John Searle obituary: philosopher of the mind who was sceptical of AI www.thetimes.com/uk/obituarie... “If you are a serious intellectual, you should not be comfortable on the left-right spectrum. The right is so stupid it’s not even worth discussing. But the left is evil.”

@roland-li.bsky.social, Cultures converge in S.F.’s Chinatown as hundreds celebrate Bruce Lee’s legacy www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/b... Disappointed to miss this!

Useful guidance from Joshua Tree National Park:

Post-race boba tea at MYM Tea & Coffee on Convoy St.

Start of Ms17’s Cross-Country race at the Mt. Carmel Sundevil Invitational:

San Diego is a military town … which is not a bad thing: Marines fighting fascism! #realpatriots

@snezanalawrence.bsky.social post on Karl Menger @illinoistech.bsky.social inspired me to memorialize 40th anniversary of death w/model of #Shutdown2025 using his mathematical formalism of (in)compatibile groups in my Intro to Math Modeling class @ucsdphysci.bsky.social. Started w/background info:

@ilanaslightly.bsky.social, Neither history nor language are neutral in this time-travel mystery www.latimes.com/entertainmen... “all that’s stolen are … ‘hapless attempts to solve arcane math problems’.” I’m sold! Off to buy @kma500.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy’s _The Expert of Subtle Revisions_!

Bender, Trump Administration Asks Colleges to Sign ‘Compact’ to Get Funding Preference nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u... "demands...free tuition to students studying math, biology, or other 'hard sciences' if endowment > $2M/undergrad" Study math for free @mit.edu or Princeton!

🦋💙🦋 How dare Hegseth and Trump

🤣😆

French Literature and Arts Festival @ucsandiego.bsky.social Friday: calendar.ucsd.edu/event/French...

“To some, Mr. Hegseth’s speech was poorly matched to his audience of senior officers who in most cases are responsible for complex military operations” To SOME? That phrase implies that some others thought the speech was *well-matched*. Not possible.

@gregjaffe.bsky.social, A Novice Defense Secretary Lectures the Brass on What It Takes to Win www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/u... "'He views the world from the point of view of a not terribly successful major in the National Guard,' said @eliotacohen.bsky.social."

Today in Intro to Math Modeling @ucsdphysci.bsky.social: running & walking heart rate. Lessons: (1) not curve fitting (2) subject-matter expertise required Discussed gait biomechanics, power needed (digression on Pogačar), ATP biochemistry (digression on LeMond), Fick principle.

Ms17 is studying for an exam in her classical Greek class and she taught me καιρός, “It’s really interesting because there isn’t an equivalent word in English.”. We decided 時機 & 吉時 are close in Chinese.

@dhruvtkpatel.bsky.social, Rai & Sundar, Trump Claims White House Has Struck Deal With @harvard.edu www.thecrimson.com/article/2025... "When a reporter asked for more information on the details of the deal, Trump seemed to back up, saying 'We’re in the process of getting very close'"

This #AmericanWestCenter event is coming up and I can't wait! Free and open to the public--

Portlanders — show off your corner of war-ravaged Portland below.

Despite being born in the US, w/2 parents & 3/4 grandparents born in the US, and having no ancestral connections to Central or South America, or the Iberian Peninsula, Ms17 told me she has stopped speaking Spanish in public or even revealing she understands it.

@uofcalifornia.bsky.social won't be able to comply since it doesn't accept standardized test scores as part of undergraduate applications.

Promo video for the recent HSBC and IBM Quantum breakthrough in finance, if it was directed by Scott Aaronson. scottaaronson.blog?p=9170

@jeffreybrainard.bsky.social, Whose papers have an edge at @science.org? In unusual study, journal looks in the mirror www.science.org/content/arti... Papers w/o math! My paper "Quantum strategies" (journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...) was rejected there bc "it uses too advanced math" (2x2 matrices).

1/n @katrinamillerphd.bsky.social, Barcelona is made of math www.nytimes.com/interactive/... Beautiful photography by Bayer, but disappointingly trivial math. Following are some more interesting examples from our visit last year.

Bullshit

Bullshit www.hsbc.com/news-and-vie...

I am pleased to announce the publication of "Expectations-based Reference-Dependence and Labor Supply: Eliciting Cabdrivers’ Expectations in the Field" (with Miao Jin, Juanjuan Meng, and Lan Yao), JEBO special issue in honor of Gary Charness. Open access here www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Today at IAS, I gave a 2 hr 15 mins lecture on why TIME[t] is in SPACE[√(t log t)]. You can watch it here! www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThLv...

The federal government has censored the work of dozens of scientists, including work by my lab, on the impacts of climate change on Acadia National Park. Signs have been removed from Cadillac and Great Meadow. They’re also removing signs about the Wabanaki’s sacred connections to Cadillac.

In six weeks (approximately). Profanity will happen. www.eventbrite.com/e/the-heartl...

@marshfamilysongs.bsky.social, "The sicker the mind, the thinner the skin"!

Corruption Czar. Shame on this guy.

At Woodbridge Invitational cross-country meet in Irvine,CA for Ms17’s race. We ran last night at 7pm for evening practice!

Wynn, Baltimore County Public Schools renewing focus on cursive writing with new program www.dundalkeagle.com/news/bcps-re... "increased writing results in areas like note-taking & essay-writing, reinforced spelling & vocabulary proficiency, deeper reading and listening comprehension"

Awesome self-own by crypto investors!

@thomasnilsen.bsky.social, "the additional on-going show of power in the Barents Sea area is a strong Russian signal about the importance of the country's nuclear weapons in a possible escalating conflict with Europe and NATO"

Posting this for no particular reason -->

Spotted in Ms17’s Ancient Greek class at back to school night: a memorial to Gilbert Lawall. See @caneweb.org caneweb.org/obituary-for...

Plan for Ms17’s *high school* biology class this year. They’ve already done the first two experiments, using techniques that were invented decades after my last biology class!

Back to school night at Ms17’s school:

Listening to Nick Trefethen speaking on Analytic Continuation and the One-Wavelength Principle at the CodEx seminar www.math.colostate.edu/~king/codex/ Looking forward to the pretty gloomy theorems!

McWhorter, The Essence of Trumpian Language, in One Three-Letter Word www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/o... "I’ll leave it to observers, or anyone merely sentient, to decide whether America’s fighting was 'wokey' in Korea and Vietnam."

Love this for young girls. Teach them weapons

Read the full story, which is part of “Food and Power in the West,” a FERN special issue produced in partnership with High Country News, at thefern.org/2025/09/eati... @highcountrynews.org @paisleyrekdal.bsky.social

I have a new record coming out October 24th called "Live Like the Sky" and this is the first video by Inuk filmmaker asinnajaq. Filmed in Kangiqliniq (Rankin Inlet), Inukjuak, Tiotia:ke (Montreal), Pittsburgh & Philadelphia.

All Girls STEM Society Algorithms Workshop, Saturday 4 Oct 2025, @SDPublicLibrary Pacific Beach/Taylor Branch: www.eventbrite.com/e/algorithms...

300M drug deaths is 4% of the world’s population. Where do these numbers even come from?

@paisleyrekdal.bsky.social, "What is unique is its [吃苦 / chī kǔ] subtle glorification of pain, the use of the verb 'to eat' rather than 'to endure'. To eat is to feed, to sustain: It is to grow the soul itself."

Nair, A.P. Balachandran: Living in Physics arxiv.org/abs/2509.06139 "One could hold an erudite and enlightened discussion with Bal, in English, Malayalam, Tamil, Italian or Spanish, on politics, history, literature or movies, but every conversation would touch upon physics at some stage."

Scouting out the San Diego River Park cross-country course before Ms17’s race, I had to pause for these (modern) petroglyphs: