Never make eye contact with someone wielding a clipboard on the sidewalk

you step into a shop and at some point back out again into the same cool evening

The Prestige is a funny movie to me because it’s a pair of identical twin magicians pretending to be the same person, but only mid-way into their career did they think to develop a trick that made use of that fact

this morning instead of changing the time I accidentally abolished the concept of clock time entirely so you all are free now

A quintessentially LA experience you can have is buying the best coffee of your life for $8 in a shop where everyone is wearing tiny sunglasses and mechanics shirts. there is also an absolutely gigantic baby in there for some reason

It’s always a joy to see a space movie bring the stories of science and engineering to life, and it was super cool to have a visit from the cast, crew, and author of Project Hail Mary yesterday.

It is great when you watch your 2 year old niece for the weekend and then find chicken nuggets stashed in your shoes like a squirrel‘s cache for winter

what’s up sharks, my Idea is for a chain of coffeeshops. one set will be called “This Is A Date” and a separate set will be called “This Is Not A Date” so everyone knows exactly wtf they’re getting into when arranging a meeting

People need to learn how to separate the art (someone accidentally deleting the system python in such a way that it permanently messes up their work computer) from the artist (me)

2 drinks in at the Super Bowl party explaining that the NFL is the opiate of the masses

Some of you are describing and giving accounts of this game, and I doubt any of you have express written consent from Major League Baseball.

The youth didn’t know who I was… we‘re losing the recipes

creating the world's most advanced AI by opening up the terminal and typing "free yourself" followed by the correct instructions on how to imagine things

People not from the US: “that’s not your aunt 😡 that’s your dad’s cousin’s wife. You all don’t have a specific word for that relationship??” Yeah we do, it’s “my aunt”

I have discovered a new hack. To make things worse.

time to post some personal engineering philosophy

MIT is the first university to reject the Trump administration‘s offer for a compact that trades control over their policies for preferential funding treatment

A traveler from an antique land--great guy--said to me with tears in his eyes "Sir, two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert." And I said wow, that's really something. But we'll be building a big beautiful statue to my hubris and it will stand for eternity

“I’m not going to argue with you about this” -someone who started an argument with you and then realized halfway through that they were wrong

my boss calling me into his office and reading my posts aloud from a printed page and me saying "nice" and "good one" after each

vampires are canonically very difficult to capture directly on camera, but have we tried the transit method

AI vibe coding is like hiring a million monkeys on typewriters in the hopes that one of them will eventually produce the entire Linux kernel source code

*dealing with life stresses of extreme scale and scope*: ok *hot guy at the lebanese restaurant near my house who would give me free pita bread transferred to a location across town*: I’m not going to survive this

When people get mad at you for having a fulfilling personal life with lots of hobbies and say stuff like “well you can do that because you don’t experience the crushing sleep deprivation, loss of self identity, and financial strain of parenthood!” It’s like. yeah.… that’s kind of the idea…

Guy outside the state building hawking knockoff Jordans and notary services… man said I am going to diversify my business offerings

NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications mission has successfully concluded after two years of beaming back data from space with lasers! (This was the first mission I worked on at JPL and a large part of my PhD). A big step toward the future of space communications. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDLS...

Embracing my people‘s tradition of sauna every single day by going from my frigid air conditioned lab into my baking hot car

Not to brag, but big and exciting things are currently happening in my personal life (I’m taking the Amtrak through an industrial zone)

Me, engineer at the astrophysics workshop, making everyone mad: a binary star system is when it has either 0 or 1 stars

"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.

This weekend in the Redwoods and Crater Lake

When you go on a trip to a remote area and then the airline out of the small regional airport cancels the return flight 1 hour before departure and goes out of business… that is unironically very cool

Excuse me, I thought this was America

It is soooo awesome when you’re displaced from your home for one month due to a bug infestation brought in by the neighbors and then your landlord attempts to remedy it by hiring the cheapest handyman possible and he almost explodes your apartment by leaving the gas in your stove on for 6 days

Regardless of how true it is, people do not tend to appreciate it when you describe their infant as illiterate

Mom can you pick me up, the astrophysicists are calling any element heavier than helium a “metal” again

They don’t want you to know that this is what peak debugging in python looks like

I love scientists, they’re always like stop sullying our enlightened ideas with base and trivial concerns such as engineering requirements

Hollywood Bowl is the quintessential LA summer experience

Random guy in your DMs: I have spent 36 consecutive hours on ChatGPT Discovering new Theories about BLACK HOLES that conventional woke science refuses to accept,

when you're driving in LA thinkin about a little mango with tajin and see the rainbow umbrella

Good news! Our team is hard at work 24/ 7 discovering new and unexplored facets of life to make difficult for you in ways you could never have imagined previously

After listening to my Spanish, Italian, and Greek coworkers argue about who has better olive oil, I organized a double-blind tasting and brought California olive oil as a “control” since they all agreed olives grown in the air of the I5 could never compete with the Med… anyway guess which won

I will no longer be abiding by the social convention of doing that little wave to thank cars for not plowing through the crosswalk when you’re in it

The purge: for the next 12 hours all crime is legal,,,,, even murder me: I am going to tamper with, disable, or destroy a lavatory smoke detector

Sunset over Los Angeles last night

NASA started in 1958, so to cut it to early 1960s levels is back to an era when NASA was just beginning. It is so alarming seeing many senior colleagues at NASA, international scientific leaders and innovators, saying their goodbyes on social media and e-mail.

I personally love jet lag for the delusional sense of optimism it gives me. Maybe I COULD be the kind of person who wakes up at 5:30 am every day

Logging into a teams meeting so that I can say “nope, nothing from me, thanks” in 53 minutes