R.I.P. Sergei Shandarin, great cosmologist and lovely human.
Category: Uncategorised
Having not lived in the US since around 2000, I have just had my first a “non-fire emergency” (i.e., active shooter) information meeting.
My 9-yr old wants to start out on Minecraft (& I kinda want to). They have a fairly old iPad to use; we’ve also got a much more recent MBP and iPad Pro which are mostly mine… What is the best setup for them (and me)? Should we go with iPad and run that on macOS too? What about server choice?
First loaf in six months. (Needs work.)
I am very excited to be sitting down with a cup of coffee and an actual print copy of the Sunday New York Times (for all its well-documented faults of late).
In DC, on a Capitol tour with my expat family. Easy & appropriate to be cynical about symbols of democracy 5 days before the awful inauguration. But somber & moving, even—or especially—speeches by senate Democrats excoriating Republican tax cuts for the wealthy disguised as populism.
New Year Dawn
R.I.P. poet and Japanese Peanuts-translator Shuntaro Tanikawa. Here’s a great 1952 poem, “Two Billion Light-Years of Loneliness” about outer space, the gravitational force, and the difficulty of being a human (or a Martian) in a big Universe. Also, sneezing.
More famous views of Mt Fuji — from our apartment building, 90 miles away, morning and evening.
(Reposted from 27 November to deal with technical issues.)
Recently discovered that, on a clear day, we can see Mt Fuji, 90 miles distant, from our apartment building.
And, because it’s cool and scary, here’s a version after processing with Apple’s new “Clean Up”: 
Try to spot the difference…
(Reposted from 25 November to deal with technical issues.)
Le beajoulais nouveau est arrivé, même au Japon!
(Reposted from 23 November to deal with technical issues.)
Testing…
Kind of obsessed with our view of Fuji-san.
More famous views of Mt Fuji — from our apartment building, 90 miles distant, morning and evening.
Just discovered that, on a clear day, we can see Mt Fuji, 90 miles distant, from our apartment building.
And, because it’s cool and scary, here’s a version after processing with Apple’s new “Clean Up”:
Le beajoulais nouveau est arrivé, même au Japon!
I’ve heard more (good, mostly American) jazz as background music in shops and cafes over the last three months in Japan than the previous fifty years in the US and UK.
Hard work is good work.
Somewhere between stupefaction and fury.
Seen earlier on a slide:
We are in the Golden Age of Theoretical Particle Physics, free from any experimental hints that would restrict free thinking.
Hmmmm… I see some possible problems with this approach.
No one is completely normal for the same reason you don’t have any Monte Carlo samples near the peak of a multivariate probability distribution.
Two views of Mount Fuji, famous or otherwise.
Nobel prize in physics for the development of machine learning techniques. Interesting choice — incredibly consequential (it lies behind large language models like ChatGPT etc), but arguably not “physics”.
From Ninomiya House, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan.
We’re on a supposedly fast (tourist-filled) boat from Gili islands to Sanur on Bali. Rough water, and engine has cut out nine or ten times so far. 🤞 (Update: we made it — late, fume-sodden and queasy…)
Today’s travel highlights include drinking Indonesian civet coffee at Kopi Loewak Mataram and choreographed dancing to Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting” with a group of Malaysian tourists at the Borobudur Buddhist Temple in Java (as one does).
R.I.P. John J Quenby, emeritus professor of Physics at Imperial College. John had a wide-ranging career at the intersection of particle physics and astrophysics, with interests from cosmic rays to dark matter and gravitational waves, and served as one of the first heads of Astrophysics at Imperial.
It’s the summer solstice so time for my annual reminiscence of seeing Sun Ra and Don Cherry celebrate the rising sun from Battery Park in Manhattan with @disquiet in 1989.
I still haven’t made it to Stonehenge for the celebrations, but Lisa has (more on this later).
