Exactly - I always say that the most important thing about a degree isn't memorising things, it's learning how to learn. I don't use most of what I learnt in my astronomy degree on a day to day basis, even as a professional astronomer. But the independence & learning skills I gained are essential.

This was necessary (we actually had this as an item of concern during the deliberation on the European Strategy Update for Particle Physics). Preservation of knowledge by independent entities becomes more and more crucial. Thanks @arxiv.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...

I want to share this memorable piece by @therezalangeler.bsky.social that taught me about Anda Kerkhove, famous Groningen pacifist, and that provides an important reflection on the role of universities as promotors of Peace in the 71st anniversary of her death www.rug.nl/about-ug/org...

Good sleep hygiene is necessary for brain health! We spend one-third of our lives sleeping, so it’s crucial to understand how it impacts the brain and how we function. #BrainAwarenessWeek #BrainWeek #SciArt #Sleep

On the topic of universities and sustainability, there are also an interesting report and a manifesto from the Dutch young academy: www.dejongeakademie.nl/en/publicati...

Fresh out of @rug.nl University Council. The improvements in sustainability since 2012, with recycling effors, cutting our CO2 emissions (already in half!), reducing heat, water and electricity waste, ended up resulting in 18 millions in savings. Sustainable ≠ more expensive

"partnerships [between uni and tech] are often presented as innovations in education[...] However, beneath this narrative lies a fundamental question about institutional autonomy and the terms on which universities engage with proprietary AI systems." Link to PDF: www.csee-etuce.org/en/item/7245...

As it did four years ago, the international mathematics community faces a clear choice about what its highest values and aspirations mean. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

My books cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com

Jeremy Avigad has a very intersting and thought-provoking article on how the role of mathematicians is changing and how we should lead the change to avoid being swept away. Very interesting (and a big rabbit hole that led me reading and thinking for the past two hours) arxiv.org/html/2603.03...

Fantastic book!i am so looking forward to the movie 😁

Not sure if I should be happy or worried. In any case I whish arXiv and the poeple working on it all the best. It is an incredible service to science

arXiv is being spun out from Cornell University and is looking for an inaugural CEO. jobs.chronicle.com/job/37961678...

Came across this essay this morning and think it is worth sharing. We can not talk enough about the achievements of all the great women out there! arxiv.org/abs/2603.09077 Celebrating Women in Mathematics by Diana T. Stoeva #math #academicChater #womeninStem #womenInHistory #mathsky

I hate that since the advent of ChatGPT I cannot use em dash’s without being accused to be a machine. This fun sketchplanation made me think about it again :( Source: open.substack.com/pub/sketchpl...

⚗️🔭 How do we spark new scientific discoveries? Why do some breakthroughs seem accidental? The new book 'The Engine of Scientific Discovery' by CPNSS Research Associate Alexander Krauss is for anyone who wants to understand how we make discoveries. ➡ Link to the book: doi.org/10.1093/oso/...

Superconductors are fascinating #quantum systems: they power real-world technologies and still remain at the cutting edge of physics more than a century after their discovery. Curious about what are next big topics in superconductivity? Then check out our video!👇 www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qie...

It is absolutely insane that the US appears to have targeted desalination plants first – putting them onto the board. Iran seems to have already retaliated against one in Bahrain. This is one of the most obvious ways this could spiral.

“This was not a thoughtful, phased development. It was an industrial surge imposed on our residential community.”

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If you are in Groningen, don’t miss tomorrow’s #YAGPubLectures! Focus is on the brain, with Gido van de Ven on "Forgetting in brains and machines" and Jamal Williams on "Music-evoked memory reactivation and its effects on later retrieval." As usual we will start at 17.00 at Vin Natuur!

This is brilliant: the enshittificator. A video on our internet and a plan to work for changing it vimeo.com/1168468796

Illustration from Tove Jansson's book 'The Moomins and the Great Flood' (1945) #Womensart

More on that footnote: bsky.app/profile/sust...

Clear message from the Trump regime to European clients* dependent on US tech companies: those will be brought under control. *) like the Dutch tax authority preparing to outsource all of its VAT collection.

Odido refused to pay a ransom for the information and the hacker group, known as Shinyhunters, is now publishing the info from millions of present and past customers online.

Hey, season 3 of It's Not Just Numbers is back! Tune in for the first two episodes of the year. Last in the row, an episode on study associations creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/... #mathSky

What better than looking back to a 9 year old mistake for a train trip? I think, after all, it turned into a quite fun blog post: www.mseri.me/fixing-an-in...

Ghosts of the tenement: a satirical cartoon from a 1901 edition of 'Puck'. #PhantomsFriday #Victorian #satire #illustration #artsky

Okay but can we all agree ChatGpt must be incredibly shitty if the War department is holding a gun to Anthropic’s head and saying misalign your AI. OpenAI would do it for free.

It could not be better than what it is… The producer built an API with zero device ownership verification, so any valid token works for any unit on the planet: www.popsci.com/technology/r... #security #epicfail #enshittification

Next academic year's teaching will consist of group conversations around a fireplace, with a glass of cognac.

#NS I can live with delays for random disruptions, but at least don’t fool us. After a substantial delay, we have been sent to wait for phantom replacement buses for 1h only to be sent to the next train in 30 min because it should go…

Dopolavoro Matematico lancia un progetto di ascolto di storie matematiche! https://maddmaths.simai.eu/comunicare/dopolavoro-matematico-storie-matematiche/

'I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.' - Joanna Maciejewska. Cartoon by Tjeerd Royaards. Source: open.substack.com/pub/cmdailyc...

Read our open letter to the Board on governance and faculty mergers. The Board likes to say there is no alternative. That leaves us with no alternative but to vote "no".

People talk about this stuff in terms of how much it'll suck for gaming and I hate to inform you how many MRI machines, X-Rays, all sorts of other vital machinery are just a Windows IoT Edition PC in a beige plastic box with a big magnet/accelerator/whatever attached.

Het college van bestuur neemt binnenkort een voorlopig besluit over de fusieplannen voor faculteiten. De Wetenschapsfractie in de universiteitsraad bepleit in een open brief een tussenweg; er zijn meer manieren denkbaar om de RUG minder bureaucratisch te maken. ukrant.nl/er-is-te-vee...

This week: Second conference of the #illustratingMath trimester at Institut Henri Poincaré, titled "Bridging visualization and understanding in Geometry and Topology." Talks are by Hugo Parlier, Érika Roldán, and yours truly. Play with Hugo's app here: quadratis.app/playPuzzle.h... (1/2)

See those two dots with arrows pointing to them? They're giant gas planets orbiting their star, located 307 lightyears away. These are directly imaged exoplanets.

The Mathematics of Everyday Life from sketchplanations open.substack.com/pub/sketchpl...

A good thread on what happens when you use an LLM. I see this same pattern with my students. They spend all their time futzing with the prompt to get a slightly different but still not totally correct answer and no time on the actual learning.

Sounds familiar…

If you have 18 min to spare, this interview is worth all of them. It contains many interesting refelctions that often go hungeard in the current noise of the hype

I really enjoyed this interview with Mihingarangi Forbes. In 20 minutes we managed to touch on numerous issues relating to how AI is changing society, issues I've been grappling daily in conversations with colleagues here in New Zealand.

Full comic here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/script... #smbc

Today I discovered visualframeworks.com A bazillion of free visual cards to promote visual thinking. Very cool

Dus, #odido, je vertelt me dat al mijn belangrijkste persoonlijke gegevens gestolen zijn. En mensen vragen me nog steeds waarom ik geïrriteerd raak van het geven van persoonlijke gegevens aan techbedrijven…

Forecast annual electricity consumption of a new data centre being built in Lelystad: 753 gigawatt hours Current annual electricity consumption of all people and businesses in Lelystad: 402 gigawatt hours 🤯 www.nu.nl/klimaat/6385...