“I spent three nights and three days in federal custody. During that time, I was never told what I was charged with, was not allowed to shower despite being covered in tear gas and pepper spray, had no phone call to my family, and no access to an attorney.” - George Retes, U.S. citizen and veteran.

I’m horrified to hear that two people were kidnapped by ICE in Evanston this morning. There’s a protest at Home Depot shortly. We’ll be delivering water and supplies to protesters — I hope you’ll join us in standing with our community.

Congratulations to all the runners today at the Chicago Marathon! I hope you’re taking a moment after crossing the finish line and enjoying all that the best big city in the nation has to offer.

5k run my time more by 2min than earlier PR but happy to get off the couch and role model for family #srvef

What you should know about the OpenAI-AMD deal. Plus: Holiday spending, regional banking, and fancy butter. Today on Marketplace 👇

gift link - no paywall. very much worth reading: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

More flux and (momentary, provisional) adhesions. Here’s a Wallace Stevens (b. 2 October 1879) poem I think about with an alarming frequency, a tiny stay in this “always incipient cosmos”:

Crying because my sister just texted to say my nephew, going on 6, told his class he wants to be a scientist, just made a Mars rover out of recycling unprompted at home, and told her his favorite animal is a wolf and his favorite book, too. All inspired by his Aunt Katie. 😭🥹❤️

IBM releases open-weight of Granite 4.0: hyper-efficient, high performance hybrid models for enterprise, which features a new hybrid Mamba/transformer architecture that greatly reduces memory requirements without sacrificing performance. Granite 4.0 collection:

Just realized these Fourier Transformers (AI/ML) are changing the way of applying modeling in optics- basically model all the spatial fields or frequencies as an embedding dimension and use attention mechanism as a tight-binding model. #photonics #modeling #ai/ml 🧪

Here's Resonate DDH DIPA from LongLive Beerworks in Boston. It’s solid, with a melonesque fruit profile and some earthiness, but nothing grabs you as very distinctive. It’s the base new model at the NEIPA dealership with no options. Still drives well enough, but nothing fancy. #BeerSky #BskyBeer

Google present an approach for transforming textbooks into more personalized and interactive versions, while still keeping the content accurate and high-quality, which they call it as "Learn Your Way".

Let's be clear: no one should be taking medical advice from the man who told Americans to inject bleach. To moms worried about the Tylenol they took while pregnant: you deserve better than being RFK Jr's scapegoat. And to the autism community: you are loved exactly as you are.

This is actually GROTESQUE. Human Resources use AI to process job applications, so people use ChatGPT to write them, then HR uses AI to filter AI applications. Effect? You spend 10 weeks average looking for a job. Pure algorithmic hell - robots rejecting robots while humans barely survive.

𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐎𝐍𝐄? 𝐓𝐑𝐘 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑶𝑵𝑳𝒀 𝑶𝑵𝑬 ✨ 👑 2020 👑 2022 👑 2024 👑 2025 A'ja Wilson is the first-ever player to win 4 M’VP's in WNBA history.

Best glory I’ve ever seen from a plane! It’s an optical phenomenon that occurs when light interacts in and around tiny droplets of water in the clouds, in the direction opposite the sun. More complex than a rainbow. Here’s a link to some more info: www.zmescience.com/science/phys... #optics #physics

Guess what America? Even with RFK's harmful misinformation and mismanagement of CDC, 76% of you can get vaxed because you're overweight BMI > 25. Thank you CVS for publishing your vaccine availability. www.axios.com/2025/08/29/c.... CDC's risk factors for severe CoVID: www.cdc.gov/covid/risk-f...

The mother of one of the Annunciation mass shooting survivors called for action on Thursday afternoon. Daughter Vivian St. Clair was shot multiple times during mass at Annunciation Catholic Church. Twice in the back and once in the arm. She was one of 21 people injured during the Aug. 27 shooting.

Never ask a man his age, a woman her salary, or GPT-5 whether a seahorse emoji exists

Federal officials have agreed to restore health- and science-related webpages and data following a lawsuit settlement with doctors' groups and other organizations who sued.

The guy literally took a crown jewel of world health, a place where we were leaders and making a real difference, and destroyed it to satisfy his favorite conspiracy theories.

We need an HHS Secretary who respects science and does not make policy based on conspiracy theories. Vaccines are safe and effective. Kennedy is threatening the health of our kids and all Americans. He must resign.

You heard— the West Coast is forming a health alliance to defend vaccines and save lives. Florida’s big move? Eliminating vaccine mandates and calling it “freedom.” 📌 NOTE TO ALL: Deadly viruses don’t care about state lines.

We the people are the job creators who keep showing up and making America great right now!

First Bernie Sanders. Then the CDC directors. Now, more than 1,000 current and former HHS staffers are demanding he step down.

Warnock to RFK jr: "For the first time, we are seeing deaths of children from measles. We haven't seen that in two decades. We're seeing that under your watch. You are a hazard to the health of the American people."

I’ve realized something recently. While a country’s cuisine naturally evolves over time, the food traditions in immigrant communities often remain frozen in the era when people first migrated. This creates differences.

Thank you on this labor day!!

I am 76 & I have had most of these vaccinations at one time or another. Also vaccinations against Covid, Tetanus, plus Cholera & Yellow Fever when travelling in foreign countries. These prevented me catching horrible diseases & dying a gruesome death. They did not harm me, they protected me!

If you enjoy… Weekends Safe working conditions Retirement benefits Paid vacations Breaks at work Sick leave Paid holidays … then you’re part of the labor movement. Happy Labor Day.

Science is real

Do all living things have a brain? 🧠 Not all. Some animals lack nervous systems (like sponges), while others (like jellyfish) have simple ones with no brain. Brains evolved over 500M years for coordination and complex behaviors. Vertebrates & cephalopods evolved brains independently. 🧪

Beavers pause while chewing trees to listen for movements so that the tree doesn't fall on them.

my father-in-law is a “I know a guy” Guy. sadly all the old Guys are aging out of the Guy Economy. Guys are fundamentally incompatible with Hustle Culture because it’s not about “winning” a deal, it’s about collecting favors and goodwill in a mutually-beneficial cycle. protect your local Guy Economy

Putting the military on the street will lower crime. It does in North Korea, did in Nazi Germany, and in the book 1984. The question isn’t will it lower crime. The question is do we want to be a nation governed like this. Until 6 minutes ago the GOP believed in LOCAL control.

Happy to share to #photonicssky I'm now a senior member of Optica society class of 2025 !

Four puppies cuddling. Pompey, 1 century CE.

Photonics - Got a paper accepted as poster for FiO 2025 conference on computing the orthogonal mode fields quickly. Key insight is based on fact to use polynomial recurrences not as is but project the recurrence as a field recurrence and solving it beyond catastrophic cancels #photonicssky 🧪

#photonicssky 🧪 Ph.D. student positions

New crochet series finished! 🧶 Wave, Sunset, Meadow Coral reef? Seed pods? Alien blobs? It’s in the eye of the beholder. I just wanted to play with color gradients. Each piece is 5x5”, made of 150-200 individual elements, crocheted from embroidery thread on a 1.25 mm hook and sewn onto canvas.

I bet pinning down that history was tough 😅

S. Chandrasekhar's contribution to Science #astronomy pubs.aip.org/physicstoday... #PhysicsSky 🧪

Women in Quantum History #PhysicsSky 🧪 pubs.aip.org/physicstoday...

For every idiot like Ted Cruz, Bill Ackerman and Josh Hawley you find at Harvard, there are people like Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, a 1st generation American who finished with a 5.0 at MIT and got her doctoral degree in theoretical physics at Harvard. Many people call her the next Einstein.

In new work, researchers created a highly tunable integrated Pockels laser that is compact enough to fit on a chip, powerful, ultrafast and relatively cheap to make. Read the OPN story: bit.ly/44wX98c #laser #technology 💡⚛️🧪

The wealthy are never stripped of their rights, never told to work harder or not have children, never told to be grateful or that they should cut back, never chased by the police over their actions, they are never held accountable & they never pay their fair share. #TaxTheRich