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”

My dad got shingles two years ago and is still recovering. Sometimes just sitting activates the nerve pain. Get your shingles vaccine!

“I brought this horrid creature into the world, and now I must take him out!” Winfrey said

This entire story is just… 🤯 #giftarticle www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/u...

New article inspired by the recent hoopla surrounding Karen Hao's book (re: water use). I argue that "no one should look to the EA community as exemplifying good habits of epistemic and moral conduct." Here's why: www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/how-effect...

We've been regularly receiving variations on this scam for weeks now. Sometimes 2-3 in a day. Today is special though. It's only 1:15 PM and I already have 18, each for a different issue of Clarkesworld. It's likely that there are more in my spam folder.

Great writeup from @startswithabang.bsky.social of an extraordinary hypothesis: the reason the two sides of the moon are so different might come down to tidal locking when the moon was still forming, and chemical gradients in the proto-lunar material due to radiant heat from the Earth!

Some percentage of the population consistently reports that they are reincarnations of Jesus, that the CIA are monitoring us with subcutaneously injected spy drones, and that the moon landing is a hoax. Is it time to consider whether they’re onto something?

On the Factor Fexcectorn and autism bicycle AI slop study: I got an answer from Springer Nature this morning that this scientific paper will be retracted! 🧪 Full story: nobreakthroughs.substack.com/p/riding-the...

Hey @nature.com, have you got an explanation for how the hell THIS happened? & especially why you accepted a paper with such a bizarre piece of genAI slop in it?! & more to the point, why we should take you seriously at all going forward? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Black Friday Sale! Our 1,000-dimensional magic golden spheres[*] are discounted by a whopping 50%! * Discounted 1,000-dimensional magic golden spheres are 99% the radius of normally priced spheres, which may result in a small decrease in magicness and total gold volume.

FFS, Carol, if the Hive Mind really will do anything you ask, tell it to get the internet working again. #Pluribus

St Peter: You studied Newtonian gravity, right? Me: Umm, a bit. SP: Explain to me, like I’m 5, why the ratio of polar gravity to equatorial for a uniform oblate spheroid is approximately 1 + 1/5 the ellipticity of the meridians. Me: You let Isaac set the questions, didn’t you?

Led me to a very informative wikipedia entry en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opaque_...

One mouse click away from butt-dialling the Big Bang.

Every ad now

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

How to turn off Gmail's ability to read your emails to train its bots: www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...

A huge, beautiful library of tessellated materials in biology! tessellated-materials.mpikg.mpg.de/collection And an interview in Science with the creators of this library: www.science.org/content/arti...

A reminder that seven years ago almost to the day, the CIA determined that Mohammed Bin Salman ordered the killing of @washingtonpost.com journalist Jamal Khashoggi. I hired and worked with Jamal for a year. www.washingtonpost.com/world/nation...

Read more (don't let this gutting of CSIRO and science happen in silence): www.theguardian.com/australia-ne... Shame on your government, @albomp.bsky.social .

In light of the astronomical increases for my health insurance next year, I thought it would be a good time to encourage people to subscribe. (A few hundred should cover it. Sigh.) clarkesworldmagazine.com/subscribe/

❤️ Love this ❤️ @mathforge.org has done what I’ve never been organised enough to do myself, and catalogued every #geometrypuzzle I’ve ever posted on social media. It looks amazing!

Google’s “AI overview”, pointlessly appended to their usual weather forecast for my suburb: “The weather in XXX is currently sunny with a temperature of about 17° C ... ” The forecast already states the current temperature, but no, it is not “currently sunny” as it’s 10:23 pm.

Oh, they made Virtual Martin from @gregegansf.bsky.social's 2010 novel Don't Make Virtual Martin^w^w^w^wZendegi

#CometInterceptor will be the first mission to visit a comet coming directly from the outer reaches of the Sun's realm, carrying material untouched since the dawn of the Solar System. Part of #CosmicVision, Comet Interceptor is an ESA-led mission in collaboration with JAXA. 1/ #CM25 🔭

There is a lot of fuss today over whether chatbots can replace human participants in social sciences research when the solution is obvious: ask chatbots to simulate the views of social scientists and survey them on attitudes towards chatbots as substitutes for human subjects.

Every parallelogram that you draw around an ellipse whose sides are tangent to the ellipse at their midpoints has the same area for a given ellipse: 4 a b, where a and b are the semi-axes of the ellipse.

Think Weirder: the Year’s Best Science Fiction Ideas, Volume 1, is now on sale. It’s billed as the year’s “sixteen best concept-driven, near-future ideas about people interacting with technology.” thinkweirder.com 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🛸 #thinkweirder #sciencefiction #shortstories

Astounding stream of stars caught escaping from nearby galaxy The Vera Rubin Observatory's "First Look" observations weren't meant for science. And yet, it revealed a surprising new stellar stream, 160,000 light-years long, escaping from a nearby galaxy. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro

My latest — this was a collective effort with colleagues Xiaoying You, @marilenharo.bsky.social, MohanaBasu, Jeff Tollefson, and @celestebiever.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...

It’s old news that most screenwriters are clueless about scientists and mathematicians, but you’d hope they'd be a *little* more familiar with what makes a good humanities student. “Down Cemetery Road”: “She was brilliant! She memorised The Wasteland, including the footnotes!”

“It’s normal to have something presented to you and be told that this thing is the future. What’s different, of course, is that in contrast to computers and the internet, AGI doesn’t exist.” www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/30/1...

It’s nice that an expert on aerosols has won the 2025 Prime Minister's Prize for Science … but the govt still can’t be bothered acting on her expertise. "The reality is that there are no regulations for indoor air quality," she said. www.abc.net.au/news/science...

Most people know how to draw an ellipse by pinning two ends of a string to a board and sweeping a pencil around inside the string, keeping it taut. But what about the 3D equivalent? Start with an ellipse and a hyperbola in orthogonal planes, with each curve’s vertices being the other’s foci.

Can't overstate how fucked up it is that unraveling what is arguably the greatest achievement in the history of humanity is now a motivating issue of one of the two dominant parties in the U.S.

Come and listen to me blabber for a few hours about light scattering!