👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻

Just saw an ad for Claude where they say “find your problem.”

First time I’ve seen AI advertise itself as a solution in search of a problem.

Very positive to extremely positive

I think they are real scientists. I also think there are lots of non-scientists who don't think of science as creative. But they're all wrong.

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

Yes, in retrospect I see how it could look like I was contrasting there, but my intent was to lament the fact that some people see a contrast.

Not at all! The idea machine is where proposals and hypotheses and new experiments and theory come from, how we fix problems in experiments and simulations. It's how we turn data points into interpretation and a scientific narrative. The whole endeavor is creative.

I certainly will!

I don't disagree! But I do think there are people who do, or who don't see it that way.

I recall, for example, a conversation in which a postdoc told me that the only things that had value were ones that could be quantified. 😶

Many scientists I know love and appreciate and do all sorts of creative pursuits! But it's also not hard to find disdain for things that aren't "hard science."

I think scientists are sometimes dismissive of creative work. It's sad for a lot of reasons, one of which is certainly that creative work makes the world a richer place to live. Another one is that scientists are extremely dependent on the idea machine and ought to celebrate all its many dispensers.

When my wife was a teenager, she was trying to get a horse back into its stall after riding, and it stepped on her foot. Not on accident, not in passing. It put its hoof on top of her foot and pressed down so she couldn't move. Why? Just because.

There are dozens of us

💀

Gotta give it up for nurses tho

I had to do chores instead of the work I needed to do and now I’m too mad to work

Rats 😭

As I see it only ONE person came to your defense after that hot dog stunt you just pulled. So...

This is just the correct way to eat a hot dog tho, except I'm a ketchup guy

I think it's seasonal... maybe they just celebrated Canadian Christmas?

cold french fries ftw

I have been saying that shows need to explain how their characters got from one timeline to another

Correct

My crappy TV screen can't even show things that dark. Full brightness ftw

You should be able to control the speed so that no time is wasted between turns.

Me, Friday night: you guys gotta clean your room before you can play video games tomorrow

Later:

Kid 1: dad can you think of a system that keeps our room cleaner?

Me: what about putting stuff away when you’re done with it?

Later:

Kid 2: we’re going to clean our room every Saturday

It's more like pancake batter spiked with cinnamon. But cornbread peach cobbler sounds great! My wife made a cornmeal rhubarb cake a while back and I made that NYT blueberry upside down cornmeal cake a couple times this summer.

Read this as "halloween candles" and though "ok well I can't disagree with ALL of this."

The Street Corn Trick You’ll Want to Use All Summer No fireworks needed—this cobbler steals the show with juicy blueberries and buttery crumble. It’s the perfect sweet sleeper hit to round out your July 4th party spread.

We came across sonker from a recipe PURPORTING to be a cobbler. It was amazing but distinctly not a cobbler.

This was one of the most influential PhD theses in all of astrophysics. Knowing what stars are made of and what temperature they are allows you to do basically everything else.