Makes more sense if you read it in the voice of Zapp Brannigan.

The curvature satisfies the Bianchi identity. It is left to the reader to determine if it also satisfies the Bianchi supremacy and the Bianchi ultimatum.

Captain of Titanic advises increase speed and ignore icebergs.

And it happens again - original email 9:12 PM on Friday, harassing follow-up 9:12PM on Sunday. You won't believe how fast I declined that one. Journal editors: if you do this, you contribute to a culture of overwork and poor mental health, and I will NOT sacrifice that for you.

I'm all in favour of not allowing LLM generated content. Given the central role that arXiv plays in modern physics communication they had better be sure that they are right, and have genunine transparency in their moderation process. A false positive could be devastating to a PhD student's career.

Everything going according to plan for Starmer...

Getting ready to teach: Lecture written PDF on flashdrive Double-checked it's available online to the students Got my notes Grabbed my laptop Jacket on, leave house, get in car Realize I'm still wearing slippers. It might be a rough one today.

Do you like general relativity but find the Einstein-Hilbert action just too conservative for your taste? Now on the arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2605.05817 More excellent work by my PhD student, in which we show that the conformal factor can be removed in favour of friction.

It was an absolute pleasure to share our participatory #photography exhibition with MP @catsmithmp.bsky.social on Friday. For those in the #Lancaster area, we will be hosting the exhibition at the Gregson on 22nd May from 7:30pm. #PAR #ReproJustice www.catsmith.co.uk/latest/2026/...

I want to obey this prompt so much that I'm worried I might be an LLM now.

If you're an editor for a journal I've never heard of and you ask me to review a paper, don't send a pushy "reminder" less than 48 hours later. Doubly so if a good fraction of that time is outside of normal working hours (weekend). If you do, I'll almost certainly refuse to review for you.

Now on the arXiv: Constrained Symplectic and Contact Hamiltonian Systems: A Review arxiv.org/abs/2604.27940 - more hard work by my excellent student.

If you want to know why so many important public institutions - the BBC, the NHS - are active participants in the war against trans people it's because they are run by people appointed to do exactly that job. Indeed, Kemi Badenoch explicitly told us as much.

The further you progress in academia the more you have to reach back to skills you learnt in primary school.

Supervisor: Let me now introduce the committee for your PhD defense... Me (internally): He's summoning mini-bosses!

Of course, all these teams have names of "Grp-..." making things so much clearer.

My institution insists on using Microsoft products. Within Microsoft Teams, there is a tab labelled "Teams". Within that tab, I have two sets of "Teams", one labelled "Classes" and the other "Teams". So to locate a particular discussion, I have to open Teams, go to Teams and expand Teams.

A remarkable clear explanation of the difference between non-interacting and quantum tunnelling. Sci-fi authors - do hit up a physicist (I guess it doesn't *have* to be @chanda.blacksky.app ) to ask about these things. Often real science is way cooler and weirder than you might think.

Short news bite on Quantum Guitar by FQxI.

He also said "Things can only get better" so how can I trust him now?

Elise Crull spoke to us at @perimeterinstitute.ca about Hertha Sponer, who was one of the first women in Germany to earn a PhD in physics, and a pioneer of quantum chemistry.

I spent a small fortune on travel to and taking the GRE, application fees, etc. I begged academics for reference letters and had no idea what the hell to write in a "Personal statement". Result: rejection letters from almost everywhere I applied. I got two offers and no clues on how to choose.

Can't wait to share our participatory #Photography exhibition in #Lancaster @ the #Gregson on 22nd May 7:30-11:00 pm! The work is about #ReproductiveJustice in N. England by people w/lived experience of social inequity and representatives from community orgs. Details: gregson.co.uk/event/repron...

Also your goal to "develop and validate scalable indicators that can identify novelty in research" looks like you want just another way to boil complex research down to a number which will be gamed like every other index (Citation count, h-index etc) and contribute yet more bullshit to research.

Not a great sign that your metascience project will be able to access expert assessment when you match me to a research area nowhere near my own, based on a paper I didn't write.

Aswathy told us that her essay began with a number from a failed calculation... "I looked it up expecting nothing and found that independent biological systems - cortical columns, capillary networks, the developing embryo had been converging on it for millions of years."

In a two horse race, Keir Starmer's Labour came third.

If my PhD student/postdoc moves to a career they want after their work I consider it the same success as if they went on to another academic position. Colleagues who move into industry jobs are successes. Having a taboo on talking about leaving is a sign of a cult.

Super excited to read this essay which just won the @fqxi.org essay contest!! “How Quantum is the Skin? A Clinician’s Perspective on Life at the Nanoscale" Very much in convo with my essay The Physics of Melanin 🥹 🧪 qspace.fqxi.org/competitions...

Due to a blizzard, I had to give a talk via zoom from my hotel room. Guy in the next room: now is an excellent opportunity to practice my trombone!

Great article by Colin Stuart, interviewing David Wallace. Part of a series on academic journals over at @fqxi.org on QSpace.

The power of the kitchen timer is key to my ever getting work done. Time for research, time for non research work. One they hit their limits i can give myself time off without guilt.

Relief as England manage to scrape past a superior Italian side in the World Cup. ...The T20 Cricket World Cup

Meet the 8 winners of our "How Quantum is Life?" essay competition with Paradox Science Institute. $53,000 in prizes. And, as our Chief Scientific Officer David Sloan puts it, "a set of fantastic essays which give us insight into the nascent field of quantum biology."

This Valentine's Day, we'll be talking about life, not love. The winners of our 'How Quantum is Life?' competition are revealed 14 February. Who's going to share the $53,000 prize pot?

Whatever it is you think your society should be, this cannot be part of it.

As usual, @acollierastro.bsky.social nails this. I sometimes wonder what fraction of academia is now a closed loop of chatgpt setting assignments, completing them and then marking the results. Why not just close the loop entirely and we can all go home?

I'm endlessly amused by conservatives who think Star Trek isn't essentially a rebuttal of everything they believe.

Following coverage over the weekend of Sir Paul Nurse's comments that suggested that the only reason that a Fellow should be expelled from @royalsociety.org is scientific misconduct, I have written to him to explain the risks such an attitude poses of increasing sexual harassment in STEM.

Due to diminishing returns on increasing efficiency, the time taken to cut wood up into n pieces is O(log n).

I guess it's post your favourite Popcorn cover time: www.youtube.com/watch?v=O775...

Come on, Guardian, "McDonald's serves up slop" was right there... www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Your brain uses 20 watts of power constantly. This is a massive reproductive fitness cost. Why can natural selection not reduce that cost?

I'm hiring a postdoc -- come and do awesome cosmology with great people in one of the nicest cities in the world (not that I'm biased or anything) 🔭 🧪 cosmology.blogs.auckland.ac.nz/2025/12/12/p...

Last cosmology lecture today, so we had open questions. A student asked a question about quantum gravity...

Inverse challenge for the @zachweinersmith.bsky.social books: Divide by a hundred. A year of solitude

Can't wait to see who's gonna win the Nobel prize for football.

Finishing 2025 with a bang: arxiv.org/abs/2512.03645 Scaling symmetries can even reduce singular theories, like the standard model. Next stop: General Relativity!