Procrastinators, rejoice! The deadline to apply for #PLASMONICAschool2026 has been extended until November 16th ⏰. Bring a mate and don't be late!

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

Fellow seismologists, we're going to get a lot of mileage out of the latest @xkcd.com

The secret that #BigMaths doesn't want you to know is that real numbers are vectors, complex numbers are vectors, matrices are vectors, and even tensors are vectors. You might ask "is there anything that is not a vector?" and the answer is "spinors". But spinors are evil. 🙃 /s

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

A halloween cartoon for @newscientist.com

JD Vance claims that diversity weakens unions, as people end up distrusting each other and not organizing. Let me tell you two menswear stories related to this claim. 🧵

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

“Talent is a pursued interest. In other words, anything you’re willing to practice, you can do.” - the great Bob Ross, who would have turned 83 today. #RIP 🎨

obviously the real lesson here is that author lists are arbitrary anyway, defined by the field, and say nothing about quality of the research

The Sword in the Stone #webcomic #krita #miniFantasyTheater

☹️ "the European Commission (EC) announced a €1 billion initiative to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence (AI)" 🙂 "photonics is a critical enabling technology underpinning AI, quantum, semiconductor manufacturing and other areas that are vital to the EU’s technological independence" 💡

"We are contacting you in regard to your COVID-19 vaccination appointment. Unfortunately, there is a national shortage of vaccines for weeks now and we are still temporarily out of stock." 🤬🤦‍♂️ #NHS #COVID

Is the UK's immigration system easy to navigate? No. Is it inexpensive to apply to? Also no. Does it run efficiently and predictably? Haha no. But at least once you're in the country you'll not be arbitrarily kicked out of it, right? I'm afraid we have some bad news about that.

I am old enough to remember when "do not feed the trolls" was the first thing you learnt about surviving on the internet.

A very Devon autumn morning. #Birds #Clouds

Our department (UW-Madison Electrical and Computer Engineering) has two openings in semiconductors and quantum technologies First, an open-rank (asst/assoc/full) search in quantum engineering, broadly defined, especially in experimental areas that take advantage of our nanofab resources

I've received an 'exclusive' invite to try Nature's new 'research assistant', which will burn down a forest to provide a 'summary of the paper' I'm reading and I have SUCH exciting news for them, that's called an 'abstract' and the actual authors already wrote it for me, no forest-burning required.

@plasmonica.bsky.social is organizing a summer school on "Plasmonic and Nano-optics" (march 23-27 in Florence, Italy), with a bunch of amazing lecturers and speakers, plus me. Come and join us! www.plasmonica.it/2026school/

#PhysicsFactlet In its simplest form Monte-Carlo integration allows to estimate a area/volume with complicated boundaries by taking a number of samples and looking at which fraction fall inside the object of interest. 🎢🧪⚛️ #ComputationalPhysics

BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV is set to effectively disband Opus Dei in the coming weeks. This would be the most sweeping internal reform of his pontificate — and a dramatic continuation of Pope Francis’s legacy.

Interesting. Tell me more about these early Xbox meetings.

When you see people screaming that the "establishment" is suppressing their their discoveries / insights / theories / etc they have invariably taken the path on the right. 🧪⚛️ #xkcd

250 documents with a keyword followed by gibberish, injected into the training of a large language model, can "poison" it - according to Anthropic. www.anthropic.com/research/sma...

How fit all your research into a short talk... Don't. #PHD #Research #Academic #Presenting #PHDChat

I’m currently chairing a search. Part of this is soliciting names of strong candidates from colleagues. I get many, but some of them I cannot contact—no webpage, not even an email on the “People” page of their postdoc advisor. I BEG of you: if you’re on the job market, BE FINDABLE! [1/2]

#PhysicsFactlet Sometimes you need to forego the intuitive way to define stuff for the sake of actually being able to do anything useful with those definitions. #knots 🧪 🎢 🧵1/

"Ops! The sample fell..."

🎵 They did the Monster Slash 😭 @ellecordova.bsky.social

A strong quality for a good researcher is the ability to sometimes ignore small details, and sometimes delves into them with the greatest care, and more importantly to being able to switch wisely between the two modes.

Ahead of tomorrow’s #NobelPrize announcement, I went on a deep dive in search of the most obscure physics Nobel Prizes in history. That means it's time for a thread on...🧵 PHYSICS NOBEL PRIZES YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF – PART 1 (1/n)

This is how I want to be awarded the Nobel Prize.

It looks like I have to add Wiley to the list of publishers I refuse to publish with or review for 🤷🏻‍♂️

Everybody makes money out of academic authors except the authors...News. Wiley is the latest academic publisher to reach a multi-million deal to allow access to its content to AI developers, with no opt out, let alone payment, for the authors who created that content.

I never touched #Reddit, but some time back a colleague told me what a nice experience they were having with it, so I decided to try it out. After 1 month I can confirm it is a toxic hellhole. Uninstalled the app and will do my best to stay far away from it.

#PhysicsFactlet A geodesics on a surface is the shortest* curve connecting two points. *if you know/care what goes in this footnote, you don't need me to explain 😉

There should be no misunderstanding that this is utter and complete corporate BS. No quantum computers are needed for whatever they did in this work. It's a shame to see IBM depart from their fact-based approach. See Scott Aaronson's blog post: scottaaronson.blog?p=9170

It is completely unsurprising to me that LLM essays and essays by real undergraduates are identically structured when PEE and TEEEL and 5 para 3 point essays have been absolutely drilled into school pupils, certainly in the UK where GCSEs are totally unforgiving and teachers must teach to the test.

🚨Registrations are open for the upcoming "Image Science" Gordon research conference , to take place in Italy, April 26-May 1, 2026. Check out the amazing program, tell your friends and share, APPLY! 🚨 www.grc.org/image-scienc...

Problems solved by Meta smart glasses: none. Problems solved by having lenses that adjust their focus to anything you are looking at that moment: most people have problems seeing both near and far objects when they get older, and varifocal lenses are not a great solution.

The cumulative budget for the National Science Foundation (NSF) over the same 30-year span is about $200 billion That is about the market cap of AT&T

Repeat with me: Excel is NOT a database, and any attempt to use it as one will invariably end in pain and tears.

This satirical blog post really illustrates the problem with a lot of technical writing. Amazing technical writing is so good and then everything else reads like this https://anniemueller.com/posts/how-i-a-non-developer-read-the-tutorial-you-a-developer-wrote-for-me-a-beginner

Electrostatic levitation #physicsdemos 👻 #techognition #techsrule

Wouldn't this be in direct violation of the Brexit accords with Europe?

And that, folks, is why I don't own any Dyson products.

Paper submission to most journal is needlessly convoluted, and most online interfaces seem to be designed to be hostile to those submitting. And I genuinely can't understand why. #AcademicChatter

Augmented Reality glasses are just an expensive novelty. You will read glorious reviews on tech-sites that should know better. You will find them nicely exposed in shops. You will hear how they are the future, and how you NEED to buy one. But they solve no problem.

Stop Killing Games update - UK petition to see a debate Parliament #StopKillingGames #Gaming #PCGaming