It's a real testament to the strength of her catalog that I would assemble a very different list, yet I can't fault this piece for any of the choices it makes.

“HERO POSED NO THREAT”

Honestly, 40 sounds young to me right now. In Chicago, which admittedly is a pricey market, almost everyone I know who bought a house before age 40 in the past 10+ years was only able to do so with the help of family money. The idea of 33 year olds doing it on their own seems like a flight of fancy.

Deflection of starlight by the Sun’s gravitational field, measured during a solar eclipse and confirming a central prediction of Einstein's general relativity, was announced at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society #OTD in 1919. 🧪 🔭

I've overheard too many 18 or 19 year old guys talking about their missed parlays, and how upset they are. It's just so entrenched.

Freeman Dyson submitted a lovely little two-page paper to Physical Review #OTD in 1951. It showed that perturbation theory in quantum electrodynamics produces a divergent series. It's one of my favorites, an absolute classic of the field. 🧪 ⚛️ journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/...

Also a big problem for physics professors

I am sorry, but it is simply not possible that people feel this way about Microsoft Teams. It is the worst piece of software I have ever used, so objectively bad that I refuse to believe anyone would intentionally give it a rating that is not zero. These are spoofed reviews. There is no way.

Good afternoon.

Freeman Dyson submitted a lovely little two-page paper to Physical Review #OTD in 1951. It showed that perturbation theory in quantum electrodynamics produces a divergent series. It's one of my favorites, an absolute classic of the field. 🧪 ⚛️ journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/...

Clear path to acquittal. No chance of inflicting bodily harm with a sandwich when the guy is wearing body armor, and they were clearly *hoping* someone would take a swing at them so you can’t say they didn’t want it to happen.

Clear path to acquittal. No chance of inflicting bodily harm with a sandwich when the guy is wearing body armor, and they were clearly *hoping* someone would take a swing at them so you can’t say they didn’t want it to happen.

I didn’t know Brøderbund was still making Print Shop, good for them.

hopescrolling

If I was a GOP strategist, I’d be pretty worried about diluting my safe +15 districts into a bunch of +5 gerrymandered districts after tonight.

Going to bed tonight with a little more hope for the world than I started the day with.

Wild.

Somebody get me the footage of Wallace Shawn walking up to Mandy Patinkin at the victory party and shouting “Conceivable!”

Excited to wake up tomorrow and read all the articles from your Yglesiases and Kleins and Douthats asking if Republican politicians need to adopt hard left positions in the face of an obvious Dem mandate.

A true Blue Wave tonight as outlets start calling it for Prop 50 passing in California. election-night.decisiondeskhq.com/date/2025-11...

I don’t really follow politics, is +13D good? www.vpap.org/electionresu...

Down by 20+ most of the game, then in the fourth quarter someone told them that all the good guys are winning tonight.

Congrats to Chuck Schumer on demonstrating pretty conclusively that his support and endorsement are completely irrelevant.

I’m not an especially astute political observer, but my (admittedly amateurish) take away tonight is that people hate ghoulish weirdos trying to dismantle their country, eliminate healthcare, tank the economy, roll back civil rights, destroy democracy, and starve children.

IF YOU ARE IN LINE TO SPEAK ILL OF DICK CHENEY, STAY IN LINE!!

Brad Lander says GET OUT AND VOTE FOR MAMDANI, NYC! And vote on the Working Families Party line! Polls are open until 9 pm - and EVERY VOTE COUNTS! Find your polling site here: findmypollsite.vote.nyc

🎃 screen name —> 🦃 screen name, transition complete

The X-10 graphite reactor at Oak Ridge went critical #OTD in 1943. Built as part of the Manhattan Project, it was the second artificial nuclear reactor (after Fermi's Chicago Pile 1) and the first to operate continuously. 🧪 ⚛️ Image: Ed Westcott

The first edition of Unix was released internally at Bell Labs #OTD in 1971. Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, et al started working on it in 1969. Check the v1 timestamps here: www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utre...

Assuming her security detail gets two weeks off per year, that’s enough to pay 23 people an annual salary of over $150k.

Guess who has no thumbs and managed to get on the dining room table and eat a stick of butter right before I had to drop him off for a haircut.

G-🦉

If only there were some way to identify the shooter there in the headline

Holy Cow, The Bears.

As a physicist in the subfields that character was supposed to inhabit, who was trained by the generation of scientists that character was supposed to belong to, Shawn was *great* in that role. Yes I understand I am saying this about a character on Young Sheldon. Completely nailed it, no notes.

Finally, some USEFUL science. Nothing amps up a boggle board’s scoring potential like a well-placed gerund dangler. arxiv.org/abs/2507.02117

Sorry I cannot abide a typo in a post, even if it is history’s dumbest post. I have to delete and repost.

If you are doing a NaNoWriMo — NArrative Novel about Orville WRIght’s MOustache — please post regular updates.

“The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the majority of the review articles we receive are little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues.”

arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month. Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.

A belated happy 50th birthday to Chaosium. Founder Greg Stafford (RIP) got the first little D&D box set; his buddy purchased it directly from Gary Gygax, who had just picked it up from the printers. web.archive.org/web/20180728...

The Curse of Drake is real

You’d think the media would be all over “aspiring autocrat throws Great Gatsby themed party for billionaire friends while taking food benefits away from 42 million Americans,” even if just for the clicks. But probably you’d need at least one big outlet that isn’t totally on board with it.

It's a Chicago holiday

No obvious ICE presence in my corner of Rogers Park tonight. No helicopters, or SUVs pulling up and grabbing people off the street. Just kids and families out trick-or-treating.

Mathematician Karl Weierstrass was born #OTD, Halloween, in 1815. 🧪 🎃 The fools at The Academy all said he was mad, but he showed them all in 1872 when he announced that he had created a MONSTER. Let's learn about the terrible thing he did. Image: Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Gather round, children. It's time for [flashlight under chin] the terrifying annual Halloween thread...

Finally got the fan to (briefly) kick in while doing something on my M4 MacBook Pro. All it took was running 28 Mathematica kernels full throttle for a few minutes.

Pumpkins carved.