How effective is protesting? According to historians and political scientists: very www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

once more a good time to remind people that in a scientific/formal context the meaning of words, especially ones presented as technical terms, does actually matter and is open to abuse (including to wider society) if not called out when terms do not refer plato.stanford.edu/entries/refe...

"High-mobility and thermally stable organic semiconductors are crucial for advancing practical organic electronics."

If you see this, post a random fact about yourself: 1986ish - A guy called me up at my day job to help him figure out how to heat up a one pound block of aluminum. We ended up making PCR more affordable by upsetting Epindrof's(sp?) monopoly

Reminds me of "Ask Marilyn" column in the 1970s Parade Magazine Sunday supplement. I need to go to the library and sit down with a stack of those.

The Week Between Christmas and New Years

(I don’t know who created this, but happy to credit if someone does.)

Si!

Early tea cannot come early enough today. Yum!

I am hoping the popularity of Marty Supreme will invigorate an interest table tennis. In particular for folks who can greatly benefit from it. I just ordered a half size table, extra balls and a ball pick up tool for my my bro's assisted living home. www.ottawatabletennisclub.com/post/the-pow...

Meanwhile, every morning for my commute I step onto a metro train that: - runs every 3 minutes - carries nearly 1000 people at a time - is fully electric - costs €1 / a day for unlimited citywide transit on buses, trams, or trains - has nearly 100% reliability Oh, and it has automatic doors. 😇

Christmas family party - Got to share my pentomino tiling theory with my almost has a math degree but is is going to be an ME niece. Build an 8x8 first which is easy and use it to inform the tiling of the much more difficult 6x10. Also played Genius Square and Chess #puzzles #combinatorics

“Leo, who has made care for immigrants and the poor key themes of his papacy, said…the story of Jesus being born in a stable because there was no room at an inn should [illustrate] that refusing to help the poor and strangers today is tantamount to rejecting God himself.” Best wishes to all…

Behold! My Solar System Christmas tree 🎄 Created 5 years ago, it’s a black tree with hand painted ornaments. Each year I added something new—asteroids from clay, moon ornaments, tree skirt, more stars, and even made it rotate. One year it was my favorite exoplanetary system, TRAPPIST-1. 🔭🧪🐡

Q: what kind of algorithms does an AI produce A: the bubble sort -- swlabr

Dog viciously mauled by a tiger. #cats #kittens #caturday

All I want for Christmas is a tiling puzzle solver in Python that I can share with summer camp kids and this is beyond my wildest dreams! www.aswinvanwoudenberg.com/posts/soma-c...

New laptop sticker just dropped.

We are hiring!! Faculty position in Gravitational Wave and Multi-messenger Astrophysics at @grappainstitute.bsky.social at the University of Amsterdam! 🔭✨🧪 werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

From quadratics in Mesopotamia 4000 years ago to the higher-degree equations of Abel and Galois in the 19th century via a Renaissance quarrel, Robin Wilson tells the story of polynomials. All in less than 20 minutes. Watch: youtu.be/39nQRySRrsw

Elf on the shelf, straight up - taken by Manhattan. #drinkmas #cocktail #elfontheshelf

Read the latest newsletter from the Committee for Women in Mathematics (CWM). CWM is the committee of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) that is concerned with issues related to women in mathematics worldwide. 🔗 www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/CW... #AWM #CWM #IMU #WomenInMath

Calls to boycott CBS/Paramount intensify after CBS spiked a 60 Minutes segment critical of the Trump regime hours before airtime… #BoycottCBS

Another adult day and I didn't - draw a portrait of my 6th grade crush, write a poem, figure out the sum of the 1 to 100 or build something in woodshop class. Those experiences shaped me, it shows up in my medical device R&D work every day. I am confident that I can do and make beautiful things.

Keen observation and well stated. Needs a pic -

Mathematical physicist Cécile DeWitt-Morette was born #OTD in 1922. She made foundational contributions to Feynman functional integrals, organized the first American conference on general relativity (important for gravitational waves), and started the Les Houches Summer School. 🧪 ⚛️ 👩‍🔬 (1/n)

Skied the green run at a local downhill place in my new backcountry gear. Still got it.

Are you a bachelor or master student anywhere in the world, and would like to come to us to work full-time on a supervised research project? Applications for the 2026 MPIA Summer Internship are open now!

To peat or not to peat?

Classical billiards can compute. With Isaac Ramos, we show that 2D billiard systems are Turing complete, implying the existence of undecidable trajectories in physically natural models from hard-sphere gases to celestial mechanics. Determinism ≠ predictability. 🎱🧠 @upc.edu @ricardsole.bsky.social

And just like that, SFWA capitulates. Keep fighting. It works.

This looks interesting. "The Incubator is intended to help start in-person, not-for-profit summer programs (residential or non-residential), at which participants do intensive mathematics with a focus on enrichment rather than remediation or acceleration" summermathprograms.org/incubator#in...

#ArtAdventCalendar Day 19 "Poinsot's Dancing Cones", 2025 Physics of the gyroscope, tribute to Louis Poinsot's work. #SciArt #MathArt Traditional geometrical constrtuction (axonometry), watercolor pencils and markers on gessoed canvas board.

It took the full power of my last remaining brain cell today to paint the scoring numbers. Gave the background a first layer, too. Once everything dries I can finish the final details & will paint deez pinballs. 🕹️

Reaching the Masses: Six Authors on Public Outreach [about Mathematics] A Zoom conversation with: Keith Devlin Marcus du Sautoy Jordan Ellenberg Sarah Hart John Allen Paulos Steven Strogatz ams.org/journals/not... PDF: ams.org/journals/not...

(a) I am inviting all these jackasses to come sit in my MATH 101 class where we very specifically talk about percentages are always *of* something, and how a good way to lie is to switch the unit (b) I am bookmarking this post as an excellent example of lying with percentages for my MATH 101 class

"By the way, learning from simpler examples is one of the most effective problem solving strategies I know. " - words to thrive by

Grades are in, so I've been playing in Desmos. Here's a dynamic transformation of a popular hexagon dissection into a rectangle. I've included parameters to control the shapes in the dissection. Can you make a square? www.desmos.com/calculator/y...

Highlights from WSJ article "We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars."

Chess Grandmaster Tired Of People Comparing Every Life Situation To Chess Match https://theonion.com/chess-grandmaster-tired-of-people-comparing-every-life-1819579235/

It’s “not a museum,” and, according to its architects, it’s “not a building.” But a cool subterranean lair on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway now houses a shifting collection of floating mobiles and grand stabiles by the modernist master Alexander Calder.

are you disgruntled by the current safety evaluation landscape? curious about what conceptual clarity, methodological soundness and rigour in AI evaluation might look like? if so, consider coming to dublin and doing a phd with me apply here: aial.ie/hiring/phd-a...

Les concours chercheurs CNRS au titre de l’année 2026 viennent d’être publiés au Journal officiel et sont désormais en ligne sur le site du CNRS. carrieres.cnrs.fr/concours-ext...

I remember writing years ago about a then-new initiative by Amazon to disrupt local government procurement of things like office and school supplies. Turns out Amazon's become very popular with school districts, and it's using dynamic pricing to rip those schools off. prospect.org/2025/12/17/a...

I will be pushing for a moratorium on the construction of data centers that are powering the unregulated sprint to develop & deploy AI. The moratorium will give democracy a chance to catch up, and ensure that the benefits of technology work for all of us, not just the 1%.

Just started using Waterfox. Very happy with it so far. Not seeing that Gemini BS and scrolling past it while swearing has significantly reduced my stress levels. www.waterfox.com

I give this course's last lecture tomorrow but for technical reasons we had the end of course party today. Two students baked #AlgebraicGeometry cookies and I feel so loved.

Have wanted to paint with gouache like Alexander Calder and Sonia Delaunay for a couple years. Turns out fine art painters do paint wood with gouache, typically pentominoes. I just happened to a have set with 12 colors...12 pentominoes, kinda gotta do it.

👀 #ITeachPhysics

Words to thrive by -