keep thunderbird alive!

from an Ukrainian mathematician [День незалежності України]

“Thank you for the message. We are still in (…). Here the life is quiet, only 2-3 air raid alert every day, but since no rocket hit the city yet, people do not care too much about the sounds of sirens. Unfortunately the situation in my city Kharkiv is still very bad and we can not come back. Our institute is still working online, so I still have my salary. But I am very tired of this life of refugees, although I am aware that my problems are \epsilon-size problems, comparing with problems of other Ukrainian people.”

Microsoft cares!

unexpected thanks

I received the following email from an author the other day, after rejecting their paper right after submission:

Dear Prof. Christian Robert,

Thank you very much for your assessment of the paper, your candid feedback and also your encouragement to submit the paper to another journal. We value very much this quick and constructive feedback and the time you need to invest to guarantee such a feedback policy.

Thank you for taking the time to consider our submission and best regards,

Which does not happen that often.

email footprint

While I was wondering (im Salzburg) at the carbon impact of sending emails with an endless cascade of the past history of exchanges and replies, I found this (rather rudimentary) assessment  that, while standard emails had an average impact of 4g, those with long attachments could cost 50g, quoting from Burners-Lee, leading to the fairly astounding figure of an evaluated impact of 1.6 kg a day or more than half a ton per year! Quite amazing when considering that a round flight Paris-Birmingham is producing 80kg. Hence justifying a posteriori my habit of removing earlier emails when replying to them. (It takes little effort to do so, especially in mailers where this feature can be set as the default option.)