"Just as Jay Gatsby is an enigmatic larger-than-life figure driven to accumulate wealth at all costs in a futile bid for the love of Daisy Buchanan, the Xerox 914 beats on ceaselessly, printing page after page, for reasons that readers cannot fully comprehend."

South Carolina

I've been doing some percolation calculations lately, and I decided that I was tired of letting my computer have all the fun

Cognitive scientists and AI researchers make a forceful call to reject “uncritical adoption" of AI in academia #AI #GenAI #HigherEducation #ResearchIntegrity #WCRI2026 #WCRI www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/cognitive-...

Good correction, which shows that I misremembered / omitted some context in my summary. Weiss came up with the idea of an optical interferometric gravitational wave detector, which eventually became LIGO. Much better to read his summary of what happened than mine: www.kavliprize.org/rainer-weiss...

1/ Rainer Weiss, who conceived of the idea of a gravitational wave detector (which eventually became LIGO), has died. I was at MIT when the first gravitational wave detection was announced, and he gave perhaps the most inspiring colloquium I have ever heard. news.mit.edu/2025/profess...

The Mask of Sorrow is a monument located on a hill above Magadan, Russia, commemorating the many prisoners who suffered and died in the Gulag prison camps in the Kolyma region of the Soviet Union during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

here’s a version where the POV is blacked out whenever the driver takes their eyes off the road

🧪⚛️ A great opportunity to contribute to the phenomenal science reporting by @quantamagazine.bsky.social

Alberta prairie town

It's a Rothko night

My four year old just asked me "Dad, is a bowl a plate?" and I'm not sure I'm ready to have the talk about topology already

⚛️ David Tong goes to a doctor. David: I am not feeling too good, doc. Trying to learn a new area of physics but somehow can't get into it. Doc: The solution is simple. There is this guy who writes the best physics lecture notes..

For no particular reason I am thinking today about the Simpsons joke about the struggling jazz musician who is ultimately made destitute because his income can't keep pace with his $1500-a-day habit: collecting Faberge eggs

I looked into the claim that chess grandmasters burn 6000 calories a day and found it was made up by popular author Robert Sapolsky open.substack.com/pub/strandbe...

All the "AI Safety" people seem to be focused on the possibility that we will build something dangerous to humanity. Is anyone worrying about the possibility that we will build something capable of suffering and then abuse it horribly because it will be profitable not to acknowledge its personhood?

taking my vizier to the vizier park so he can scheme with the other viziers

Ask a caterpillar your question, and it will become the answer. Slime in a silky cradle, computing a reply; from god's own tongue, translated into butterfly

Sometimes I browse Bluesky looking for allergy advice. I call that rheumscrolling.

Funny that Krusty the Klown has so dramatically outlived the thing he was parodying. Any other prominent examples like that? Maybe Bugs Bunny and that Clark Gable character that he was parodying?

I guess this is the year when I officially become a curmudgeon, because my first reaction to this was "get me out of here" engineering.osu.edu/news/2025/06...

Super Kamiokande neutrino detector, Gifu Prefecture, Japan

El Greco, View of Toledo, ca. 1600

Here's an ongoing thread of story requests from my three year old son.

It occurs to me that my "story prompt" list is much more delightful if I just give you the text request from the kid, rather than the kind of insipid AI images generated by them. So let's try another thread with just the premise of the stories, as requested by my 3-year old son.

My 3 year old son has developed the habit of asking me to tell him a story with a particular premise. Then after the story we AI-generate an image based on his description. This is an ongoing thread of those images. It's something like a visual record of what a 3 year old is thinking about.

Source says all NSF grants at Harvard are terminated.

I enjoyed this insight, by way of @meaningness.bsky.social (meaningness.substack.com/p/to-keep-pr...). It seems obvious in retrospect that the people who rise to leadership in any organization will be those who feel greater duty to the organization than to the purpose of the organization.

pro-top: this also works with another human

dandelion season

Thinking again about the "logarithms" rant from Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground"

I'm very happy to say that Plastic Fantastic, my book on scientific fraud at Bell Laboratories, is available online as an affordable paperback or ebook. The content is the same but it has taken taken months to reformat after rights reverted to me from the original publisher.

lol probably not hard to predict the questions that high-energy physicists will be asking in 50 years because they're the same questions they were asking 50 years ago

my wife's phone number is a seven-digit number, but the *location* of my wife's phone number in the decimal expansion of pi is a SIX-digit number, which is therefore easier to remember,

* The actual Microsoft publication in Nature: doi.org/10.1038/s415... * The referee reports: static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10... "No Majorana zero modes" is technical jargon for "no qubits".

Billshit

apropos of www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-m..., it is almost literally unbelievable that someone could say "all possible mathematical objects exist" and someone else could feel like that explains something

"Remarkably, all data presented in this paper is significant at the p=1 level."

good to know that I have already become "a character" to the grad students in my department

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social could have done this with hyperspheres and then he chickened out smh bsky.app/profile/grav...

Bluesky Premiere: Documentary on Reproducibility in Condensed Matter Physics www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfpW... A project by @ancurlija.bsky.social

Found a great typo in someone's grant proposal

chalkboard felt cute; might erase later

I just realized that I am so condensed-matter-pilled that it's hard for me to write the word "hall" without capitalizing it. (Also basically impossible to write the variable h on the chalkboard without giving it a bar)

Bad. But how bad? I once asked myself, while finding fakes in the Scientific Report @natureportfolio.bsky.social. So I decide to "do my our research" - I took 100 articles in a row from Physical sciences that contains diffraction. Result - 15 fakes out 100. Details in the 🧵 #ResearchIntegrity 1/x

This is also the universal experience of authors of scientific papers