Nick @internic@qoto.org

I have a favour to ask of a condensed matter physicist on behalf of a friend.

If you class yourself as a "condensed matter physicist", or "condensed matter physics adjacent", would you mind giving me a ping?

Thanks.

(PS: Please boost for reach ... much obliged)

#Physics #CondensedMatterPhysics

@felipe now this is a super interesting question that I do NOT have much insight into, maybe @flourn0 actually would since conscientiousness is often modeled as a personality trait in my limited understanding. The only geneticist stuff that comes to mind is Paige Harden's work? But I do not have the genetics background to really be informed here! I have seen some criticism of the entangling of self-regulation with conscientiousness and other complex trait stuff (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36326625/ )

An NPR investigation found that high-ranking Louisiana health officials ordered staff to stop promoting vaccines for COVID, flu and mpox.

This is unacceptable and must not be tolerated. When political appointees at health agencies prevent public health workers from doing their jobs, it kills people.

https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/12/20/nx-s1-5223440/louisiana-ban-public-health-promoting-covid-flu-mpox-vaccines-landry-rfk-jr-anti-vaccine

A very important point for parents of young children from Doctor of astrophysics Becky Smethurst: The International Space Station is a very bright light moving across the sky quite rapidly, and is easily confused with Santa's sleigh....
From ~2m 47s. Use this knowledge as you see fit.

https://youtu.be/KuTVjuXu7uE?t=167

Many Videos That Purport to Show Drones in New Jersey Likely Show Planes, Visual Analysis Finds
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/video/new-jersey-drones-planes-videos.html?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Home Page @home-page-newyorktimes

We are humbled and extremely grateful to the good humans of @SocialCoop who have decided to make a huge donation (https://opencollective.com/socialcoop/expenses/226852) of £500 GBP to support our project 🎉🎉🎉

We intend to put this to good use in our participatory budgeting process, funding federation members and allies to work on improving our software and self-management processes.

Thank you so much 💝💝💝

-- @decentral1se

@enoclue That’s the problem—auditing is so hard, even with full source. If nothing else, all it takes is one obscure bug that will let some attacker inject malware. Let me tell a true story to illustrate things…
Many years ago, I was working on a project when I learned that one team member had just been arrested and charged with hacking. I went to management and told them this; for my pains, I was told to organize an audit team. The first hole I found, and it was a serious one, was inadvertently introduced by an audit team member. (We had commit logs, but on top of that she remembered writing the code.) The next was worse. There was a bug that, coupled with a common configuration error, led to root compromise—and the comments didn't agree with the code, but for understandable reasons given the exact situation.
On even days, I think it was a subtle back door, but today is an odd day, so I think it was just an ordinary bug—and the hardest-to-locate bug I've ever found, at this point in almost 60 years of programming.

Report: US considers banning TP-Link routers over security flaws, ties to China
Founded in China, TP-Link makes routers popular in US homes and businesses.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/report-us-considers-banning-tp-link-routers-over-security-flaws-ties-to-china/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

🎉 We have moved! 🚀
Our new Mastodon account is now on mastodon.social 🐘

Stay connected with us here: @MPI_Magdeburg

Wishing everyone happy holidays and a joyful season! 🎄✨

#HappyHolidays #MastodonMigration

If You’re #Pregnant, Here’s What You Should Know About the Medical Procedures That Could Save Your Life
—

#Women experiencing #pregnancy loss in states with #abortion bans told us they wished they had known what to expect and how to advocate for themselves. We created this guide for anyone who finds themselves in the same position.

#News #Health #Healthcare #Doctors #Miscarriage

https://propub.li/4gC4CaV

Following Elsevier's decision to raise the article processing charge for NeuroImage to $3,450, all editors (inc. chief editors) from NeuroImage and NeuroImage:Reports have resigned, effective immediately.

I am joining this action and have also resigned.

Full announcement: https://imaging-neuroscience.org/Announcement.pdf

The starlings seemed to be enjoying the relatively calm weather. And photographing Iceland in this weather is kinda like working in easy mode.

@FelisCatus wrote:

"But because these theories are so perfectly fine, each in its own domain of validity..."

I don't think the Standard Model of particle physics and general relativity are "perfectly fine" in their domains of validity.

First, nobody has given a mathematically rigorous formulation of the Standard Model, so it could be inconsistent, and we certainly don't know *for sure* what predictions it makes, though in practice we are very good at extracting predictions from it. We don't know if the Higgs destabilizes the vacuum, computations of the proton mass use a lot of ad hoc assumptions, etc.

Second, while general relativity is much closer to being mathematically rigorous, the overall features of the Universe as predicted by general relativity require dark matter, whose properties are mysterious - if it exists at all. If dark matter doesn't exist, general relativity is in trouble.

Also, general relativity probably breaks down when it predicts infinite curvature at the Big Bang and black holes.

I'm mentioning these problems not because these theories are bad, but because right now we *need* problems, to help us make progress.

"Which brings me (at last) to my question, namely is technological progress the current limit to contemporary theoretical physics (at least insofar as to seeking for a "theory of everything") ?"

We'll see! We are still improving our experiments to better understand dark matter, dark energy, neutrinos, etc. Maybe we'll make progress experimentally, but maybe not.

As mentioned there are also lots of problems with the Standard Model and general relativity, so we might make progress purely theoretically - but maybe not.

J. J. Thomson, who was born #OTD in 1856, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for his discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be found.

Thomson was also a teacher, and seven of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes: Ernest Rutherford, Lawrence Bragg, Charles Barkla, Francis Aston, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Richardson and Edward Victor Appleton.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Thomson

Books by J.J. Thomson at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/38322

#books #science #physics

Is it petty to be annoyed at all of the “Microsoft released a docx to markdown tool” statements when the tool itself is mostly a wrapper for pre-existing tools they had nothing to do with—many of which had to put in a lot of effort to figure out Microsoft’s garbage office formats with all too little documentation and help?

Asking, uh, for a friend.

#Introduction Hi #fediverse ! We’re the European Southern Observatory, and we design, build and operate ground-based telescopes.

One of them is our Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in #Chile. It will have a 39 m mirror, and its rotating enclosure will weigh 6100 tonnes, or about 700 mastodons!

We’re looking forward to chatting with all of you about #astronomy

📷 ESO/G. Vecchia

#astrodon #astrophysics #space #science

Some personal news: Excited to team up with @snarfed.org to form A New Social, a non-profit focused on building cross-protocol services and tools for the open social web.

It's time for social media to be centered around people, not platforms. Let's build bridges 🌐

https://www.anew.social/hello-social-web/

Physics often "goes out on a limb", developing theories that nobody can test - and often these limbs come crashing down. String theory and loop quantum gravity are crashing down as we speak, but there are plenty of earlier examples.

Neither of these theories truly make testable predictions. That is, starting from the core theory, without adding ad hoc assumptions or making vast leaps of logic, these theories predict essentially *nothing* that we see around us - much less make new predictions that we can test with experiments today.

However, physicists are not shy about making ad hoc assumptions and making vast leaps of logic!

So, string theorists have a long track record of 'predicting' particles and other effects that are just out of reach by current detection methods, and claiming that future experiments will see them. When these experiments are carried out, these predictions are always falsified. But string theorists argue that the core of string theory is not falsified, only the extra ad hoc assumptions and leaps of logic. So string theory carries on.

Hossenfelder gives a good explanation in the video.

And yet, despite having installed string theorists in top positions worldwide, string theory is gradually fading. Physics departments are less likely to hire string theorists than they were 10 years ago - and that was also true 10 years ago. So it seems the tree branch is slowly breaking off the tree, and will eventually crash onto the forest floor, opening up a bit more light for new plants to grow.

Loop quantum gravity has similar problems, but far fewer people work on it, and it hasn't managed to dominate institutions of higher learning in the same way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JYwmxZBjZQ

Companies issuing RTO mandates “lose their best talent”: Study
Despite the risks, firms and Trump are eager to get people back into offices.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/companies-issuing-rto-mandates-lose-their-best-talent-study/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social