… Should the containment fail, and the antimatter make contact with normal matter, the resulting pulse of energy would be so feeble, the load doesn’t even warrant a radioactive label.”
www.theguardian.com/science/2026...
Antimatter Trucker is finally a job title! But don’t worry, this isn’t going to be “The Wages of Fear, 2026”:
“The device on Cern’s truck will carry about 1,000 antimatter particles, weighing about a billionth of a trillionth of a gram. …
"AI" is not a stochastic parrot.🦜
I wrote this piece a couple weeks ago, but it was hard for me to finish up given AI's role in society and war over the past few weeks. I should share it at some point though. Not perfect, but here it is.
medium.com/@margarmitch...
Doctor: I’m not sure what’s going on.
Me: So, time to send Olivia Wilde and Kal Penn to break into my house to search for drugs, toxins and mould, while gossiping about their colleagues’ sex lives?
Doctor: Nah. I think we’ll do a bone marrow biopsy.
Me: It was worth a try.
I spent 4 months trying to answer a simple question: has this book been translated into my language?
Turns out no one tracks this. Not ISBN registries. Not Amazon. Not Google. Not libraries.
So I built a tool that crosses four databases to piece it together.
zenodot.app
I’ve yet to watch “Dark Winds”, but since 2 seasons just popped up on Netflix in Australia, a reminder to Australian viewers that it is also available streaming free on SBSOnDemand, who have 3 seasons, and SBS deserve the ad revenue more than Netflix.
“Crisis Actors” / “크라이시스 액터스”
“Mitochondrial Eve” / “미토콘드리아 이브”
“Dark Integers” / “암흑 정수”
“Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies” / “방랑자의 궤도”
“Sleep and the Soul” / “잠과 영혼”
A new collection of my stories in Korean
잠과 영혼, East Asia Publishing, Seoul, 2026. Translated by Kim Sang-hoon. ISBN13 979-1193078808
Contents:
“Crystal Nights” / “크리스털의 밤”
“This Is Not the Way Home” / “고향으로 돌아가는 길”
“You and Whose Army?” / “너 혼자서?”
“Dream Factory” / “꿈 공장”
For example, it tells us that to accelerate such a rocket to half lightspeed, 𝑣=1/2, it will end up with a payload fraction of √[1/3].
We can also solve for the mass ratio:
𝑚₂/𝑚₁ = √[(1–𝑣)/(1+𝑣)]
But this result also gives us the “rocket equation” for an idealised relativistic rocket, that emits only photons as exhaust and works with perfect efficiency.
(𝑚₁, 0) for the nucleus
(γ, –γ) for the gamma ray
𝑚₂ (1, 𝑣)/√(1–𝑣²) for the recoiling nucleus
with γ, 𝑣 unknown.
Conservation of energy-momentum
(𝑚₁, 0) = (γ, –γ) + 𝑚₂ (1, 𝑣)/√(1–𝑣²)
gives
𝑣 = (𝑚₁² – 𝑚₂²) / (𝑚₁² + 𝑚₂²)
γ = (𝑚₁² – 𝑚₂²) / (2 𝑚₁)
From gamma decay to photon rockets
Suppose an atomic nucleus with mass m₁ emits a gamma ray and ends up with mass m₂. How fast does the nucleus recoil?
In units where the speed of light is 1, the time and space components of the energy-momentum vectors are:
“The Sticky” is a preposterous, hugely enjoyable Fargo-esque crime caper, with Margo Martindale in overdrive, a cameo by Jamie Lee Curtis, and the Fort Knox of maple syrup.
Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Last week, for the first time in 20 years, a man died from a treatable snake bite on my home island of Martinique. He had asked chatGPT what to do instead of going the hospital. He missed the 6 hours treatable window.
On top of all this, not one word about the right of Syria to deport unwanted foreigners back to their country of citizenship.
In the Boston Globe behind a paywall. As I undertand it a *physicist* derides me as out of touch for not worrying superintelligent AI is going to kill us all. I'm not worried because we are nowhere near close to even human level. But black holes, they worry me! www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/24/b...
The radiologists’ target turned out to be 60 bpm. I can’t answer the second question.
It’s just crushing to watch an actor of Idris Elba’s calibre deliver a look of utter desolation to the camera, as it dawns on him that the plot of Hijack Season 2 is at least a hundredfold less believable than Season 1.
Tomorrow I will be taking a drug to slow down my heart sufficiently for it to be imaged in a CT scan, which seems like the ideal opportunity to also cheat at snooker.
Just to be clear (because I've had questions):
*** We are currently open to submissions. ***
There are certainly ways in which this conclusion might be avoided, but the simplest assumptions favour the notion that in a spatially infinite universe where the contents obeys the same probability distribution everywhere, there will be infinite numbers of extremely similar versions of everything.
… and certainly far from uniform, the existence of whatever we decide counts as “our version of the Earth” [however much of our surroundings we want to include in that] makes it seem implausible that this is a “zero-probability” event that won’t be repeated in any other such regions.
There is a hard upper bound on the mass and energy in a region of a given size before it collapses into a black hole with limited degrees of freedom. So arguably the relevant phase space is coarse-grained and finite, and though the probability distribution across the cells would be very complex…
In this context, “copies of the Earth” involves a coarse-grained phase space, with sufficiently close points lying in the same cell.
A spatially infinite universe would contain a countably infinite number of disjoint regions, with a certain probability distribution for their total matter & energy.
In general relativity, there is a number called the “affine parameter” along every geodesic, even null geodesics, which can only be changed by an *affine* function if it is to satisfy the geodesic equation. So we can use this to order and compare events on a photon’s world line.
… but they will be connected by affine functions that preserve “C is twice as far from A as B is.”
(An affine function is f(x) = p x + q.)
In special relativity this is simple: pick any reference frame in which the photon’s world line lies in the (x,t) plane, and use either the x or t coordinates of A, B, C. Different reference frames meeting this condition will assign different values to these x and t coords …
But also, not only are the events along a photon’s world line distinct, you can order them (A, B, C, ...) and you can even say “event C is twice as far along the world line from event A as event B”, notwithstanding zero spacetime intervals all the way.
Firstly, saying “for a photon” is a kind of category error. It is literally impossible to have a clock at rest with respect to a photon, so it is meaningless to talk about proper time here the way you can for a massive particle.
