There are still tickets available to hear me answer the question “Is Everything We Know About The Big Bang Wrong?” and talk about The Random Universe tomorrow, Tuesday, 16 June at The Blues Kitchen in Brixton (London). The late show is sold out, but you can still get in for some early Pints of Knowledge at 5:45.
Statuses
Newest PhD student giving his first science talk to our group… (They are all much better at this stuff than we were at the same stage in our careers!)
Shocked but not surprised.
Trump Keeps Immunity from I.R.S., a Victory in a Long-Running Feud
Of course he doesn’t really care about the $1.8bn slush fund — that’s about helping other people (albeit maga criminals). Let’s see about the IRS deal.
The heat has broken just in time for us to have forgotten two of our sleeping bags on our camping trip.
Articles like these arguing that LLMs can’t be conscious simply because they are “mere formulas” are just a version of Searle’s (debatable!) “Chinese Room” argument. (I don’t think they’re conscious either, but that’s not why.)
The Mekons on how they made “Where Were You?” | The Guardian
@andrewhickey.500songs.com, only 3/4 of the way through the Dark Star episode, you’ve managed what none of my Deadhead friends, nor years of reading Xgau, have done: made me wish I had seen the Grateful Dead (possibly with appropriate psychedelic enhancement) when I had the chance 40 years ago.
@siracusa@mastodon.social @atpfm@mastodon.social For me, terminal session restore works — it keeps scrollback & restores directories. Sometimes the tab/window title stops tracking. And there’s a (longstanding, unfixed, race condition) bug in the interaction between the shell and the terminal.
Happy to find myself on a bookshelf with Damian Hirst, Nick Cave and Manolo Blahnik.
Claude is helping me run some code, preparing inputs, monitoring outputs, &c. It kept making badly wrong predictions about how long the run would take, and told me that it was “doing it in my head”, by which it meant it “was computing the estimate inline as part of generating text”.
Thanks to some local heroes, the only officially designated river bathing spot in London is a short walk away. Let’s hope Thames Water can keep it clean enough to actually use.
River Thames in London gets first official bathing spot — The Guardian
Home state in London.
Invigilating (good British word) for the first time in a couple of years — year 4 Information Theory. Good luck!
Canvas Down! A hacker group has taken down the Canvas “Virtual Learning Environment” across many higher-ed institutions. Great: Imperial will be using Canvas starting next year…
“Workers of the world &c!…”
If you’ve read my book The Random Universe—about how scientists use models and probability to make sense of the cosmos—a short Goodreads review really increases the probability that other readers will find it. Even a sentence or two makes a difference.
Azaleas in bloom. Isabella plantation, Richmond Park, London.
Still time to come see me talk about The Random Universe in Oxford tomorrow night, Tuesday, 21 April! Epistemology! Probability! Physics! Cosmic tensions!
Failed sourdough. Icarus-like, it rose too high and fell too fast.
(Tasted ok, but a bit dense.)
There will be a “70 Up”, completing Michael Apted’s magnificent series of 7 Up documentaries! Watch them ASAP, if you haven’t already. (From The Guardian: Asif Kapadia to direct 70 Up, last chapter of influential ITV documentary series)
As someone who owes his passion for science, and his career, to early glimpses of the Apollo launches, I hope that Artemis II is just as inspiring today.
Discussing The Random Universe on The Resonance FM Science Show.
Seder plate, of a sort.
We thought we knew the shape of the universe. We were wrong | Scientific American — the topology of the Universe and our COMPACT collaboration. (The subhead conflates topology and geometry, but the article gets it right.)
Spending the day at the UK Cosmo meeting here at Imperial College, with excellent talks by young cosmologists from around the country. We’ll also be taking the opportunity to remember the great Tom Kibble, one of the founders of cosmology here at Imperial and throughout the UK (and the world).
Most ideas that disagree with the dominant scientific paradigm in any field are certainly wrong — even though the dominant paradigm is probably also wrong.
Water fountain water is the best water.
In honor of the coming vernal equinox, my first cycle ride into work since October.
