I hadn't even thought of this! (Fortran user)

If the college student had been *unprepared* for this work environment, they would have been removed from consideration. The fact that the student *withdrew* from consideration tells me that they had been amply prepared to practice journalism with integrity, and found the newsroom lacking.

More than this: I've seen the slopbot in action in the email replies of HR 'professionals' too lazy to do their job. The slopbot can't tell the difference between 'too little' and 'too much', and doesn't know how to paste web links into an email. Slopbots can't even do the bare minimum.

YES! MOAR TREES! 🌳🌲🌳🌲🌳🌲🌳

I finished reading Ken MacLeod's 'Lightspeed trilogy' recently. A++ would recommend! Great worldbuilding (and, um, -wrecking), plenty of plot twists, complex politics, and no simple answers.

Holy shit 😬

One of the many benefits of not doing small-talk. #ActuallyAutistic

On it.

Me as an undergrad in the early 1990s #WomenInSTEM

I am so proud of #CarletonU #cupe4600 graduate Teaching Assistants right now. cupe4600.ca/bargaining/a... "[T]here is no such thing as ethical use of AI. [...] AI fundamentally undermines the purpose of higher education." Sign their open letter for the right to opt out of slopbot use!

📢 The Canadian Association of Physicists 2026 Annual Congress will be held in Ottawa, ON from June 22-26. The deadline to submit an abstract is coming up on January 15, 2026. Find more details on abstract submission on the CAP website: cap.ca/congress-con...

This is extremely important work.

Physicists be like ⚛️🧪

If you’re using generative AI for anything, I’m going to assume you’re using it for something exploitative and harmful when you think no one is looking.

Thanks to the generative-AI grift, "AI" has become synonymous with slop. If you mean machine learning, say machine learning. There's nothing smart about infesting our critical infrastructure with slop.

Everyone teaching right now sees lots of evidence for this. Students using LLMs are, to varying degrees, incapable of independently doing the things they are supposedly learning, the same way that students copying answers from a solutions manual then struggle to do something similar on an exam.

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

Neurodivergents against Microsoft

Tomorrow, November 18, is the International Day of 2SLGBTQIA+ People in STEM! ⚛️ 🧪 If you teach or mentor people in STEM, simply acknowledging this day can go a long way to creating a more supportive environment for your 2SLGBTQIA+ students. Read more: diversity-and-inclusion.web.cern.ch/node/133

Employers are always handwringing about autism accommodations in the workplace and I gotta tell you: ear defenders and quiet workstations are the least of your problems. What autistic people really need is *whispers* for other people to do their actual jobs.

Happening tomorrow! Mon Nov 10 at 11:30am EST. #ActuallyAutistic

Pretty much. ⚛️

Dear Physicists and Physics fans, I would like to encourage you to celebrate #WomenInPhysics Day this Friday, November 7th. Why November 7th? Because it is the birthday of two of the most impactful women physicists of the 1900's: Marie Curie and Lise Meitner. 🎢 ⚛️ 🧪 👩‍🔬

In a little over a week I'll be giving a talk on my experiences as a (formerly) undiagnosed autistic person in academia. I'm a little nervous about the "exposure", but hey, what could go wrong?? science.carleton.ca/event/ace-ed... The plan is for there to be an online option as well as in-person.

For *reasons* I feel I have to say that I have never and will never use genAI in anything to do with my job other than generating examples of how useless it is so I can put students off using it. I have my own brain and quite enjoy using it.

This midterm exam season I'm experimenting with "blinded" marking [grading], where I take extra care to mark (e.g.) problem 1 independently from 2 and 3 and also to ensure I don't know whose work I'm marking while I'm marking it. I think this maximizes fairness both by preventing performance ...

My talk was recorded, and is now up on the SAC's YouTube channel! youtu.be/6CSRsDNUnSQ A bunch of other past talks also have recordings, all linked from here: sac.cap.ca/events/the-p...

Tomorrow at 6pm Eastern!

I'm writing a colloquium for next week on CP violation and symmetries in particle physics (senior physics-undergrad level), to be delivered online through the Canadian Association of Physicists' Student Advisory Council's Physics Hour [scroll down]: sac.cap.ca/events/the-p... ⚛️🧪 All welcome!

It's midterm season, and the most valuable thing #HigherEd staff can do right now is to reduce the stress load on students. They have enough stress studying their course material; they don't need more from being put the wrong exam room or having proctors whispering loudly while they're writing.

MathVeg! I still think these are super cool.

As a theoretical cosmologist, I'm frequently asked "what is the benefit of the work you're doing for people's lives?" Nothing I work on makes money or cures disease. There are a few different answers one can give, at various levels of "convincing" / "actually relevant to why the work is done." 1/🧵

I gave my talk today, on the "(In)consistency of the Real two-Higgs-doublet model", for the Scalars 2025 conference! 🎉 I had to give it remotely, because I still can't travel due to chronic fatigue. 😢 3 other speakers were in similar situations; kind of glad I wasn't the only 'weird' one. 😬

Amazing colloquium today by @burcinmp.bsky.social on "The Smallest and Faintest Galaxies: Clues to the Nature of Dark Matter and Galaxy Formation"! #CarletonU ⚛️🧪

Age verification? I write code in FORTRAN.

Ahaha holy shit

Survived the first (half-)week of fall semester! 💪 - Met my two new graduate students; - Taught the first class in my 3rd-year course; - Wrote a recommendation letter for my former grad student who's applying to a faculty job; - Did a PhD committee meeting for my other student. #CarletonU

Heard from someone that a student from my stat mech class last year were gushing “I never thought the rice cooker is so amazing until I took Eugene’s class!” I feel that a brag is warranted. The rice cooker is amazing: 2 phase transitions working together to make a simple tool that every Asian own.

I wrote the first draft of my talk for SCALARS 2025 indico2.fuw.edu.pl/event/16/ove... and gah, I need to completely rewrite the intro. And make it like 35% shorter.

As a FORTRAN user and a woman in STEM, I love this! 🥰

A blog article I wrote up for my publisher on figuring out why my language development was different to other people. #Autistic blog.jkp.com/2025/08/auti...

Transformative work on improving inclusion for #autistic students -- focus is on kid-school, but relevant to #HigherEd as well!

My alma mater! 🥰

*Something* is coming soon, but I guess we'll never know what! #Ottawa #VaguePosting (Storefront where Haven coffeeshop used to be; apparently rented out now to a purveyor of mysterious squiggles.)

Are there new undiscovered extra Higgs like bosons that decay to top quarks? Those create instead a 'wiggle' (because of quantum interference) in the top quark pair invariant mass distribution. This paper looks for these wiggles. arxiv.org/abs/2507.05119

Very cool news about a newly-measured 'ultramassive' black hole, with some gorgeous gravitational-lensing pics. New mass-measurement method & led by a Brazilian PhD student! 3.5 x 10^10 M_sun, 10^4 x heavier than Sag A*. www.cbc.ca/news/science...

Giving my first lecture (of 2) in about 2.5 hours! ⚛️ indico.slac.stanford.edu/event/9605/

In #HigherEd? Care about, well, anything? Read this. (It's mostly about AI slop.)