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…

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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

“Add personality to your work with new editable shapes!” — Apple, fondly imagining that this prospect is so alluring that I will pay them A$19.99/month for “Creator Studio” when the current apps I have (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) work perfectly well.

I often find myself explaining something that is easy to take for granted, but should be evident: There is no reason why the program of Figuring Out Nature should proceed in time steps that are less than or comparable to the duration of one scientist’s career. (1/n)

“A newly married billionaire remains partially conscious during his long-awaited heart transplant and overhears details of a shocking plot against him.” So relatable.

Some light relief in dark times: “Witnesses reported a white Mitsubishi Triton was being driven on the beach, with a dog in the driver's seat and a man in the passenger seat. [Not OK because:] The Tasman Council's Dog Management Policy says dogs must be on a lead at all times on White Beach.”

"We're trying to compete with the big boys, and part of that is you've got to keep your content refreshed and new all of the time," Mr Hennessy said. Refreshed, new and hallucinated: tourists book trips to nonexistent hot springs. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

For crying out loud, ABC news, never send a line graph to do a bar chart’s job. Link: www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

When the crackpot DIY Theory of Everything spammers forget to fill in the blanks in their email templates: “I'm reaching out because your work in - particularly on - engages with fundamental questions that the U-Model addresses from a unique angle.”

“Keep, ancient lands, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your Oscars, your Tonys, your Grammys. Your Pulitzers and your Prime Time Emmys. Your Breakthrough Prizes. No one deserves a Breakthrough Prize like me. Just leave them all by the door on your way out.”

I think determinism is perfectly compatible with the kinds of free will worth wanting - those that underlie moral responsibility and such. It's a 'purely academic' issue, since our universe is not deterministic. But it helps clarify things. direct.mit.edu/books/book/4...

“Dialogue Boost” is described as an accessibility feature, and that’s fine with me, but honestly the sound mix is so bad in some movies that I bet 90% of people would welcome this even if they have no hearing difficulties in any other context. www.aboutamazon.com/news/enterta...

I really don't have the words. Sheila is a dear friend and I wish and her family all the best as she recovers. locusmag.com/2026/01/shei...

Chekhov: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off.” Ibsen: “Yeah, don’t worry, the guns have been fully telegraphed. My new rule is ‘Never bring the sole copy of a manuscript to a raucous party, unless it’s going to be in mortal danger.’”

Gravity is the curvature of spacetime. So, how curved is the spacetime we are in right now? Let’s start by looking at the effect of curvature in a very simple situation. Two meridians on a sphere, like the red and blue ones in the diagram, will come together and move apart …

I would never have guessed that the Antarctic ice so far inland was moving quite so fast! “The polar ice sheet is moving at a rate of roughly 10 m per year in a direction between 37° and 40° west of grid north, down towards the Weddell Sea.

LLM AI means you need more persistent experts and more sceptical generalists to spot fake stories like this www.platformer.news/fake-uber-ea.... It’s a metacognition issue of certainty and confidence.

Every Australian politician who has dragged their feet on emissions reductions is cordially invited to spend the upcoming 44°C day in Sydney’s western suburbs in a two-bedroom flat without air conditioning.

No need for a futuristic sci-fi take on What It’s Like To Be Grok, whether it can meaningfully apologize, anything like that. X is paying for synthetic revenge porn and CSAM at enormous scale because it amuses its insane king and appeases its sick users. The implementation details are irrelevant.

Of course They Might Be Giants have the perfect song to prepare you for 2026: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBCV...

Last year I wrote about a paper on the idea of black holes made purely from light, and why it doesn't seem possible. Now one of the proponents of the idea, Don Page, has argued that there are still circumstances in which they could happen. journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

Three movies I’m looking forward to in 2026. (The dates here are when they open in my home town, at Perth’s Luna Cinemas.) “No Other Choice” Jan 15 “The Secret Agent” Jan 22 “It Was Just An Accident” Jan 29

Chekhov would be ... pleased? #Pluribus

2025 Headline of the Year nominee (August)

My Christmas was just saved from being fairly dire by D. C. Stillson, inventor of the pipe wrench. My place is so old you can’t buy the square-plug tools for opening the drain access hatches anymore, but a pipe wrench did the trick, and now the kitchen sink ... empties again.

What are the minimum and maximum areas of an equilateral triangle inscribed in a unit square? (possibly use only simple algebra and geometry, no trigonometry, no calculus).

This is a cool result, but to me represents why the Turing model is actually the wrong physics model of computing. This is because it is serial, and so cannot deal with errors. I’ve written about this here dabacon.org/pontiff/2010...

In the 1960s, a group of New Jersey teenagers helped make computing personal... (An excerpt from my new book in IEEE Spectrum) spectrum.ieee.org/teenage-hack... #HistSci #computing #History 🗃️

In his opening speech America’s Chief Counsel Robert H. Jackson called the decision to have a trial “one of the most significant tributes that Power ever has paid to Reason.” That strikes a deep chord at a time when Power is trumping Reason in so many instances… His full speech:

I just got my annual COVID booster. The vaccine updated for LP.8.1 recently became available in Australia, so if you were waiting for that, now’s the time to get a pre-Christmas boost.

What surface arising naturally in physics is described by a degree-6 polynomial? There’s a whole family of them hiding in plain sight: x^2 – k^2 (x^2 + y^2 + z^2)^3 = 0 These are the surfaces of equal electrostatic potential for a dipole pointing along the x-axis!

Demo coded by my intern, exploring the results of a ~10yo simulation of the tree of life. A few glitches, and we took some artistic liberties in clustering and naming the species, but I'm glad to finally have something interactive out! lanasina.github.io/speciation/h...

If a mass of incompressible fluid is floating in space, subject only to its own gravity and centrifugal force, what shape will it adopt as its angular momentum is increased? Initially, it will form an oblate spheroid, with two equal semi-axes shorter than its axis of rotation.

The US social media vetting for visas will be devastating for scientific and journalistic conferences, fellowships etc. No global organisation can seriously consider holding an international conference in the US while this policy exists.

I see your “Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness” and raise you my “Journal of Earth and Flatness”