David Sloan

"English-Scotts-Irish" seems like a very specific way to say you don't like the Welsh.

Very nice work, well done! I've always loved a bit of numerical relativity in cosmology, particularly in that awkward Mixmaster phase, lots of weird and wonderful dynamical phenomena.

Relief as England manage to scrape past a superior Italian side in the World Cup.

...The T20 Cricket World Cup

Meet the 8 winners of our "How Quantum is Life?" essay competition with Paradox Science Institute.

$53,000 in prizes. And, as our Chief Scientific Officer David Sloan puts it, "a set of fantastic essays which give us insight into the nascent field of quantum biology."

This Valentine's Day, we'll be talking about life, not love. The winners of our 'How Quantum is Life?' competition are revealed 14 February.

Who's going to share the $53,000 prize pot?

The Resilience of Life to Astrophysical Events - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - The Resilience of Life to Astrophysical Events

I once wrote a paper broadly related to the idea - www.nature.com/articles/s41... It turns out that it's quite hard to kill *everything* on earth.

Presuming Lancashire ended up there following their performance in the county championship.

*that we know of

Whatever it is you think your society should be, this cannot be part of it.

They also missed "burn out horribly, divorce messily, die young".

UKRI: We want curiosity driven research so long as what you are curious about is how you can make our mates in industry a bunch of cash. None of this "science as a goal in its own right" nonsense.

When I set assignments for students, it's because I believe that the students will benefit from doing the work. Feeding it in to chatgpt is just a waste of everyone's time.

On the other hand, if chatgpt wants to sit in Teams meetings...

As usual, @acollierastro.bsky.social nails this. I sometimes wonder what fraction of academia is now a closed loop of chatgpt setting assignments, completing them and then marking the results. Why not just close the loop entirely and we can all go home?

So when I got to the first answer, then I got prompted with "Could it be anything else?" and "How would you know you've found all the solutions?" Finding myself on the other side of the desk many years later, I try to model my interviews on how she did it.

Not quite. My interviewer was brilliant - something that I only appreciated well after the fact. She had designed questions with multiple branching points and had places to stretch you at each of them. I think the real test was seeing how I dealt with working at the edge of what I understood.

People watch sci-fi and think "Ttechnology will be drastically different in a few hundred years, but society will be unchanged"

It took just 66 years to go from powered flight to moon landings. It took the UK 60 years to go from first female Member of Parliament to first female Prime Minister.

I'm endlessly amused by conservatives who think Star Trek isn't essentially a rebuttal of everything they believe.

I got this question in an undergrad admissions interview. Thought I was so clever...

Turns out there are multiple solutions - e^((2k -1/2)pi) for all integers k.

Dear Sir Paul, Re: Royal Society Code of Conduct I am sure that many scientists have written to you about the specific question of Elon Musk’s Fellowship and whether, under the Royal Society’s Code of Conduct, his retaining that Fellowship is appropriate. I will not rehash these issues. Instead, as a female scientist with extensive experience of activities aiming to increase equality, diversity and inclusion in the engineering and physical sciences sector, I am writing to you (in a personal capacity) to ask you to reconsider the statements you have recently made in this context to the UK press about the Royal Society’s Code of Conduct and how it is applied. A 2018 report from the joint National Academies of the United States of America, concluded that “sexual harassment is common in academic science, engineering, and medicine” and that “greater than 50 percent of women faculty and staff and 20–50 percent of women students encounter or experience sexually harassing conduct in academia”. This report described codes of conduct that make clear that sexual harassment is unethical and will not be tolerated as a “powerful incentive for change”. The authors also noted that sexual harassment can have significant and damaging effects on the integrity of research. In my own praxis, I have found that clear and consistently-implemented codes of conduct that address these issues make female scientists and engineers safer, and allow them to focus more effectively on their research. For codes of conduct to have such a positive effect, it is vital that sanctions for actions which transgress the code are meaningful and substantial.

I was hence aghast to realise that in an interview with the Financial Times published on 9/1/26, you appear to have suggested that the Royal Society “should only expel fellows if their science proved “faulty or fraudulent or highly defective””. Moreover, in a further interview with the Guardian on 11/1/26 you suggested that the code “may need to be looked at again”, with the implication that your aim would be to remove the option of sanctions on Fellows for reasons not strictly related to faults or defects in their research. I suggest that changing the Royal Society’s code of conduct so that the likelihood of serious sanctions for sexual harassment is reduced, would directly endanger women who interact with the Royal Society at events or otherwise, and would provide a licence to harass to the already powerful people on whom the Society bestows fellowship. The implications of your words - that under your leadership the only infringements of the code which are likely to receive the sanction of the Fellowship being removed are those related to research misconduct - already risk empowering harassers. You stated, in the Financial Times interview, that “there’s many bad people around, but they have made scientific advances”. Given this awareness of the possibility of bad actors in our scientific community, it is wholly irresponsible to suggest that the Royal Society would not act to sanction these people if they harass more vulnerable scientists. I am hence writing to request that you retract any suggestion that the Society’s Code of Conduct should be changed so that the only reason a Fellow might be sanctioned by the removal of their Fellowship is “faulty or fraudulent or highly defective” research. This action is necessary to safeguard female scientists, a requirement placed on the Society by safeguarding legislation and UK statutory guidance. Yours sincerely, Professor Rachel A. Oliver.

Following coverage over the weekend of Sir Paul Nurse's comments that suggested that the only reason that a Fellow should be expelled from @royalsociety.org is scientific misconduct, I have written to him to explain the risks such an attitude poses of increasing sexual harassment in STEM.

Due to diminishing returns on increasing efficiency, the time taken to cut wood up into n pieces is O(log n).

This is to enticing to leave - story time?

If you're available this summer, we're always one short of a full XI. Bat 3, field at slip, bowl first change?

I guess it's post your favourite Popcorn cover time: www.youtube.com/watch?v=O775...

‘Ruined my Christmas spirit’: McDonald’s removes AI-generated ad after backlash Commercial in Netherlands depicting festival-season chaos at ‘most terrible time of year’ prompted flurry of criticism online

Come on, Guardian, "McDonald's serves up slop" was right there...

www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Your brain uses 20 watts of power constantly. This is a massive reproductive fitness cost. Why can natural selection not reduce that cost?

Post-doc @ Auckland Looking for a cosmology post-doc at the University of Auckland

I'm hiring a postdoc -- come and do awesome cosmology with great people in one of the nicest cities in the world (not that I'm biased or anything) 🔭 🧪
cosmology.blogs.auckland.ac.nz/2025/12/12/p...

Image of Charlie from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia in front of a crazy wall of papers with lines drawn between them in a conspiracy theory way.

Last cosmology lecture today, so we had open questions. A student asked a question about quantum gravity...

Wow, that's incredible.

Of course, I can't prove that the whole of UK academia isn't a massive spam generator. Let me check my sent mail.

They might have a point.

Inverse challenge for the @zachweinersmith.bsky.social books: Divide by a hundred.

A year of solitude