Bryan J. Field

Collective hapax legomenon?

Rethinking Our Place in the Universe The new map of the Universe’s expansion history released by the DESI Collaboration offers hints at a breakdown of the standard model of cosmology.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument has created a cosmic map of unprecedented scale. Its newly published findings, combined with those from other observations, suggest that dark energy changes over time.

For undergrads, I like Advanced Engineering Mathematics by Kreyszig. Incredible number of high quality problems.

Call me an old softie, but I loved Arfken and Weber. The edition I am most familiar with is light on differential geometry. My “off the wall” recommendation for this is the first chapter of Chandrasekhar‘s Mathematical Theory of Black Holes. It has everything you need and I could understand it.

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Brendan Loper. #NewYorkerCartoons

#GenZombies💔

I won't lie to you. A lot of people saw that.

I have never seen anything like that in Earth weather...

This is not a drill people!!

My spirit animal...

One of my absolute favorites. I wish it wasn’t so relevant and had aged at least a little poorly. Literally a masterpiece.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

We'll bring crab!

a group of men are standing in a hallway and one of them is saying we are the united states government ALT: a group of men are standing in a hallway and one of them is saying we are the united states government

RIP Robert Redford.

Growing up, I loved “Sneakers,” “Three Days of the Condor,” and “The Sting.” Can’t argue with “Spy Game,” “The Natural,” “The Great Gatsby,” or “Out of Africa.”

He will be missed.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfPV...

and if some god shall wreck me yet again on the wine-dark berry compote

This Is the Greatest Threat to Our Human Future Co-authors Michael Mann and Peter Hotez share 5 key insights from their new book, Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces that Threaten Our World.

“This Is the Greatest Threat to Our Human Future” | @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social and I discuss with @nextbigidea.bsky.social about our new book, #ScienceUnderSiege:

nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/gre...

Ah... every cover of Omni magazine from my past!

Imagine what you could learn if you spent a year with the greatest shitposters in the greatest subreddits in the world...

NASA discovers ‘clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars’ Detailed analysis of images of speckled rocks found by NASA’s Perseverance rover has found a “potential biosignature.”

Exciting times… wapo.st/4mapyHQ

Mystery Martian minerals hint at the planet’s complex geochemical past The Perseverance rover on Mars has observed unusual minerals associated with organic matter — raising questions about the geochemistry of ancient Mars.

The Perseverance rover on Mars has observed unusual minerals associated with organic matter — raising questions about the geochemistry of ancient Mars.

go.nature.com/469V1nr

This is very exciting...

Physical Science Careers Disrupted Documenting the Impact of Federal Funding & Policy Changes

The American Institute of Physics @aip.bsky.social wants to preserve the human stories behind the current dramatic shifts in science policy and funding.

If you work in physical science and want to contribute, anonymously or with attribution, visit this site.
🧪🔭

www.aip.org/library/ex-l...

Slightly diminish a book:

Zen and the Art of Moped Maintenance

From NYT story on NVidia opposing AI chipset regulations: "The chip giant Nvidia, which could make as much as $50 billion in A.I. chip sales to China over the next year, has responded with an unconventional lobbying blitz that tars the Republican-proposed rules as a product of left-wing paranoia peddled by people it calls A.I. doomers. The company’s furious effort has muddied the A.I. policy debate while shocking Republicans who support the new measures. And it has dragged perplexed Washington insiders into a parochial Silicon Valley dispute between people known as accelerationists, who want to speed A.I.’s development to unlock trillions of dollars in economic value, and doomers, who worry that the technology could destroy humanity."

This NYT story on Nvidia opposing AI regulations informs me that the debate over AI is between people who want to "unlock trillions of dollars in economic value" and "doomers"

no room for people just generally worried about environmental impact, fuzzy numbers or broad product misrepresentation

Hegseth is now the Secretary of War, which is fitting I guess as RFK jr is basically the Secretary of Pestilence. We just need Famine and Death to round it out.

The Sun is fainter than the Moon, at least in gamma-rays Across all wavelengths of light, the Sun is brighter than the Moon. Until we went to the highest energies, and saw a gamma-ray surprise.

The Sun is fainter than the Moon, at least in gamma-rays

What shines brighter: the Sun or the Moon?

In visible light, it's clearly the Sun, as the Moon only reflects the Sun's light.

But in gamma-rays? The Moon wins, by a landslide.

Here's how.
bigthink.com/starts-with-...
#space #astro #gamma