McCarthy never would have used that comma though

Taking long walks around Baltimore and admiring all the elaborate and unusual fire escapes on the sides of old buildings

MAGRERR CHRISMACKS

you're right, most of us never get famous

Brian Skinner on X: "Life cycle of a physicist: https://t.co/M3m4oHXX5z" / X Life cycle of a physicist: https://t.co/M3m4oHXX5z

(I made this dumb joke on twitter a few years ago: x.com/gravity_levi... )

Life cycle of a physicist:

A cartoon illustration of a vampire at an organ talking to another vampire. Caption reads "I really only know 'chopsticks' I'm embarrassed to say. But it's a very spooky 'chopsticks' in my opinion."

Chops. #grickledoodle #vampire #music #halloween #horror #cartoon #art #drawing #funny

This animation alone should win a science journalism award

my local library is pushing pro-AI propaganda at children smh

Live footage of Nobel committee giving the Physics prize to quantum computing.

It's because we're all sick of Trump and immediately scroll away whenever his face appears

Measurement is a classical process by definition (even in quantum mechanics), so I can only conclude that a "quantum measurement" is a normal measurement that has gone through a marketing transformation

They'll sing a different tune when I've published my brilliant and deeply moving debut novel: Bill Dung's Roman Adventure

It was like getting a preview of what the adult mind must be like, and I wasn't sure I liked it but I couldn't look away.

My parents had a bunch of these collections, and as a kid in the early 90s I read them with a kind of perverse fascination. There were clearly points of appeal to kids, but the focus was squarely on "adult themes" (risque, political, banal).

Promo video for the recent HSBC and IBM Quantum breakthrough in finance, if it was directed by Scott Aaronson.
scottaaronson.blog?p=9170

Book Review: The Great Gatsby by the Xerox 914 Photocopier Amid the rise of artificial intelligence, technophobes and Luddites have continued to insist that machines “can’t really write”—at least not the wa...

"Just as Jay Gatsby is an enigmatic larger-than-life figure driven to accumulate wealth at all costs in a futile bid for the love of Daisy Buchanan, the Xerox 914 beats on ceaselessly, printing page after page, for reasons that readers cannot fully comprehend."

South Carolina

that was true before this tweet

I've been doing some percolation calculations lately, and I decided that I was tired of letting my computer have all the fun

Cognitive scientists and AI researchers make a forceful call to reject “uncritical adoption" of AI in academia A new paper calls on academia to repel rampant AI in university departments and classrooms.

Cognitive scientists and AI researchers make a forceful call to reject “uncritical adoption" of AI in academia

#AI #GenAI #HigherEducation #ResearchIntegrity #WCRI2026 #WCRI

www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/cognitive-...

Good correction, which shows that I misremembered / omitted some context in my summary.
Weiss came up with the idea of an optical interferometric gravitational wave detector, which eventually became LIGO.

Much better to read his summary of what happened than mine:
www.kavliprize.org/rainer-weiss...

As someone who is never able to maintain focus on a single problem for more than a year or so, I'm so glad there are people like this in science.

(And of course I worry that the modern culture and pace of science is pushing them out)

Rainer Weiss life story Rainer Weiss life story

Just found this longer, and much better telling of the story: www.kavliprize.org/rainer-weiss...

Looks like I mostly remembered things correctly, but the full story is much better than my telling.

10/10 "Wait, could you actually detect a relative change in distance of order one part in 10^20?" He spent all summer thinking about it.

And that was the beginning of his obsession. It took 48 years from that moment to the first actual detection of a gravitational wave.

9/ The point of the problem was to show that there is a relative change in distance between the masses less than one part in 10^20, and you go "ahh, got it, the effect is negligible" and you move on.

But during the summer after the class ended, the problem stuck with him and kept bothering him.

8/ It was a simple homework exercise, and he showed it as part of the colloquium: the solution takes less than a page, and he claims that everyone in the class was able to solve it correctly.

7/ At one point he conceived of a homework problem that would make the point to his students that dynamical effects in GR are extremely weak. So he designed a little problem where you imagine two free masses passing light back and forth to each other as a gravitational wave passes by.

6/ He was assigned to teach the General Relativity course, which at the time was in the Engineering department because no one in Physics wanted to teach it. But Waiss (in his description) didn't know any relativity. So he struggled all semester to stay "at best one day ahead of my students".

5/ Weiss finished his PhD, bounced around as an instructor a bit, and eventually managed to get a junior faculty position at MIT's Research Laboratory for Electronics.