Can't believe this bus wifi got a faculty position.

It's funny how my "internet not working right" workflow has shifted from checking my wifi connection to checking downdetector to see if there's a global outage of from something like AWS or cloudflare.

Someone in a pub asked me how I don't get cold running in shorts and I got to give a whole thermodynamics lesson.

I woke up too early because of jetlag AMA

After hanging around kids several times in the past few weeks I can confirm that the 6-7 thing is annoying.

Environmentally and geopolitically it might be a disaster, but the Northeast passage between China and Europe could be made a lot shorter by digging a canal between Lake Baikal and the Amur River basin. Then you'd only need to sail the Arctic between the Yenisey and the White Sea-Baltic Canal.

If there's one thing I can attribute my success to, it's understanding the post hoc ergo propter hoc falacy. My career really took off after I learned about it.

Boss: "This new invention that rotates the pistons in our engine is great! What should we call it?" Jim: "A jimshaft!" Cam: "I have a better idea."

I bet Ryerson didn't count on their name change setting themselves up for "Temu U of T"

You are eating because you're hungry, I am eating because I'm bored. We are not the same.

Guy who insists that arrays begin at index 0 but that the ground floor is the 1st.

My biggest shame from high school English class is that I DNF'd Jane Eyre right before we found out about the wife in the attic.

Good news, we now have evidence that there was a two month period in which planetary-mass black holes did not collide within our solar system. journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

Solving the helium atom in quantum mechanics 🤝 Cancer prevention Understanding the importance of screening

Teaching thermodynamics but pronouncing "metastable" with the same cadence as "metastasis."

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...