“My patient is refusing a drug studied in 170,000 people because of side effects that a 124,000-person analysis just confirmed do not exist — while injecting a compound studied in 14 humans, from unregulated sources, based on the recommendation of someone who profits from selling it.”

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

I haven’t eaten liquorice for ages, but when I read “You should not eat large amounts of liquorice while taking this medication” … (a) I had a sudden craving for liquorice (b) it turns out probably *no one* should eat *large* amounts: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

In 3D Euclidean space, the surface equidistant from a point is a sphere, with constant curvature. In (2+1)-dimensional Minkowski spacetime, the equidistant surface is a (1+1)-dimensional de Sitter spacetime, which also has constant curvature.

In 3D Euclidean space, the surface equidistant from a point is a sphere, with constant curvature. In (2+1)-dimensional Minkowski spacetime, the equidistant surface is a (1+1)-dimensional de Sitter spacetime, which also has constant curvature.

An extremely good article on the horrific bombing of the primary school in Minab that puts it in the context of both the wider history and the recent technological acceleration of the error-prone process of military “targeting”. www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ma...

Those staff layoffs and vibe coding seem to be really working out for Amazon ...

Preview our new album right here: Sleep's Older Sister. www.youtube.com/watch?v=75-1...

This image (from www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/Elli...) sums up for me (roughly, intuitively) why there is SO(4) symmetry for orbits: the two equal-sized vectors A and B can be rotated *independently* while preserving the semi-major axis, and hence the energy, of a Kepler orbit. And so(3)+so(3) = so(4).

"this is like a bookstore ripping the covers off the books it puts on display and changing their titles" www.theverge.com/tech/896490/...

“AI demanded answer should be ‘Ne’ (honorifics for yes) or ‘Aniyo’ (honorifics for no). When a customer reached a human consultant, he expressed anger, saying ‘why do I need to say honorifics to a machine,’” she said. Interesting long read here. www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/s...

Antimatter Trucker is finally a job title! But don’t worry, this isn’t going to be “The Wages of Fear, 2026”: “The device on Cern’s truck will carry about 1,000 antimatter particles, weighing about a billionth of a trillionth of a gram. …

"AI" is not a stochastic parrot.🦜 I wrote this piece a couple weeks ago, but it was hard for me to finish up given AI's role in society and war over the past few weeks. I should share it at some point though. Not perfect, but here it is. medium.com/@margarmitch...

Doctor: I’m not sure what’s going on. Me: So, time to send Olivia Wilde and Kal Penn to break into my house to search for drugs, toxins and mould, while gossiping about their colleagues’ sex lives? Doctor: Nah. I think we’ll do a bone marrow biopsy. Me: It was worth a try.

I spent 4 months trying to answer a simple question: has this book been translated into my language? Turns out no one tracks this. Not ISBN registries. Not Amazon. Not Google. Not libraries. So I built a tool that crosses four databases to piece it together. zenodot.app

I’ve yet to watch “Dark Winds”, but since 2 seasons just popped up on Netflix in Australia, a reminder to Australian viewers that it is also available streaming free on SBSOnDemand, who have 3 seasons, and SBS deserve the ad revenue more than Netflix.

A new collection of my stories in Korean 잠과 영혼, East Asia Publishing, Seoul, 2026. Translated by Kim Sang-hoon. ISBN13 979-1193078808 Contents: “Crystal Nights” / “크리스털의 밤” “This Is Not the Way Home” / “고향으로 돌아가는 길” “You and Whose Army?” / “너 혼자서?” “Dream Factory” / “꿈 공장”

From gamma decay to photon rockets Suppose an atomic nucleus with mass m₁ emits a gamma ray and ends up with mass m₂. How fast does the nucleus recoil? In units where the speed of light is 1, the time and space components of the energy-momentum vectors are:

“The Sticky” is a preposterous, hugely enjoyable Fargo-esque crime caper, with Margo Martindale in overdrive, a cameo by Jamie Lee Curtis, and the Fort Knox of maple syrup.

Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Last week, for the first time in 20 years, a man died from a treatable snake bite on my home island of Martinique. He had asked chatGPT what to do instead of going the hospital. He missed the 6 hours treatable window.

In the Boston Globe behind a paywall. As I undertand it a *physicist* derides me as out of touch for not worrying superintelligent AI is going to kill us all. I'm not worried because we are nowhere near close to even human level. But black holes, they worry me! www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/24/b...

It’s just crushing to watch an actor of Idris Elba’s calibre deliver a look of utter desolation to the camera, as it dawns on him that the plot of Hijack Season 2 is at least a hundredfold less believable than Season 1.

Tomorrow I will be taking a drug to slow down my heart sufficiently for it to be imaged in a CT scan, which seems like the ideal opportunity to also cheat at snooker.

Just to be clear (because I've had questions): *** We are currently open to submissions. ***

Along the world line of a massive particle, we can talk about the “proper time” that would be measured by a clock at rest with respect to that particle. Along the world line of a photon, the spacetime interval between events is zero.

A nice summary of the state of the art in indirect detection of cosmic background neutrinos by @startswithabang.bsky.social (bigthink.com/starts-with-...), a useful supplement to a recent discussion on @dandkuniverse.bsky.social In my SF story “Didicosm” the protagonist used indirect neutrino …

Echocardiograms are so expensive that I really think they should offer a 30 percent discount if they fail to locate an alien chest-burster.

This is no way to run a regulatory agency:

Good morning. For everyone who wants to get a better gander at the cover of our new album, The World Is To Dig, here you go. The painting is Yosemite Valley after Thomas Hill, circa 1882. Song titles included! Arrives April 14.

I know some people are keen on buying their eBooks from Bookshop dot org, so I’m happy to announce that almost* all my self-published DRM-free eBooks are now available there. * Except for DICHRONAUTS; the US rights are held by Night Shade so my own edition can only be sold outside North America.

“It Was Just An Accident” was powerful, tightly focused on its central quandary but still humanly messy. Maybe “Death and the Maiden” was first to ask “What if you meet your torturer?” — but sadly the world has more than enough barbarity to justify another version of this story.

Next pandemic is gonna be lit 🔥 We’ll all be chugging protein drinks and swallowing deworming tablets and talking about “that which cannot be named” while our social media feeds tell us that anyone who died did not do enough push-ups…

It's time for your periodic reminder that we count on subscriptions to keep the lights on. clarkesworldmagazine.com/subscribe/ Thank you.

Imagine! I mean, imagine how hard it is for a quadratic equation to understand itself! Imagine how hard it is for that statement to have any meaning whatsoever!

I very much enjoyed “The Secret Agent”. It reminded me of “Once Upon A Time in Anatolia’’, in the sense it created of being immersed in a very specific time, place and culture, while the flash-forwards expanded the scope and gave everything an eerie poignancy.

Hear the brand new track from our upcoming album The World is To Dig. The song is Wu-Tang. Arrives in April.... and get your own free download of it right now at TMBGshop. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io63...

Both of these Quanta articles describe fascinating mathematical developments — but they also come with encouraging human stories of the ultimate success of persistence over decades by individual mathematicians, fresh collaborations that reignite dormant ideas, and connections to work from long ago.

Dear MacOS developers How about you stop uglifying the icons and start disambiguating multiple folders with the same name in the Finder’s Go > Recent Folders menu. Maybe include enough of the end of each path so that every item becomes distinct?

Welcome, piles of slop filling up the journals with clouds of useless wordy garbage. Case in point:

In special relativity, observers in relative motion will disagree about various measurements. But if Alice draws any planar figure, and fires a simultaneous pulse of light from each point on it, perpendicular to the plane, any observer will agree on the figure’s shape and size.

I’m sure the writers of “Death By Lightning” know exactly what they’re doing with the anachronistic dialog: endless F-words, “quality time”, “crash and burn” etc. It’s fun, in a West Wing With Beards way. But it still makes me nervous about trusting them on any of the history.

Today in the supermarket I scanned 2 packs of flour … and one of them was listed on the receipt as frozen raspberries. So that must have been a genuine barcode misread, rather than just incorrect data in a product database. The barcodes looked fine, so maybe the reader glitched.

FYI @profgalloway.com: a paper in the journal of a major US professional society for computer scientists: “Against Imaginary Friends: Why Digital Companions Are No Solution to Social Isolation” by Robert Sparrow & James Brown. Published with a 5 minute video overview. cacm.acm.org/research/aga...

"Among the hires at CBS News announced by Weiss is a doctor who claims he reduced his biological age by 20 years with cold plunges; that cod liver oil treats autism; and that Alzheimer’s and dementia can be reversed with supplements he sells on his online store." www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Just rewatched “The Wages of Fear”, which suited the ambience on a 37C day. I last saw it 40 years ago, and I’d forgotten everything but the overall premise, so it was every bit as jaw-dropping as if I was watching for the first time. 4.9/5 stars, with -0.1 for the very end.

Two pairs of ants set off from the same starting point, walking side-by-side. One pair takes the red path, the other pair takes the blue path. The red and blue paths are geodesics (the straightest possible paths, like great circles on a sphere) …

“Can a time capsule outlast geology? A ridiculous but instructive thought experiment involving deep time, plate tectonics, erosion and the slow death of the sun” This is hugely enjoyable! The subheading is exactly right: don’t take the premise seriously, just go along for the ride.

So there you have it: AlphaGenome is a great start, and will surely be a valuable tool. Whether it will lead to clinical advances remains to be seen. Its applicability will be limited by its very nature. And we still need to do the basic science. 32/32