quack

Benefit of having an L-desk at home: desk buddy

My cartoon for this week's @newscientist.com

Todd finally got to me. Bought Skyrim for a second time this weekend. At least I'll get to play the DLCs for the first time.

Classic

Getting journal rejections like

Then Toad began to bang his head against the wall

"Their words cannot be allowed to stand"

HEADS UP: CDC website now officially asserts that vaccines may cause autism.“Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.” Also says the “vaccines do not cause autism” header remains b/c of an agreement with Cassidy.

My 12 year old 3DS still holds a charge like it's brand new. What magical batteries was Nintendo putting in these things?

Favorite soft drink of a computational physicist? LSODA

Next talk at the #NaturalPhilosophy Symposium was by Chris Kempes on The Easy Part of Biology. Commentary by Margaret Johnson. [Physics. Physics is the easy part of biology.] www.youtube.com/watch?v=riKf...

Genuinely incredible reddit comment on why C++ is called "C++" and not "++C"

I couldn't help but do the back-of-the-envelope calculation: based on the scale of the components and numbers shown, this would subject riders to about 50 g's of acceleration for around half a second. Short enough time period to probably be survivable... for some of the population, at least!

Arizona sunrise

Cool idea!

Coming up on two months of Linux-only computing, and I'm definitely never going back.

Utterly absurd

EPSTEIN SPENT THANKSGIVING WITH TRUMP WHILE HE WAS PRESIDENT? www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/e...

This was an awesome workshop!

He's not always right, but Stewart gets this absolutely spot-on www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFI6...

If only science communicators, doctors, and the people who have monitored the anti-vaxx movement for years could have convinced journalists and politicians of this.... They want zero vaccines. They're not hiding it.

A question came up in the lab today: How many fish could you (completely) boil with the energy it takes to train an LLM like ChatGPT?

A question came up in the lab today: How many fish could you (completely) boil with the energy it takes to train an LLM like ChatGPT?

Just thinking again how Democrats asked people to accept short-term suffering in order to give space to prevent long-term, worse suffering and then said, "Thanks for suffering in the short-term. You'll get to suffer long-term too so that our Thanksgiving plans don't get disrupted."

i think this is key. taking the deal would amount to taking the blame. it would turn a clear political victory into an unambiguous defeat.

"Why do you like membrane bending simulations so much?"

Oof, while reading some voting statistics it suddenly dawned on me that I'm no longer in the "young voters" category by most metrics. 😬

Apple entering the low-cost market is as sure a sign of a recession as anything

Good to know that in addition to being a sterile corporate hellscape, LinkedIn suffers from the same slop as twixter: on a post from Penn State Medicine about new highly effective screening/treatment protocols for pancreatic cancer, the top comment is telling them to research Ivermectin instead.

It’s a tradition that I ask my “Physics III” class to create some memes about our class material. It’s *also* a tradition that they’re super good at this. Please enjoy, like and share! 🧪 (I promised my students extra game points if this goes nano-viral!) (Front pic is my own entry.) 1/17

I would love a physics conference that included a session that was, "Present your favorite derivation." Could be relevant to your research area or not, just a derivation that you find particularly insightful, or illustrative of a really neat trick, or just really cool.

"There's a story that someone ran into an old physicist at a conference and asked him "How's your wife?" To which the physicist replied "Compared to what?""

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs - Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75% - Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60% - Social Sciences by 50–70% - History by 60% - Biology by 75% - The German department will lose all PhD seats - Sociology from six PhD students to zero

Trump:

Always good to remember that even the most advanced LLM AI models currently available have extremely high rates of hallucination, and all outputs should be thoroughly validated. source: research.aimultiple.com/ai-hallucina...

Wow my gf is cuddling with the actual Batman rn

AWS outage? [laughs in non-Amazon VPS hosting]

Over and over again, establishment journalists just refuse to describe Republican policies and beliefs in plain language to mislead the public. The GOP says it is purging liberals from academia and journalists reframe it as “rebuilding trust.” That is not journalism, it is regime propaganda.

Now three weeks in, and I haven't booted back into the Windows partition since. Slowly going through the process of backing up my secondary drives and reformatting them to ext4 for better Linux compatibility.

Here's something I haven't seen before: Google search apparently doesn't just directly feed your query to its "AI", but can try to distill your query into a shorter input, which in this case leads to a confused answer from the LLM. Trying to reduce token count to save on computation costs?

When I used Google Maps yesterday, it told me a store's hours might differ from the usual due to Indigenous Peoples' Day. Today, it says the hours might differ due to Columbus Day. Gotta apply those last-minute patches to appease the administration.

POV: laying on the couch with kitty cat

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

Over the weekend ICE abducted an NIH contractor when he showed up to a courthouse for his green card hearing. He is documented. His wife is a citizen. He is also member of the skeleton crew of animal care staff that works through a shutdown, to ensure the health and wellbeing of research animals.

I wrote up some notes on Brownian dynamics of (nearly flat) Helfrich membranes to help myself learn, and decided to post them publicly in case anyone else finds them helpful. Starting from Stokes equations and going through stochastic simulation in Fourier space. www.samuelfoley.com/misc/

🤔

IMO this hasn't gotten enough attention: a recent memo at NIH announces that peer review will be devalued in determining which grants get funded, granting more power to political appointees to make decisions based on the admin's whims over scientific merit kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

Never a good day to be at the pet ER with the kitty