If you're ever feeling bad, know that the building that houses the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, one of the richest departments in one of the most prestigious schools, designed by world-famous architect I.M. Pei, does not have a way to take the stairs from the second to the third floor.

Can't even reflect off nickel without my polarization changing, because of MOKE.

I wanted to take the bus but it was stationary

If you want to know how to make knots untie or why proteins have the knots that they do, our paper was just published:https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.macromol.5c01073

Anglo-Saxon historians, can we just agree that the world would be a funnier place if we all said that Aethelred the Unready was actually unready for his responsibilities, and not just poorly advised or whathaveyou?

Glitchless any% errormaxing Overleaf speedrun

Looked up how much the @calstate.bsky.social paid OpenAI, it's 16.9 million dollars. (Purchase order 2400029476) @cfaunited.bsky.social

Outlined shadowed gradient comic sans, you know this will be good

If you ever submit a paper to the journal Soft Matter, do not use the word "via" at all, or else the editors will italicize it and make you look like an idiot who italicizes random words in the middle of sentence for no reason.

@mscommunity.bsky.social if Windows 10 support has ended why are you still externally restarting my computer to install updates? That's the whole benefit of no more support, I get to use my computer as I like!

Told a border guard I was a physics professor and he had me tell him the equation for force before letting me back into the United Kingdom.

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

One of my pet peeves is the persistent belief that signatures are magical.

The prolific @johncarlosbaez.bsky.social is giving TWO different talks in Edinburgh today, and I'll have to miss both.

Come be my colleague! careers.pageuppeople.com/873/lb/en-us...

Why are you, as a conference organizer, asking for a 500-800 word abstract.

Any discussion about knot theory invariable ends up with a demonstration of how to get Rob Scharein's cat on the surface of a knot in KnotPlot

Magnetic field around a knotted wire

A good physics day for guys named John.

The @canjphysics.bsky.social just followed me and this reminded me of the time about 10 years ago that my paper was rejected there because the referee thought I should acknowledge that he was on the path to win a Nobel prize in high school.

Three major problems that have been solved in my lifetime: -ozone depletion -acid rain -USB plugs that are always upside down the first two times you try to plug them in

New preprint with Ryan Blair and student Jonathan Strange, developing a new way to detect if ellipses form Borromean rings. It is 150 times faster than using the Jones polynomial! arxiv.org/html/2509.15...

COVID watchers, how high do we think this trend will get before the next zenith?

What would this scatterplot look like? On the x axis is the mass of objects from electrons up to tanker ships. On the y axis is the fastest speed humans have managed to make it go.

What if we kissed 👉👈 in the topological jellyfish

New preprint for you knot weirdos arxiv.org/abs/2507.20903

Inverted Wolfram Alpha logo spotted at St. Mark's basilica in Venice

Reading "Termination Shock" by Neil Stephenson and I find it funny that even though the book is about dealing with a global environmental crisis, he takes every opportunity he can to point out how stupid he thinks environmentalists are.

At the risk of getting scooped

@xkcd.com RANDALL ARE YOU OK?!

@techconnectify.bsky.social You may already be aware of this, but people are making memes about you in one of the largest Simpsons meme groups on facebook. For example:

If you like scientific figures that look like spaghetti, this is the paper for you www.nature.com/articles/s41...

NEW CHEESE PHYSICS JUST DROPPED IN PRL (pasting arxiv though) arxiv.org/html/2501.00...

Dozens or hundreds of people are suddenly following me as of the last few days. Was there another twitter exodus event? Are science starter packs going around again? Did I post some sort of banger?

New acquaintance, casually: "I was ok at math but I gave up when the numbers became imaginary." Me, justifiably: "Oh so I guess you're just a HUGE fan of gimbal lock?!"

Lezgo! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Cool TEM image of a polycatenane crystal from a new preprint chemrxiv.org/engage/api-g...

Will Farrell, Colin Farrell, and Colin Firth imply the existence of a Will Firth to close the ring. He does exist, and is an Australian translator of Serbian literature.

My two-factor authenticator has given me the number 88 three times in the last week, I'm worried it might be a white nationalist.

Worst part of teaching my lab class is that after wearing rubber gloves for three hours then going home, my cats don't feel as soft.

Diamonds are scary! They can include little pockets of water that remain at ~237000x atmospheric pressure (it's about 5,000x atmospheric pressure at the bottom of the ocean) once the diamond has been erupted to the surface. The water is so highly pressurized it's Ice VII at room temperature.

Have the Canadian electoral cartographers considered using an upside down Mercator?

(walking around a conference poster session with a comically large 3-minute hourglass that I flip over every time I start talking to a presenter)

After an accidental release of tsetse flies in Southern Ontario, the popular hiking route is now known as the Brucei Trail

(guy drowning in a tide pool) "omg I'm littorally dying here"

Physicists may recognize Weber State as the home of prolific textbookist @dvschroeder.bsky.social

As a Canadian scientist in the US I'm skeptical of this "bad US science conditions are a boon for Canada!" claim. Canada doesn't even have science jobs for its own scientists which is partly why so many are in the US.