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• Post #3803663

  Happy 5/4 (sound on)

• Post #3803662

  Good morning. #bloomscrolling

• Post #3803661

  what https://www.reddit.com/r/Weird/comments/1tidtfw/im_a_land_surveyor_and_i_just_found_an_organ/

• Post #3803660

  Relativists use a script letter ℐ with + or - to denote the two light cones comprising the conformal boundary of Minkowski space. ℐ is a script "I" so it is pronounced "scri." Today I learned that the Polish word "skraj," pronounced about the same way, means "edge," as in a boundary. "skraj lasu" means "edge of the wood."

• Post #3803659

  Back on my nonsense.

• Post #3803658

  I found a box of CDs with laptop archives from ~2003 that I thought were lost. They include a bunch of gtk2 and metacity themes that are making me very nostalgic for the old gnome desktop!

• Post #3803657

  Mods are asleep, post skulls.

• Post #3803656

  Hot bees in YOUR area are down to pollinate NOW.

• Post #3803655

  There was a lot of stuff I needed to get done today. Instead, I spent several hours hammering out an update to the website where I compile useful formulas and results for the areas of physics I work in. This was not on my to-do list! #Physics #Math https://jacobi.luc.edu/Useful.html

• Post #3476897

  Physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer was born #OTD in 1906. She developed the nuclear shell model of the nucleus, for which she was awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics. Image: APS

• Post #2549983

  "I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice." Einstein sent a letter to Max Born #OTD in 1926, in which he gave his oft-quoted objection to the probabilistic interpretation of the wavefunction in quantum mechanics. You may be surprised by where this is headed. (1/n) https://physicstoday.aip.org/letters/albert-einstein-to-max-born-1

• Post #2476233

  “There is no joy more intense than that of coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas." Astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was born #OTD in 1900. She used quantum mechanics to decode the spectral lines of stars and deduce their elemental composition, concluding they are mostly H and He, and was the first woman to be made full professor and department chair at Harvard. Image: Harvard Observatory

• Post #2409234

  Precisely twelve years ago today, one of my favorite pictures.

• Post #2054362

  Yvonne Madelaine Brill was born #OTD in 1924. She was a rocket scientist who invented the hydrazine resistojet, which increased the payload capacity of satellites by reducing the weight of propellant they require. JWST uses hydrazine thrusters! Photo: W. McNamee/Getty

• Post #1651023

  Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies.

• Post #1414091

  RFK Jr is trying to prevent these sorts of advances when he attacks funding for mRNA-based vaccines and treatments. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/pancreatic-cancer-mrna-vaccine-shows-lasting-results-early-trial-rcna331969

• Post #1377294

  Albert Einstein passed away #OTD in 1955 due to complications from a ruptured abdominal aneurysm. Doctors recommended surgical intervention but Einstein declined. He told them “I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly." Here is his office just as he left it, before anyone came him to collect his things.. Image: R. Morse/LIFE

• Post #968289

  Friends! Suppose you were going to be in Paris for 8 days this June, with a spouse and a 14yo. What are some lesser known or not obvious things you would plan to do? Any recommendations? I mean besides the standard stuff like the Louvre, Catacombs, etc.

• Post #968288

  Particle physicist Mary Katharine Gaillard was born #OTD in 1939. She and Benjamin Lee predicted the mass of the charm quark in 1974, and she was the first tenured woman on the physics faculty at UC Berkeley. Image: Emilio Segre Visual Archives/AIP/SPL

• Post #968287

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@jamesthomson/116360468686770003 Everyone tell James that you’d really like a “dice in free fall on a spaceship slingshotting around the Moon” mode

• Post #964204

  We pack a handful of folks into a tin can loaded with explosives. Their computers are running Windows and the ship's toilet is malfunctioning. We hurl them at a distant rock. Everything about where they are is trying to kill them. And it is sublimely beautiful, one of the greatest things we’ve done as a species. #Artemis

• Post #704970

  If you ever installed Twitter (or X or Grok) on the App Store, you can submit a report of abusive content and ask them to remove the apps from the App Store. Just click the “Report a Problem” link on the app’s page in the App Store.

• Post #687420

  RE: https://flipboard.com/@ign/ign-jtkhe64mz/-/a-uBljWqVbQ5ur98_8Uw7WoA%3Aa%3A4274664-%2F0 Director: You de-age those actors for the Jurassic Park bit? CGI guy: Sure did boss, gave ‘em real different sized eyes just like you asked Director: what

• Post #687419

  [Elon’s voice over the Mars habitat intercom] I have some important news about our oxygen supply.

• Post #687418

  Oh for sure. I want to build a quantum mineral extractor in the asteroid belt.

• Post #687417

  People refuse to acknowledge how an LLM actually works, and insist on assigning meaning and understanding to its output. There is no meaning and the system understands neither the user’s question nor its own “response.” At least, not in the sense people expect from the conversational format of the interaction. https://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/gemini-artificial-intelligence-the-national-archives-fake-records

• Post #506246

  This was posted in a shorter format as a thread on Bluesky and it worked marvelously. One of the most innovative uses of the form that I’ve seen. https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english

• Post #366649

  I knew that one day the Stars Would Be Right, but didn’t think I’d be in my grocery store’s parking lot when it happened.

• Post #307872

  "That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering…every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." — Carl Sagan Voyager 1 captured the "Pale Blue Dot" image #OTD in 1990. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

• Post #299571

  Astronaut, author, professional football player, and STEM educator Leland Melvin was born #OTD in 1964. Here he is in the greatest photo ever produced by the US space program. Image: NASA