David Sloan

This Halloween special edition of the FQxI podcast features Bernard Carr, who discusses primordial black holes, the notorious 1970s Enfield poltergeist case that Carr investigated, and more!
Listen to Part 1: qspace.fqxi.org/podcasts/126...

Almost all my publications have authors listed alphabetically. How nice for those of us with surnames from the arse end of the alphabet. Forever last author regardless of our contributions.

And of course you can't fix metrics by introducing new metrics. Particularly one-size-fits-none approaches.

An image of the children's TV classic "Victor and Hugo" featuring Victor, Hugo and their bird "Interpol".

French police finally realease an image from the Louvre heist getaway.

I might even remember to tag @fqxi.org in this!

We're flexible on timing, location, part time/full time work, and more to get the right fit for the right candidate. Enquiries through the address on the website please.

Postdoctoral Research Associate - FQxI FQxI is seeking Postdoctoral Research Associates for the Foundational Answers project. Job Title: Postdoctoral Research Associate Organization: Foundational Questions Institute (FQxI) Location: Remote...

Postdoctoral Research Positions in the Foundations of physics.

fqxi.org/jobs-postdoctoral-research-associate/

We're looking for postdocs to work on the "Foundational Answers" program. Work with some brilliant, friendly people on a fun and exciting research project.

Don't forget the £17 million in costs associated with the "cost saving redundancies".

Harvard is destroying its PhD programs, instituting a hiring freeze and stopping work on "non-essential" spending. The reason given: A defecit of $113 million this year. I can see the concern - with their $57 billion endowment, if they keeps up for 503 years they could be in real trouble!

28th hour of the meeting. I imagine at this point someone has a question, or "..really more of a comment than a question"

For anyone who needs the musical accompaniment www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Ho...

Now on its tenth hour.

I'm actually fairly sure this is someone you don't know. But I think there are a number of people in the intersection of our circles who it *could* have been.

A wonderful quirk of Teams seems to be that online meeting officially continue until everyone has left the call. Due to what I *really hope* is a somewhat distracted professor, it appears that a meeting I attended but left earlier is just entering its eighth straight hour.

YouTube video by LukeFrame The “authenticity” of books.😂😂😂#viral #trending #shorts #comedy

This remains the most accurate depiction of history lessons as I experienced them in high school.

Counter-point - with the typical pronunciation, I get to pretend that somehow my uncle's mild-mannered wife has got some people really riled up.

UK universities offered to monitor students’ social media for arms firms, emails show Loughborough, Heriot-Watt and Glasgow corresponded with companies concerned about campus protests

Won't someone please think of the poor merchants of death - however will they defend themselves?

www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Now that's a reason I'm putting on my next grant application.

"Come on... you're embarassing us in front of the aliens!"

Still won't get approval, not enough recovery on overheads.

This is the best answer. Our understanding of the universe is part of our shared culture. It's a beautiful end in itself. Yes, the spinoffs make money eventually, but the value of great literature is more than the box-office taking of the films based upon it. Understanding science enriches us all.

Infographic from the World Health Organisation. Cartoon of Frederick Banting, co-discoverer of Insulin (1922) saying 'Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world' on the left. On the right, cartoon of hands reaching for bottle of insulin. Above, it says 'Access to insulin is still out of reach for many who need it'. The caption below gives the WHO logo and explains 'In 1922, insulin co-discoverer Frederick Banting refused to profit from the discovery and offered it to the world as a global public good. Today, many people with #diabetes still don't have access to affordable and quality treatment and care. #BeatNCDs #UNGA'

When I see requirements (from reviewers, funders, etc.) to motivate research in terms of economic benefits/ #commercialisation, I want to scream. #PublicGoods often have far-reaching economic benefits, but this should be a perk, not the driving reason. #PublicHealth #Science #ProfitCorrupts

An external grant for shovel time has overheads to pay the others. The workload model won't allow a reduction in form filling for digging, so you have to do it on your own time. But you should be demonstrating how you contribute to the Hole Excellence Framework.

The one advantage to having to write exams so damned early is that by the time we get to the revision sessions I can honestly answer that I have no recollection of the content whatsoever.

Another example would be

f(x)=cos (x), x not equal to pi
f(pi) = 10

That appears periodic for an arbitrary set of samples, and unless you exactly sampled x=pi (chance infinitessimally small for the kinds of probabilities you'd normally think of as this is a set of measure zero) you wouldn't know.

I'm going to assume you mean a function from the reals to the reals. In this case, I can write an example

f(x)=sin(x) for -1000 pi < x < 1000 pi
f(x) = x^2 elsewhere

By changing the end points of where f(x)=sin(x), I can make this periodic over an arbitrary interval, but the function itself isn't.

FQxI is seeking an Academic Managing Editor for a new project, the Foundational Review Series.

Remote (Global applicants welcome)

Full-Time (will consider alternative working arrangements for the ideal candidate)

~$70,000 – $100,000 based on experience

fqxi.org/academic-man...

Sara Walker and Paul Davies on the physics of life. Our $53,000 quantum biology essay contest asks: How Quantum is Life? qspace.fqxi.org/competitions...

Tulips. Back in the 1630s, everyone was investing in Large Liliaceae Merchants.

Dynamical Similarity in Multisymplectic Field Theory Symmetry under a particular class of non-strictly canonical transformations may be used to identify, and subsequently excise degrees of freedom which do not contribute to the closure of the algebra of...

Now on the arXiv: Dynamical Similarity in Multisymplectic Field Theory

arxiv.org/abs/2509.16099

In which my students maths the hell out of reducing field theories by eliminating redundant scale.

Comments, questions and complaints welcome!

Academic Managing Editor - FQxI FQxI is seeking an Academic Managing Editor for a new project, the Foundational Review Series. Organization: Foundational Questions Institute (FQxI) Location: Remote (Global applicants welcome) Positi...

@fqxi.org is hiring

We're looking for an Academic Managing Editor for the Foundational Answers series.

Come work with brilliant, kind colleagues. Also me.

fqxi.org/academic-man...

Non-geographic - work remotely anywhere in the world.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Nuke Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Nuke

Cursed knowledge. Why would you do this to us @zachweinersmith.bsky.social ?

www.smbc-comics.com/comic/nuke

The Picard-Worf interactions in this episode were great. Michael Dorn was great portraying a man who was righteous, strong and wrong.

150,000 students, 5,000 deans and one lecturer. Every year the lecturer will be told that they really need to increase their contact hours, and aren't pulling their weight on committees.