I've been thinking a bunch about photons for class, so a passing comment about them on the Bird Site triggered a response that's lengthy but hopefully amusing/informative: open.substack.com/pub/chadorze...

🚨WE'RE HIRING AGAIN!🚨 Music @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social Permanent lectureship in historically European music (anywhere in the world) in the long 18C. Must have PhD in hand at application. Deadline 12th March; job talks/interviews 1st & 2nd April for ASAP start. www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/138148-...

As usual the instructions for these things completely forget to explain how things work for people with settled status. This create a weird problem, as I know I don't need a ETA, but the people at the airport don't necessarily know that.

If ChatGPT can successfully summarise for you that long document you don't have time to read, than you shouldn't have asked people to write it in the first place. Ask them for a short summary, and save them hours of their time.

Age verification? I started playing #DnD with the "Dungeons & Dragons Set 1: Basic Rules" red box.

New preprint! 'Miniaturised multi-plane light converters via laser-written geometric phase holograms' arxiv.org/abs/2602.07222 . Rapid prototyping of multi-functional passive optical components sized ~1mm^3. A long-running project led by Dr Unė Būtaitė who built the laser-writer from scratch!💡

If you were looking for yet another way to kill your productivity for today, I have good news for you! 😃

That tiny cluster, well separated from anything else is "Optics and Photonics". Not many of us it seems. Explains why there is so little scientific discussion in my timeline. 💡

Meanwhile, in Milan

Many people have wondered why the Chien-Shiung Wu never won the Nobel Prize for Physics. New findings from the Nobel archives, exclusively revealed in Physics World, show she was nominated 23 times by 18 different physicists - and yet was still left empty-handed. 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/twenty-thr...

OOOOH Researchfish Is going extinct 🐡🐟🐠 help.researchfish.com/en_US/resear...

Scientist types as #DnD classes: Fighter: The best way to approach any problem is to do an experiment first and ask questions later (assuming there is any question left to ask). Very high volume of fire, but needs a constant stream of money to pay for fancier and fancier equipment. 1/

These are the days I am happy to live high up the hill.

The Waterfront a bit closer to the water front than usual.

SpaceX's Starlink dodged 300,000 collisions in 2025. That's nearly 40 maneuvers per satellite, and it's rising fast – possibly hitting 1 million maneuvers in 2027. "If they make a mistake, we’re in really big trouble.” Story by me in @newscientist.com www.newscientist.com/article/2512...

Help us make hope normal again. Join the Green Party now.

It's weird I was REPEATEDLY told that payment processors "had" to ban all nsfw to mitigate the risk of processing CSAM. So if that's true then why wasn't X immediately dumped by every one of those payment processors when Grok turned into an automated CSAM generator?

My long trip to Glasgow begins with me getting soaking wet on my way to train station. ☔️ How can you not love the British weather?

This seems like a maliciously put headline to make people feel a certain way. Wikipedia is not partaking in generative AI. They are making AI companies and scrappers having to pay for training their modules off wikipedia texts. And having an AI (not that ai) tasked with updating dead links.

A U.S. president cannot be held accountable. Therefore, a U.S. president must never make a policy decision.

tl;dr: Meta jumps from one unprofitable bubble to another unprofitable bubble.

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

Ursula K. Le Guin, spitting truth.

Students sometimes fail to appreciate that relativity did not emerge fully formed from Einstein's head. I for sure failed to appreciate how long before Einstein's 1915 general relativity paper people were already discussing the idea that mass might distort space-time. ⚛️🧪🎢

There is always an XKCD

And 🥁 the final program of the *"Image Science" Gordon Research Conference*, to take place in Italy April 26-May 1st, is out! Please take some time to check the program, apply, *share* with your colleagues. www.grc.org/image-scienc... (1/N)

Quantum mechanics is a wave theory, and once you look at it as a wave theory 99% of its weirdness completely disappears. (The "wavefunction collapse" is the only part that is not about waves, and also the only part that is genuinely weird.)

Paper accepted! 🥳 "Explaining and exploiting the radial memory effect in multimode optical fibres" (A slightly older version is on ArXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2508.11389 ) 1/3 💡 ⚛️ 🧪 #OpticalFibers

Nominations are now open for the Trust’s Philip Leverhulme Prizes, which are awarded in six broad subject areas and worth £100,000 each for two to three years. Deadline: Wednesday 14 May 2026, 4pm. 🔗 For more details, visit: www.leverhulme.ac.uk/philip-lever...

I took to the blog and wrote about the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, in case you're in the mood for a discount @seanmcarroll.bsky.social kind of thing: chadorzel.substack.com/p/why-the-ev...

Dear Journal editors sending a request to review a paper on Dec 26, a reminder on Dec 28, and a second one (called "final reminder") on Jan 2: don't. #AcademicChat

Join our team at Imperial College London! 🚀 I am looking for a postdoctoral researcher in time-varying metamaterials and ultrafast structured light in space and time. 👉 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPX643/r... 🔹 Deadline: 31st January 2026 #Photonics #Postdoc #Physics #Metamaterials #ScienceJobs

www.nature.com/articles/d41... #AcademicChatter 🧪⚛️💡

We spoke to a dozen professional concept artists who are currently or have previously worked in game development about whether generative AI image tools have made their jobs any easier. Zero said it did. Most said it made things harder. thisweekinvideogames.com/feature/conc...

Physicist Leo Szilard, in a short science fiction story from 1948, describing how to retard science by making the funding application longer and harder than the proposed research - now called the ‘Szilard point’

Streaming services are getting more expensive and are packed with adverts + DVD prices are incredibly low = I guess I will go back to buy the DVD of the movies/series I want to watch

I went to the Dolomites a lot as a kid, and I could clearly see the difference between the '80s and the '00s. Much less snow, higher temperatures, ski slopes that only existed because of snow cannons. I haven't been there in over 20 years, but I guess the situation now is a million times worse.

As someone working in #imaging and #optics, I have no notes. xkcd.com/3182/

Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aspect #smbc

There is a call for joint PhDs between @exeter.ac.uk and @univparissaclay.bsky.social with deadline for projects (not students' applications) in mid-January. Most of the people I know in Paris works at Sorbonne, but maybe I know someone at Paris Saclay who wants to collaborate? 😀

The proposal to use the frozen Russian money to fund Ukraine is more complex (from a international law point of view) than I thought, and I understand Belgium's argument. Still, I really hope they go through with it.

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :) The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used > neal.fun/size-of-life/

EU set to indefinitely freeze Russian assets, removing obstacle to Ukraine loan reut.rs/4iV4xAP

I am tempted to say that should teach the difference between heat, temperature, and heat capacity in primary schools, but I suspect that most kids knows it better than the adults.

Operation Bluebird wants to relaunch “Twitter,” says Musk abandoned the name and logo arstechnica.com/information-...

you could make an ad like this made by actual humans that goes viral and gets making of press coverage or you could put out AI slop like mcdonalds that everyone hates and still have the team whining how brutally hard it was and how long it took while also feeling creatively unfulfilled tough choice

In early 2024, I got to speak to Deans from up & down the West Coast of the US & Canada about "AI". I told them that the only value of ChatGPT for university administrators is as a contrast-dye test to show where resources are lacking.

What you write: "If using a <insert list of OSs/browsers> the link might not work - please use on a windows/chrome device if you have issues with the link." What I read: "We are too incompetent to make a working web page. But instead of sorting it out, we are dumping the blame on you."

Mimics are just a silly #DnD idea. They can't harm you.