It’s not just cost. Digital sovereignty and privacy matter. The migration from Microsoft (Windows, Office) to Linux and open-source software (e.g. LibreOffice) is accelerating. This is just one notable example among many. 1/2 www.zdnet.com/article/this...

Rowan caught another dragon for our Dragon Soccer game! The dragon was initially annoyed — and still gets a bit touchy about not being able to fly with too much dog spit on its wings — but now seems to enjoy playing with us! #dogs #dogsofbluesky #AustralianShepherd

It is soooo satisfying to continue ditching/purging enshittified Microsoft, Adobe, etc. products for high quality open-source software without missing a beat. Things like LibreOffice, Gimp, OmniTools, etc.

lol oh my gosh are you suggesting that instead of defaulting to an LLM, maybe I should use my own shitty little brain?! lol what a grand idea… 😂😄

Rowan and I are NOT doom scrolling on my iPad. We’re watching cool dog agility videos and checking out the stuffed animals toys on the webpage of our locally owned pet supply store. We’re getting ready to go hide in the mountains/woods for a week or so. #dogs #dogsofbluesky #AustralianShepherd

eBook Preview Statistical Physics of Rarefied Sediment Particle Motions and Transport: Applications to Hillslopes and Rivers Posting this preview of material from my next (unfinished) book might be a mistake. But eh… what the hell. 1/n cdn.vanderbilt.edu/t2-my/my-prd...

Despite growing up in North Carolina, I only recently learned of the Southern Devil Scorpion (Vaejovis carolinianus) and its occurrence in Tennessee. Nocturnal and relatively innocuous, but they make for interesting nighttime walks with Rowan, who insists on sniffing in every nook and cranny.

lol clever satire wins again yet despite the absurdity of it all, there are still real academics who actually buy into some of this shit

“When I say AGI is impossible, I mean: it requires mathematics that doesn't exist to model biology we don't understand to implement functions nobody can define. That's "impossible" in any practical sense.” fluxus.io/article/alch...

You are, in the next few months, going to see a few pro-AI people who start trying to morph into "thoughtful cynics" on the issue, and I can't wait, because I've been taking such detailed notes

Gary Marcus’s assessment of GPT-5 and LLMs more generally is unambiguous garymarcus.substack.com/p/gpt-5-over...

re the use of LLMs my wife just shared a statement that a literary agent (friend of a friend) posts on her website regarding project/agent queries in effect it says that any query email/statement/letter generated by an LLM will be immediately deleted, unread

a thoughtful, clear assessment of the AI delusion including — and you can’t make this shit up — a Dyson sphere around the solar system, courtesy of Sam Altman’s personal fantasies/delusions/stupidity

just rereading this brilliant (very funny) statement by Greg Mania concerning the appearance of the em dash in AI stay for the P.S. at the end 😂 www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

lol wishing I had known of these insights when I was teaching my probability/statistics course 😂

for fun, here is another snippet from something I'm currently writing, which concerns the statistical physics of sediment transport although focused on transport of soil particles by rain splash, the idea equally applies to other transport processes, including bed load transport in rivers

A key element of the broken incentive structure that Hossenfelder does not address is the well-known transformation of universities and professional societies into top-heavy corporate enterprises whose role, like publishers, is parasitic abetment.

“Hey Big Woof, I brought my dragon, did you bring the soccer balls for our game of Dragon Soccer?” #dogs #dogsofbluesky #AustralianShepherd

lol delightful essay what if instead we lean on a comma and write: the central, limit theorem

my colleague @cstark.bsky.social recently reminded me of a cool word: polemical so for fun, here is one of my favorite footnotes in something I'm currently writing... which concerns the statistical physics of sediment transport

brilliant… and Samuel Jackson does it perfectly

The title says it all. Ethan Siegel’s explanation is thorough and clear. Why “vibe physics” is the ultimate example of AI slop bigthink.com/starts-with-...

This thread concerns science dogma. I recently received an email from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) encouraging me to submit an abstract for a session at the 2025 annual meeting. I suspect the email was AI generated from a data scrape... 1/n

Angela Collier ripping through Billionaire AI Vibe Physics Bullshit like a tornado. ❤️❤️❤️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz... #AI #LLM #ChatGPT #Physics

NEW: “Staggering” Water Loss Driven by Groundwater Mining Poses Global Threat A new study finds that freshwater resources are rapidly disappearing, creating arid “mega” regions and causing sea levels to rise. By @abrahm.bsky.social

lol Rowan was rather annoyed with me that I posted her less-than-graceful dock dive without explanation… and insisted that we make things right so… here it is… her fearlessly and properly executed dock dive (and splash!) with precise tennis ball fetch! 😂 #dogs #dogsofbluesky #AustralianShepherd

💥 My research area of Earth-surface processes, w/ emphasis on sediment transport, is nominally a subfield of geophysics. Yet this paragraph (with certain exceptions) nails the state of affairs in this area. The disconnect between theory and purposeful experimental design/data analysis is glaring.

A compelling argument for science reform by the always-compelling @rmcelreath.bsky.social, doubly worth the read for all the incidental shots fired at Nature.

Newsletter: This is the Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble: genAI is nothing like Uber or Amazon Web Services, there are no profitable genAI companies, agents do not and cannot exist, there is no AI SaaS story, and everything rides - and dies - on selling GPUs. www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...

To re-spin this: The combination of delusion regarding so-called AI, ignorance of science and how it works, and lack of self awareness, is breathtaking. These people should be ridiculed relentlessly rather than platformed to spew their bullshit with minimal pushback. gizmodo.com/billionaires...

Rowan would chase her ball into the lake for hours if I let her lol she’s a bit shy and maybe less than graceful with her dock dive this time #dogs #dogsofbluesky #AustralianShepherd

Continuing my task of speaking softly into the void, my latest essay is entitled, "The sediment particle flux: An illustration of the pronounced consequences of the small numbers of particles involved in rarefied (non-continuum) transport conditions." 1/n cdn.vanderbilt.edu/t2-my/my-prd...

In the past year we've had a series of papers with results that've shocked #climate scientists - the globe is heating #FasterThanExpected & we don't fully know why The public discourse is not keeping up. Here's a series of 5 new studies that climate hawks & journos need to have on their radar 🧵

First Dog on the Moon explains things well www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Here are my top 10 protest dogs! youtu.be/lgOtg-BeV6E

Regarding the notion of a scientific law, my dear late friend and colleague, Peter Haff, offered a particularly refreshing take on the physics law named in his honor — Haff’s cooling law. “At most it’s a physics law-let.” 😊 cdn.vanderbilt.edu/t2-my/my-prd...

Some folks in the field of geomorphology pretentiously claim the existence of emergent “laws” for how things work. To be sure, the laws of this field are the laws of physics. The closest one can ever get to an emergent “law” is an explanation that is hard to vary (sensu David Deutsch).

Rowan really enjoys playing catch and release, although the frogs and turtles become rather annoyed by it all, particularly if the release part of the game is not immediate. #AustralianShepherd

For those who like to think about first-passage/last-passage types of problems, here is a particularly interesting paper on survival probabilities of biased random walks. arxiv.org/abs/2505.24814

I am reminded by Isabel Brooks’ interesting piece that I lived roughly half my life without, then half my life with, the internet. Without weighing in here on the pros and cons, consider the order: Suppose it was with, then without. How might perceptions change? www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Adam Mastroianni provides a delightful commentary on writing! The tarantulas appear under Item 6 😂 www.experimental-history.com/p/28-slightl...

Ye gods this paragraph goes hard. <3 I've long advocated for free education at all levels, but never heard the case for it put quite so forcefully.

Presidential budget is out. Here's NSF. Biggest cut, by amount, is $1 billion, or 66.8%, from MPS (Physics & Math directorate). nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

A special part of one of my favorite bike trails — along the Little Harpeth River, Tennessee

T Murphy offers a thoughtful existentialist essay on his participation in the scientific enterprise. I disagree with certain assertions/arguments; but I suggest it is a mistake to blithely avoid this depth of reflection on what we as scientists are doing, and why. dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/12/conf...

This new paper offers a refreshingly accessible introduction to Markovian processes — a very nice read. “We provide an overview of Monte Carlo algorithms based on Markovian stochastic dynamics of interacting and reacting many-particle systems not in thermal equilibrium.” arxiv.org/abs/2505.18145

Change the wording a bit (e.g. the platform details) and this thread effectively characterizes the systemic algorithm underlying the publish-or-perish culture that has consumed much of academics in the US, notably the sciences.

David Potash provides a particularly thoughtful review of Evan Mandery's highly acclaimed book, "Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us" (2002, The New Press). www.thedigitalquad.com/2025/04/19/p...

The conceptual consequences of Noether’s theorem are hard to overstate.

Have a look at my latest essay co-authored with @sarah-squilliams.bsky.social, with thanks to @cstark.bsky.social for commenting on an earlier draft. 1/n "Bed load particle velocities: The essential role of particle-bed collisions in the Langevin-like equation" cdn.vanderbilt.edu/t2-my/my-prd...