises is: how could these youth ever come to this level of confusion and madness? What feeds into fundamentalist fury? How can we fight it?

On racism in France and the law against the veil:

That the emergence of fundamentalism is posing serious problems to Arabs also sheds an interesting light on the law banning the hijab – a law that is routinely mentioned as a proof of France’s anti-Muslim bias. I do not have a definite opinion on this law. I was, however, stunned when I read a very angry article by a writer I admire, Mohamed Kacimi. The son of an Algerian Imam, deeply attached to his Muslim culture yet also fiercely attached to secularism, Mohamed Kacimi lashed out angrily at white, middle-class opponents of the law, who focused on the freedom of Muslim women to dress as they please. They were not the ones, he said, who had their daughters in the suburbs called prostitutes, bullied and sometimes raped for the sole reason that they chose not to wear the veil – let us remember that many Muslim women do not consider wearing the veil as compulsory: again, we have here Muslims being persecuted by fundamentalists.

On how despite the apparent consensus displayed during the phenomenal demonstration of Sunday, France is undeniably divided and how Charlie seeked less to divide than it seeked to unite:

This is the difficult argument I am having with my French friends: we are all aware of the fact that the attack on Charlie Hebdo will be exploited by the Far right, and that our government will use it as an opportunity to create a false unanimity within a deeply divided society. We have already heard the prime minister Manuel Valls announce that France was “at war with Terror” – and it horrifies me to recognize the words used by George W. Bush. We are all trying to find the narrow path – defending the Republic against the twin threats of fundamentalism and fascism (and fundamentalism is a form of fascism). But I still believe that the best way to do this is to fight for our Republican ideals. Equality is meaningless in times of austerity. Liberty is but hypocrisy when elements of the French population are being routinely discriminated. But fraternity is lost when religion trumps politics as the structuring principle of a society. Charlie Hebdo promoted equality, liberty and fraternity – they were part of the solution, not the problem.

The cartoonists of Charlie were not allowed to rest in peace for very long.

Bells toll at Notre Dame, in honor of a newspaper that was radically anti-cleric. A chant of war, the Marseillaise, was sung, in honor of people who were deeply pacific. Millions of dollars were donated to a newspaper that held its financial independence higher than any other principle. On the brink of bankruptcy just a week ago, Charlie finds itself flooded with cash at the very same time its fangs are removed.

The murder of innocents is denounced by people in whose direction guns will never be drawn: neo-fascists, far-right writers and intellectuals disguising their islamophobia in a thin veil of free speech. Once dedicated to deconstruct and mock symbols, Charlie has itself become an idol. On Saturday, one French newspaper titled ‘Justice was served’ when there is nothing further from the truth. Though regrettable, this outcome was almost inevitable.

Luz, one of Charlie’s cartoonists who escaped the massacre, said they would have hated that. “They were just guys sitting in a corner, making drawings.” As to put back things in perspective – real people lost their lives. It’s personal. You can’t bury a symbol in the ground but their bodies will soon rest there.

When interviewed over the phone on the morning of their deaths, the perpetrators said themselves they murdered no innocents, they only eliminated targets. To their eyes, their actions are entirely legitimate and they showed no remorse whatsoever. This violence wasn’t blind. Journalists, police officers, jews – the problem is not where this list begins, it’s that it is conceivably endless. The killers are free to arbitrarily direct their wrath to anyone they perceive as an enemy. How that label is applied follows no reason or logic.

It’s been said, by many and by me, that Charlie’s satire was undirected – that it hit all religions and political and financial powers equally. And that as such, it also targeted oppressed and vulnerable minorities in France and elsewhere. In this instance, Muslims. Let it be very clear: Arabs in France are, and have been for decades, subject to a systemic violence and discrimination. It existed long before France faced attacks from extremists supposedly acting in the name of a religion. Without becoming any kind of excuse for it, poverty and ghettoization are undeniably elements in which extremism has the potential to fester.

But reducing French Arabs to a theorized atomic Muslim identity is as idiotic as turning Charlie Hedbo into of symbol of anything. From Yemen to Syria, it’s painfully obvious the Muslim civilian population is the first victim of religious extremism. Those victims are oppressed and murdered by the same people Charlie was mocking – the same people who executed those cartoonists, cops and jewish shoppers.

I wrote it would be hard to describe the magnitude of this event to people who never lived in France. On this day, up to 2 million people marched in the streets of Paris and about 2.7 millions throughout the rest of France. This is unheard of: the single largest demonstration in the History of France, bigger even than when Paris was liberated from the Nazis. Well over a thousand people gathered at the Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco. With the exception of a single asshole carrying an anti-Islam sign, the gathering was peaceful and honorable. To an extent, it was somber. But to another, it was glorious.

This morning in Paris, three gunmen opened fire on the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, a weekly french satirical newspaper. Ten people in the staff were killed as well as two police officers. Several were left gravely injured and are fighting for their lives at this very moment.

It’s really hard to communicate the magnitude of this event to someone who didn’t grow up in France. Of course, there’s the violence and the brutality with which the victims were executed. You don’t wake up in the morning thinking about the possibility of facing such a death but I guess that’s the world we live in. I’ll forever remember the place and the time when I learned about this.

The victims were people, with families and relatives that are mourning them. They were journalists and cops, both doing their jobs on the frontline. But moreover, the target of the attack was Charlie Hebdo – “Charlie”. The perpetrators were heard leaving the scene screaming in joy “On a tué Charlie!”, “We killed Charlie!”. All these cartoonists and journalists were celebrities and they were partners in a newspaper that had an iconic status in France. They were people I knew, people I had read, people I had laughed with. I read Charlie every week through high school and college. It shaped my political conscience, as was the case for so many young adults from the ’70s and until today. They were family – they had been working together for decades.

I’ve left France almost a decade ago and I don’t think I’ve seen any equivalent to the way Charlie was handling the news. Leftist, anti-cleric, pacifist, humorous, punchy, radical, scruffy. Fighting against all established powers, religious and politic alike. Charlie lived and thrived like an old-school newspaper. It was one of the last two fully independent national newspapers in France: they relied solely on subscription revenue.

The absence of paid ads gave them full liberty to address all that’s fit to print and also some of what’s not fit to print. They excelled in using and playing with the age-old concept of ‘freedom of speech’. It was not just a concept to them - their liberty was a way of life. Charlie had already been targeted three years ago and Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier, editor in chief and one of today’s victim) was under permanent police escort.

Charlie didn’t have an editorial policy, didn’t have a style guide. They didn’t care about digital, didn’t care about social media. They were living week-by-week, pulling a new issue and moving on. Some people were prompt to denounce Charlie Hebdo as a racist publication. I suppose anything is up for debate but I don’t think that’s the case. When you get killed by an extremist for doing nothing but your job, you must have been doing something right.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next – the loss seems like too much to stomach for everyone. But we’re going to have to live through this. To those who don’t: may you rest in peace.

Yesterday, NASA released an updated view of the iconic picture originally taken by the Hubble space telescope in 1995. Using an updated camera installed in 2009, Hubble was able to capture the magnificent structures in an even greater amount of detail.

The pillars have been presented as a ‘nursery of stars’ – the dust constitutes the raw material that slowly collapses into stars and planetary systems. A new infrared shot of the same region pierces behind the dust curtain and literally shines a new light on just how much is hapenning behind the scenes. Young stars blow their surroundings away as soon as they start radiating heat and solar winds.

Although the original image was dubbed the “Pillars of Creation”, this new image hints that they are also pillars of destruction. The dust and gas in these pillars is seared by intense radiation from the young stars forming within them, and eroded by strong winds from massive nearby stars. The ghostly bluish haze around the dense edges of the pillars in the visible-light view is material that is being heated by bright young stars and evaporating away.

You may download the picture in a variety of sizes (from ~300KB to a whopping 114MB in full resolution) on this page.

This past Saturday, three coworkers decided to take on one of the most brutally idiotic cycling challenge ever invented: Everesting. As the name implies, this is about elevation. And the rule is rather simple: accumulate, in one ride, the elevation of Mt. Everest. 8,848 meters of pain or, for my less metric-inclined friends, 29,028 feet.

They settled on Hawk Hill for the location. It’s a benchmark segment for riders in the area, known for its bautiful vistas of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco and the Marin Headlands. It took them just shy of 50 reps and slightly over 16 hours to accomplish the feat – that’s riding time only, mind you. A full post is expected to drop on the Strava blog soon, so I won’t spoil it too much. I did go twice over the bridge that day to capture a bit of their achievement.

The full gallery is here.