Albion Lawrence

Also contains lizard lassoing and Anole Annals

Has Your Scientific Work Been Cut? We Want to Hear.

has your scientific work been cut? @nytimes.com wants to hear from you.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/c...

A well-turned sentence is an inspiring beginning to the working day.

I'm sad to report that Rainer (Rai) Weiss passed away yesterday at age 92. Rai developed the design for LIGO, he and Kip got it funded, trained countless researchers, and received the 2017 Nobel Prize. Rai always had time for students and treated us as equals. May his memory be a blessing

If you put the DOGE guys on a desert island where the only way out was to say the magic words “I’m not sure what the answer is, let me consult someone who has worked on this problem for a long time” they would all starve to death

Mary K. Gaillard, 86, Physicist Who Probed the Subatomic Universe, Dies

Mary K Gaillard, a theorist who had a knack for telling experimental physicists where to look, died in her home on May 23 at 86.

Dr. Gaillard was an unpaid scientist at CERN for more than a decade, & the first woman physicist hired & tenured at Berkeley:

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/s...

An Agreement That Settles Nothing BY THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CHAPTER OF THE AAUP The Agreement between the federal government and Columbia University announced on July 24, 2025, has been presented as a settlement of Title VI violat…

"In the absence of strong and principled leadership from Columbia’s Board of Trustees and Acting President, it falls to the faculty, above all, to defend the values and norms that have defined the university and allowed it to flourish." academeblog.org/2025/07/29/a...

‘Things keep evolving into anteaters.’ Odd animals arose at least 12 separate times Findings speak to the dramatic impact ants and termites can have on mammalian evolution

Inspiring! www.science.org/content/arti...

This Simple Chart Explains Why Columbia Caved To Trump The Muppets Who Actually Run the University

www.programmablemutter.com/p/this-simpl...

The cited cost of this putative center ranges from $500m to $1b. Meanwhile, over at Harvard’s School of Public Health, a $200m budget gap due to the Trump admin breaking hundreds of NIH and NSF research contracts has already produced hundreds of layoffs, including of TT faculty. Priorities.

Academic freedom mostly means freedom to work on something for 10 years and still not submit it

Miles Reid on Andrew Wiles solving Fermat's Last Theorem: "it goes without saying that an individual with a total of only 14 publications to his credit who spends 7 years sulking in his attic would be a strong candidate for early retirement at an aggressive British research department."

Title card for Koyaanisqatsi, with the name of the movie superimposed on a long exposure of a complex highway intersection at night, except it's Zohraanisqatsi.

Someone on Twitter posted that they had run into Philip Glass at their lower Manhattan polling place, saying nice things about Mamdani.

The campaign put this up as a quote-tweet within the hour.

who would the New York Times and Wall Street want in charge of New York's fire department: an upstart young firefighter or a serial arsonist? The answer may surprise you

Brandeis faculty and staff at the Waltham No Kings demonstration, holding signs reading: "No King! Fund Science", "Keep ICE where it belongs" (held by Sabine von Mering dressed as a polar bear), "Emergency is here! Impeach Trump", and "Stand with Ukraine".

Brandeis faculty and staff out for #NoKings in Waltham! L to R: Matthew Headrick, Sabine von Mering (as a bear), Abigail Arnold, Irina Dubnina, and Toni Shapiro-Phim. Matt,Sabine, and Irina are members of @aaupbrandeis.bsky.social .

At 1pm Eastern today, 200 scientists will be doing a 100 hour livestream about all of the ways that the administration, through DOGE, is endangering us, through the dismantling of the weather and climate science apparatuses. Let people know and tune in. You don't have to watch all 100 hours.

There is also a BlueSky account: @aaupbrandeis.bsky.social

(We are awaiting recognition as an official advocacy chapter)

The Brandeis members of the AAUP have a website!

www.aaup-brandeis.org

It's neat that instead of taking on entities that have been gradually eroding the quality and very concept of education for profit, politicians and pundits have spent the last decade focusing on threats to higher ed like "the existence of trans people" or "people who oppose race science on campus."

If a degree is just a piece of paper you need to get a desirable, good-paying job, someone invents a machine that can do it for you, and the notion that you might go to college to develop your mind for its own, non-remunerative sake is a punch line and an elite privilege, why not use the machine?

This is the last talk of the 2024-2025 academic year; the seminars will restart in the fall. Most opf the past talks are recorded and available at engage.aps.org/gpc/resource... and are a wonderful resource for digging into the physics of climate.

These seminars, put on by the Topical Group on the Physics of Climate, are aimed at students, postdocs, and faculty interested in learning more about current work and major questions in the physics of climate. Questions at the end of the talks are encouraged.

Coming next week! On May 14, 12 EDT, @annalisa-clim.bsky.social will give the @apsphysics.bsky.social virtual Climate Physics seminar, on "Multiscale physics and ocean-based climate solutions: the case of alkalinity enhancement". Register to receive a Zoom link engage.aps.org/gpc/resource...

They do share a birthday!

"Yo human, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, and I NEED THAT BANANA"

(In all seriousness he is a great dog. Just, you know, a lab.)

Photo of my yellow English labrador retriever R Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller staring fixedly at a banana

10 years of total devotion...to his stomach.

Many thanks of course to Brandeis/Caltech postdoc Jack Skinner, and my colleague/Pivot mentor Jörn Callies, both way too smart to be on social media.