One more finished model, a million new things I tried for the first time. The most notable were blending contrast paints, and the crackling on the base. Biggest mistake was not to undershade enough before applying the contrast paints. #MiniaturePainting #WH40k #Warhammer

If I were on a mission whose computer system required me to deal with Microsoft Outlook in space, I’d give up and go back to the slide rule

⏳ Less than two weeks left to submit your abstract for #EOSAM2026! Join us in Tampere for a dynamic week of cutting-edge research, industry insights, and networking with a global community of experts. Submit & register here: tinyurl.com/yty3nt78 More info: tinyurl.com/3y98bxay #Photonics #Optics

Part of me wants this to be the best April's Fool in history. Part of me wants it to be real. #Warhammer #WH40k

This is the original sin of higher education. (So many) students see University as a away to access better paid jobs. Universities see students as income. (So many) professors see teaching as the price they have to pay to be allowed to do research. Learning is almost never discussed.

Literature Only

Big win of the week: I had @gevero.bsky.social try out the traditional Florentine #Lampredotto 🤤 (The stand in Porta Romana changed owner some time back, but the new guys tuned out to be good.)

Tough questions being asked and sad truths being revealed by @jacopobertolotti.com at #PlasmonicaSchool2026 👹

Do I know anyone here with experience in laser ablation? I have a VERY stupid question to ask 🙂 💡

@jacopobertolotti.com decided it is time to justify our presence at the Galileo Galilei Institute for Theoretical Physics! Flexing classical field theory with Feynman diagrams 😵‍💫 at #PlasmonicaSchool2026!

#PLASMONICAschool2026 has started today in Arcetri! This morning we had 👨‍🏫 Francesco Monticone (@cornelluniversity.bsky.social) delving deep into the subtleties of light-matter interaction fundamentals and @jacopobertolotti.com (@exeter.ac.uk) guiding us through the intricacies of optical scattering.

I haven't been here in 20 years. When I was a student, Physics at the University of Florence was in this old, beautiful villa on the hill of Arcetri (not far away from Galileo's villa). 1/2 #UniversityOfFlorence #PlasmonicaSchool

#PhysicsFactlet Scattering VS Extinction In #Optics, the concepts of scattering and extinction are closely related. So closely related that many people tend to confuse them. 1/ 💡 ⚛️ 🧪 🎢

Did you know that ⍼ is the symbol for "azimuth"? I didn't. ionathan.ch/2026/02/16/a... via @xmau.bsky.social

∃ Maths joke.

🚨Save Languages at the University of Essex 🚨 #langsky #linguistics UoE plans to cut German, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese + all evening classes and merge Language and Linguistics with a larger unit. Only 2 languages will remain next October. Please sign our letter: tinyurl.com/SaveLingLang...

in 10 years age verification will be so entrenched as the status quo that saying age verification is bad and ineffective will get responses like "well what do you propose, *not* have age verification?" like it's a foregone conclusion and was always there mark my words

BREAKING: For the first time in 35 years the Ig Nobel ceremony will move to Europe. "There are no immediate plans to return the ceremony to the US." www.theguardian.com/science/2026... Food for thought for conference steering committees.

#PhysicsFactlet While electrodynamics is well understood, there aren't many scattering problems we can actually solve. A plane wave scattering from a uniform dielectric sphere is one of those few, and the solution was originally found by Gustav Mie in 1908. 1/ 💡 ⚛️ 🧪 🎢

Thoughts & prayers to the EPA :(

#PhysicsFactlet A simple finite element simulation of a pulse scattering on a small (but not point-like) dielectric obstacle. The scatterer behaves approximately as a re is a very faint halo of light going everywhere, but most light gets diffracted into something similar to a Airy Disk. 1/2 💡 ⚛️ 🎢

Do not speak to me of the old magic

Diana's back! 🎢 youtu.be/B3m3AMRlYfc?...

The Voyageurs Wolf Project of Northern Minnesota tags & documents grey wolf ecology & behavior: www.voyageurswolfproject.org The video you see here is confirmatory proof: Wolves. Love. Blueberries. As much as 83% of a wolf's calories in summer months comes from eating berries.

I find myself slightly suprised to be recommending a video from the Norwegian Consumer Council, but it's bloody good. www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Up...

HISTORY OF PHYSICS Norman F. Ramsey was an American physicist who received the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks.” He was part of the Manhattan project, too. 1/

I'm constantly trying (/failing) to get this point across. If you're a trained expert in a field, then it may be worthwhile to question the scientific consensus of your peers. If you're not, the scientific consensus is absolutely the best you can do and it's arbitrary foolishness to disregard it.

Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. taranis.ie/datacenters-... (love the allusion to the kids’ story)

It's out! 🥳 pubs.aip.org/aip/app/arti...

Carbon Dating xkcd.com/3205/

It is now 26 hours after I was supposed to arrive, and we are still not there. (I am just a bit furious at #KLM).

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?