I had fun speaking today at the Quantum World Congress panel on Demystifying Quantum: How to Communicate Cutting Edge Science to Diverse Audiences. Alongside the fantastic moderator @csrday.bsky.social and esteemed panelists @nicoleyh11.bsky.social and Ben Stein #QWC2025

According to a study by the New York Fed, physics majors had the second highest unemployment rate, 7.8%, among college graduates in 2023. What's going on? www.newyorkfed.org/research/col...

Are the gravitational anomalies attributed to dark matter due to WIMPs, axions, primordial black holes, modified gravity or something else? Take Physics Magazine's survey for a chance weigh in on this and other big questions.

I think of JWST whenever I play this card in Terraforming Mars.

Homemade garganelli pasta with chicken gizzard sauce.

I was sorry to hear of the death of Mario Vargas Llosa. Two weeks before, I bought a copy of his 2001 novel The Feast of the Goat at my local second-hand bookshop. The book was misfiled in the cookery section. I like to think Mario would be amused.

My go-to brand for one of my favorite foods. Unlike anchovies canned in olive oil, the ones packed in salt need to be filleted. But the effort is worth it for the fishier flavor.

"This new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending" - Robert Wilson explaining to Congress why the US should fund an expensive and powerful particle accelerator and, by my extension, science.

The conclusions of this article hinge on a distinction between programmer and developer. But how clear is that distinction?

“If we are lucky, some new ideas will emerge that are really valid. Ponder why the successful flavors do work; use that understanding to choose new possibilities” — Giuliano Bugialli.

"There is now a vast variety of erotica available, including cosy erotica (knitwear is torn off), Austen erotica . . . There is even erotica featuring—readers may wish to brace themselves—physicists."

So happy to be reading again one of my favorite novelists of my teens and twenties: Honoré de Balzac. The pic is from the cover of Lost Illusions (1837-43).

Favorite clue in today’s FT Xword: Knight crossing an eastern river (6). Knight, DUB, crosses an, AN, to give DANUB followed by eastern, E.

The track that closes side 1 of David Bowie's album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is a cover. I've finally sought and listened to the original version, and it's good.

Christopher Priest's 1998 novel The Extremes is like one long creepy and riveting episode of Black Mirror.

Useful perspective, clearly written and well-reasoned. arxiv.org/abs/2501.05694

For yesterday's dinner I made offelle alla triestine. They're like ravioli but with potato gnocchi dough as the pasta covering. These are stuffed with mushroom, tomato and cheese.

'Tis the year's midnight and time for my annual reading of John Donne's poem about deep grief.

My favorite pasta dish combines two of my favorite ingredients: onions and anchovies.

This wine from Whole Foods is classified as Vin de France, so I checked out the label to get a sense of where it's from and what's in it. The bottler (see under the QR code) is LCDM -- evidently, someone who favors the prevailing cosmological model.

I'm relieved to be resupplied with one of my favorite ingredients.

My Airedale terrier Allie in a limb configuration I haven't seen before.

This week's issue of Science magazine includes a review of six of the 70 exhibits that make up "Art & Science Collide."

When I was out walking my dog this morning, I spotted this flag flying outside a house in DC's Capitol Hill neighborhood. It's the flag of the Canton of Geneva.

Today I picked up the most surprising book I've ever found in a little free library in my Capitol Hill neighborhood: Saunders Lewis's 1930 novel Monica in the original Welsh.

From one of my favorite cookery books I made spaghetti al finocchio. Bugialli observes that "recipes for fennel bulbs with pasta are very rare" -- and then he describes one from Sicily in which braised fennel is pureed. Delish!

A misdirected cake won in a raffle in wartime London triggers a chain of events that leads to . . . I don't know yet but I'm engrossed by this 1943 novel.

NASA Hyperwalls are incredible—and now you can visit one in a new exhibit at Smithsonian’s Natural History museum. “That one visual tells an enormous part of the story of life on Earth.” eos.org/articles/smi...

My latest kitchen tool: an aluminium salta pasta pan from Italy.

It has finally rained in DC after 35 days. So I'm listening to this.

"Vintage flavoured swimmers that don't bar the style - bulk-free to keep your office style afloat" is a teaser that appears in today's NYT special advertising supplement on high-end watches. I've no idea what it means but I'm oddly reassured that NYT copyeditors did not intervene to make it clearer.

Allie is relaxing after spending today at doggie daycare.

I've just discovered that Thomas Mann's principal English translator, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (shown here) was the great grandmother of disgraced British PM Boris Johnson.

Wonderful title!

This morning I dropped off my Airedale at the groomer and picked up this book from a little free library.

I've just started reading Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses. Keen to discover where the novel takes places, I went to Norwegian Wikipedia. Here's how Chrome/Google Translate renders some of the names of towns in Akershus County.

I continue to enjoy and be edified by Alasdair Gray's quirky, principled novels. Lanark and Poor Things are his best, I think. But this novella, which I've just finished, perhaps best encapsulates his diagnosis of what it means to be a Scot in late 20th century Britain.

Nina Allan's The Rift is among the best novels I've read this year. And it reminds me why I love speculative fiction: The perturbations that animate the plot and challenge the characters are unconstrained by earthly reality.

What I like about the Financial Times cryptic crossword is that I can solve it completely about half the time. Today I was victorious.

Freshly made pesto di noci. Don't tell the Italian recipe police I used pecans instead of walnuts.

The different title that appears in the online TOC caught my eye and induced me to click through, "Native lizards taught to avoid toxic toads by released toadlets." Actually, it was just the word "toadlets."

This is an interesting analysis. And it's great to see the valuable work of copyeditors acknowledged.

My new favorite YouTube channel is about Italian food.

Thank you to everyone who solicits, writes and edits obituaries! Because of this obituary in the New York Times, I became acquainted with one of my (now) favorite novelists, Javier Marías.

Just read @cathleenogrady.bsky.social's in-depth report of ethical failings at a prominent French research hospital. I'm impressed that she consulted two sociologists of science. Sociologists, economists and historians can enrich science reporting.

A benefit of watching period dramas is that they help you picture novels from that period. I'm reading John Dickson Carr's 1931 whodunnit, Castle Skull, which is set in Weimar Germany. I'm picturing Babylon Berlin.

I keep hoping that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will recognize the importance of cosmic chemistry with a Nobel. This story provides a taste of this vibrant field.

Nice update from Nature's Davide Castelvecchi on efforts to determine one of the most consequential values in physics: the mass of the neutrino.

I'm enjoying the Ian Rankin novel, Let it Bleed, which I picked up from a little free library. I can't help observing that Rankin's Scottish police detective, John Rebus, is just like Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Swedish detective, Martin Beck, from two decades earlier. Plus ca change.

Oof. Power went out this morning and I heard a bang in the house. Turns out our car charger in the garage blew out! Shattered case on the ground, burn marks in the charger. Those are not cheap. Word to the wise: get a whole-house surge protector!