This spring I'm reviving Physics 306: Nuclear Physics and Technology. Everything from shell models to reactor neutronics. Last time (2021) we talked about AP1000s, ESBWRs, and doomed SMR startups. Times have changed! Would love advice about how to teach the latest fusion and SMR R&D. #nukesky ⚛️🎢

(getting unpacked into my new office) Once at SNOLab I picked up a piece of rock underground for a souvenir. (Or two?) And I think Harry Nelson brought me a rock from SURF once. Did I label them? Stupidly, no. @steve.mastodon.cooleysekula.net.ap.brid.gy could that be Sudbury norite lower left?

I switched offices. I scooted a lil' particleboard desk in, movers hauled a literal ton of Steelcase desks out. Are desks a material-culture sign of how long people expected enterprises to last? Steelcase was "It's 18-gauge so your nth successor in the same office can use it 70 years from now"

AQI map looks like a diseased brown dragon poised to swallow Cleveland

Reboot _Hunt for Red October_ so Vasily Borodin survives & give him a post-defection TV series. He farms rabbits in MT and AZ, tours the country in his RV solving problems with homespun Red Fleet wisdom. His CIA handlers scramble to prevent his arrest for bigamy. Dir. Natasha Lyonne. (RIP Sam Neill)

POLICEMAN: "Did you see what kind of car hit you?" INJURED PEDESTRIAN: "I saw no car. I was hit by an uncanny black void. A two-dimensional absence of light that grew, swallowed me, and un-disappeared." POLICEMAN: <into radio> "yeah I got a 10-57, hit-and-run, round up Anish Kapoor"

This federally-required training on Research Security is full of depressingly outdated facts like "a robust federal research program is vital to American economic and national security" and "researchers are accountable to taxpayers and Congress" 🧪

I want the "Save Shaker Lake" discourse (which I sympathize with parts of) to be aware that 17" is a storm that ODNR expects will destroy Class II dams, but requires Class I dams to pass safely. These events are real and ODNR's threshholds are not crazy overkill here in the anthropocene.

In Mieville's Perdido Street Station, a cast of prickly outcasts team up for fantasy-trope-standard Underdogs Discover Teamwork & Loyalty. At the very end, the sad, sympathetic Yagharek confesses his past includes a rape conviction ... and the team dumps him instantly! No regrets! It was great.

Good idea. Our national 256th comes up in 2032! America’s 100000000th birthday. Around here, we light candles on the birthday cake in binary. So that would be one lit candle, followed by eight dark candles. Happy ninth candle, America! 🇺🇸🎂

I propose MLB amend the rulebook to treat this case differently: if a fan catches a live ball after a throw from a fielder, it's still live. Put down your nachos and try to make the relay throw. Be a legend.

"Martin Puryear: Nexus" at the CMA is not to be missed, #cleveland folks. Open through 8/9. a) imagine dressing up as "Self" (1978) for Halloween b) the hardcover monograph is a steal in the gift shop at $65 c) see your old CMA buddy "Alien Huddle" (1993-95) again but with all its friends

Out today in Nature Microbiology: a paper that started in 2021 with an email from @sullivan-lab.bsky.social. Subject line: "Crazy ideas". www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/23

So long #LHC and thank you for all the collisions 👋 Today, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, comes to the end of an extraordinary chapter in its scientific journey. Find out more: home.cern/cern-bids-fa...

A.E. HOUSMAN: Now, of my threescore years and 10, 20 will not come again, And take from 70 springs a score, It only leaves me 50 more. And since to look at things in bloom 50 springs are little room ... FOSSIL FUELS: update your math! we traded some "springs" for "heat domes". stay hydrated!

The NHTSA standard for driver height and sightlines should be set at "Oshkosh NGDV or better".

lebensprawn

I took a day off work yesterday and spent 10 hours in the garden, getting 72 bare root trees planted and staked. The eventual goal: a three-season pollinator resource in the form of a South-of-England-inspired laid hedgerow! Using 100% Ohio native plants! Wish me luck!

incomprehensible pitcherspeak "I get a little bit too juiced up, so my miss is way worse with the four-seam on the outer half," Williams said. "With the seam-shift that I have on the sinker, I'm able to run it back -- where with the four-seam, I just pull it. It's an auto take every time."

(catching up on #guardsball) Patrick Bailey's line drive went straight behind Luis Curvelo and pegged him in the knee. Curvelo limped to the ball, threw to 1st off-target for the putout, and left the game injured. The official scorer ... charged Curvelo with his career-first fielding error! No.

I'm reading a trashy Icelandic crime novel. It features many flashbacks to characters' childhoods, including this spectacular scene where Tinna solves a math problem correctly:

Planning to be in Europe in July but in a bit of a pickle with Visa issues. I booked my return on 30 July, but my visit to CERN ends on the 17th. I need an official invitation for the interim. If anyone in Schengen lands would beinterested to host me at their uni bw July 20-29, send me a DM. ⚛️

(missed this when it first came out. v. impressive work) Q: "what beamline and detector technologies did you use to do this measurement?" A: "yes" "β-delayed proton pandemonium: A first detailed 31Cl(βpγ) 30P decay scheme" by Tamas Budner et. al. ⚛️ arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04456

People talk about how fast we're losing WWII veterans, but we're also losing the all-star cast of The Longest Day (1962). Surviving (per Wikipedia) actors played: 5 American privates (0 officers left) 1 British Chief Wren 1 French "Second-Maître" (a naval petty officer) 0 Germans

Trump has always been a mashup of all the awful salesman characters in Glengarry Glen Ross. Now he's also all of the awful customers: weakling Lingk who is fast-talked into a sale; and the broke, demented, useless Nyborgs, for whom pretending-to-enter-contracts is a weird form of attention seeking.

Most #waroncars "spend less on car infrastructure" talk focuses on highways. What about spending less repaving side streets? What if low-traffic residential streets were kept paved only in a 10' driving lane, with the side space (parking, aprons, occasional slow passing) downgraded to gravel? 1/

You know what's a real reading adventure in America in the year 2026? Imelda Marcos' Wikipedia bio.

Kwan scored on a wild pitch. Martinez scored on a sac fly. Ramirez stole second, stole third (challenged the on-field caught-stealing call), scored on a minor fielding error. Extremely #guardsball. (Did the Reds 3B coach waving Stewart around in the 5th (not even close) cost them the game?)

In this sci-fi-guided era, surely we want guidance from L Frank Baum's TikTok, the mechanical man "fit-ted with Smith & Tinker's Improved Combination Steel Brains", one of the first thinking machines in American literature. L. Frank Baum, what does Tik-Tok have to say about AI liability?

statehood for Memphis

compare/contrast

L. Frank Baum really really loved using the word "meat" adjectivally and I have to bring this to your attention. Here is a meat thread of some of L Frank Baum's meat mentions: 🧵

SAUDI ROYAL INVESTMENT OFFICER: 3AM and someone is offering $920M in oil shorts? sounds like a losing bet SAUDI ROYAL BRIBERY OFFICER: Sure does. Tell me, where is the flowerpot on Jared Kushner's balcony? INVESTMENT: ... it's on the left? BRIBERY: Buy the shorts and charge the losses to my office

I clicked over to MiLB to check in on former #guardsball player Big Christmas. After 24 games with the AAA Norfolk Tides he's slashing .128/.211/.478 so I would like to regretfully withdraw this statement

also notable: literally the only use of the word "pilcrow" in a full-text search of the arxiv

Today on arxiv, a paper I am SUPER EXCITED ABOUT that hopefully represents the starting point for a lot of future work. Deep in the weeds of detector instrumentation (i.e. my happy place) and learning totally methods from way outside my training (also my happy place). 🧪⚛️🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2604.27027

Tomorrow I will be skeeting about a new and exciting preprint. Tonight I want to prepare you for most complicated LaTeX I have ever produced. Custom chemfig multirow label spacing macros! Handcrafted tikz! Table column spacing magic from before the dawn of time (*stackexchange)!

five seconds after clicking "submit" on the arxiv I noticed I used a dumb latex macro in the article title

My post-gerrymandering idea is to change how Congress does roll call votes. Brown D OH-11? "Aye" Turner R OH-10? "Nay" Miller R OH-7? "Nay" the measure fails 2-1 What if we weight the rollcall by popular vote win? Brown? +40.94. Turner? -23.04. Miller? -10.98. The measure passes 40.94 to 34.02

Want to do a PhD combining AI with sustainability challenges? I have funding. Please forward to anyone frozen out of the job market. Thanks! ucl-epsrc-dtp.github.io/2026-27-proj...

This administrative change is so stupid, so negative, and so destructive of the proposers' time and effort (on top of the already-sketchy Genesis NOFO) it smells to me like a DOGE-level appointee is trying to destroy science infrastructure without technically impounding any appropriated money.

I worked on this experiment for more than a decade and never noticed that the bird’s beak is a greek letter nu 🧪⚛️

happy grad admissions committee panic day to all who celebrate cgsnet.org/resources/fo...

Other universities have hyperbolically-titled excellence initiatives but KIT has the

TIL that MLB's Statcast analytics package has data on batters' stances, making possible this ridiculous deep dive into Chase DeLauter's left foot. (Actually I am curious about his follow-through; doesn't it seem shorter than everyone else's?) #guardsball www.mlb.com/guardians/ne...

TIL: American Science and Surplus shut down their mailorder business. (Brick-and-mortar still alive!) Heartfelt thanks to all their catalog illustrators and copyeditors over the decades; as a wannabe-tinkerer kid stuck at home in the 90s your work was a joy to read and a spark to the imagination.

Solar is INSTALLED and WIRED and PERMITTED and INTERCONNECT APPLICATION APPROVED and INSPECTED and BIDIRECTIONAL METERED and as of today is ACTUALLY SWITCHED ON LETS GO

Trump just wants to destroy agencies. First he tried CLAWING BACK their appropriations and the courts said no; he tried IMPOUNDING and the courts said no; he bullied Congress to CUT appropriations and they said no; now he's ordering agencies to MISSPEND appropriated money solely to wreck themselves

I give little mini-lectures during my advanced lab course. Today I wanted to pull up some published examples of different approaches to systematic error analysis and reporting. Here's what I came up with but would love to hear other fun examples from the 🧪⚛️🎢 sky: 1/

sitting around the TV watching a space launch with the family and definitely tensed up at the 73 second mark