Nick has moved to Mathstodon @internic@qoto.org

Your 80-year old reminder of the ethical decision you make if you choose to dissociate your fantasies of space exploration & love of rockets from the politics of the people building & launching them.

Credit: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), via Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_141-1879,_Rakete_V2_nach_Start_cropped.jpg

So grateful in an era where so much online advice comes from generative AI without any grounding in evidence, that someone has actually made a robot to test the best phone cables.

It may seem like a small thing, but it really matters.

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/chargers/which-charging-cables-last-longest-a2032406624/

Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today.

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the "What's Cool" button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic...

https://jwz.org/b/yka7

Ever wonder when your system last updated a package when using a Debian or Ubuntu Linux? Let's check Firefox, for example. Type this:

```
grep -B4 firefox /var/log/apt/history.log
```

See https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-ubuntu-linux-find-package-installed-updated-date/ for more info.

#debian #ubuntu #linux #sysadmin

In the past few weeks, Apple canceled the following:

a) A multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI

b) Apple officially cancels autonomous driving permit (Apple already scrapped its self-driving electric car project after ten years of research)

c) Apple engineers confirmed that AIs don't understand reasoning and stuff like that.

While the whole tech industry is going AI-first, Apple is more cautious and isn't buying AI buzz. What do you think this indicates?

Someone in misinformation research really needs to follow-up with all the biologists and other researchers (so many grad student open science folks!!) who worked to keep floods of misinformation about covid off preprint servers as best they could. It's an invisible heroic battle that hasn't been talked about enough and I've only heard about it from personal conversations. Way more interested in this than Wikipedia editing or whatever.

I don't know what's more astonishing: the new typesetting language José Reyes explains here, or the depth and quality of the explanation.

https://blog.jreyesr.com/posts/typst/

#typst #latex

This has been my personal experience with MS Copilot: the (small) improvements in coding speed are not worth the vigilance with which you have to review the generated code.
https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/sorry-genai-is-not-going-to-10x-computer?r=dz8ws&utm_medium=ios

NPR: All the available evidence suggests that a miniscule number of noncitizens vote illegally in federal elections and not in numbers that would sway the outcome of any race.#news #NPR https://www.npr.org/2024/10/12/nx-s1-5147789/voting-election-2024-noncitizen-fact-check-trump

Convolutional neural networks—the machine-learning systems routinely used for image recognition—are inherently limited, according to a new study by @lamaral and colleagues. #ConvNets fail on data above a certain threshold of complexity. They lean too heavily on shortcuts—spurious correlations that don’t generalize—and on localized features such as texture, to the neglect of the overall scene. h/t @manlius https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0213905 #AI

When I can step back from the salaries involved (otherwise excruciating) it's really funny to watch computer science gradually and weirdly rediscover many classic statistics problems as it reinvents its own applied statistics

New job and new place means new #introduction post!

Hi, I'm Doro!
I'm a #Physics PostDoc at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics near #Munich, Germany! I play with ultracold atoms in lattices of laser light to simulate other quantum systems!
I'm also a fan of open source software (#FOSS), #Linux, and I code in #python for work and for fun!
I love SciFi in all forms, especially #StarTrek and #DoctorWho.
No tolerance for discrimination of any kind.

This, but with chemistry instead of physics.

Has the literature prize been announced yet?

From my new essay about America’s abuse cycle at the hands of toxic political party-parents…

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/wait-til-daddy-gets-home-americas

“We can build the web we want to see.” @molly0xfff kicked off XOXO 2024's conference with a hopeful talk about building Web3 Is Going Just Great, and how we can “push the web back towards the wonderful, joyful, beautiful place it used to be.” https://xoxofest.com/2024/videos/molly-white

In 1596, Kepler claimed that the planetary orbits would only follow "God's design" if there were two more planets: one between Mars and Jupiter and one between Mercury and Venus. Later folks came up with the Titius-Bode rule. This says there should be a planet whose orbital radius is

0.4 + 0.3 × 2ⁿ

times the distance between the Earth and Sun.

• For n = 0 we get Venus.
• For n = 1 we get Earth.
• For n = 2 we get Mars.
• For n = 3 we get... NOTHING???
• For n = 4 we get Jupiter.
• For n = 5 we get Saturn.
• For n = 6, this rule correctly predicted the location of another planet: Uranus.

So, 24 astronomers called the "celestial police" looked between Mars and Jupiter. And in 1801 one of them found a small object in the right place! Later people found other asteroids in a belt between Mars and Jupiter, but the first was the biggest: Ceres.

In 2015 we sent a probe called Dawn to investigate Ceres. It found something wonderful.

The surface of Ceres is a mix of ice and hydrated minerals like carbonates and CLAY! It probably doesn't have an internal ocean of liquid water like Jupiter's moon Europa. But it seems that brine still flows through its outer mantle and reaches the surface!

A new paper argues that Ceres contains a 𝑙𝑜𝑡 of ice, and was once an ocean-covered world:

"We think that there's lots of water-ice near Ceres surface.... People used to think that if Ceres was very icy, the craters would deform quickly over time, like glaciers flowing on Earth, or like gooey flowing honey. However, we've shown through our simulations that ice can be much stronger in conditions on Ceres than previously predicted if you mix in just a little bit of solid rock.""

https://phys.org/news/2024-09-asteroid-ceres-ocean-world-slowly.html

Astronomers found evidence for a long-theorized mechanism that helps forming stars to grow by drawing material from the surrounding disk - magnetized disk winds. These winds remove angular momentum and thus allow material to reach smaller radii

https://www.mpia.de/news/science/2024-13-jwst-disk-wind

📣 Science Job Opportunity 📣

Postdoctoral positions available in gravitational-wave physics and astrophysics at the @mpi_grav in Potsdam. Join our thriving research environment and work on cutting-edge projects in gravitational-wave astronomy, numerical relativity, and astrophysics. Apply now!

👉 https://www.aei.mpg.de/1183887/acr-postdoc-2025

#GravitationalPhysics #PostdocPositions #MaxPlanckInstitute