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The Irish border problem isn’t actually solvable, right? #brexit

I have been coming to Paris pretty regularly over the last 30 years and I am always struck by the unique smell of the Metro.

Arrived in Paris for The Universe as a Quantum Lab with less than a couple of hours to go before my talk on a subject I don’t know much about.

We were listening to Bowie’s “Scary Monsters” with our three-year old and her first question on looking at the cover art was “Is that a boy or a girl?”, which I hope was an encouraging sign of her notions of gender fluidity (and then we played The Replacement’s “Androgynous”).

Pulsar discoverer Jocelyn Bell Burnell wins $3-million Breakthrough Prize.

Well deserved and long-delayed. With great commentary from @DrBrianKeating and @Dr_CMingarelli.

Very pleased with the new paper from my student, our collaborator @Dr_CMingarelli, and me: On the Amplitude and Stokes Parameters of a Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background — lots of good (and useful!) math and physics.

Thanks to Aretha for many things over the years, but perhaps especially for the dance parties she has inspired us to have with our one- and three-year old daughters over the last few days.

I am now so old that I have lost track, and am both embarrassed and happy to have discovered that this birthday is actually one less than I’ve been saying for the last few weeks.

My Nature review of When Einstein Walked with Gödel, by Jim Holt

The Planck 2018 results papers are available! (Direct from ESA today and on the arXiv tomorrow.)

Was pleased to find my toddler’s day-care group dancing to The Band’s “Rag Mama Rag” for yesterday’s Fathers’ Day celebrations! (I hadn’t realized that was actually their biggest UK hit… back in 1969.)

LaTeX equations in Apple’s Keynote FTW!

(It would be even better if the equations could also appear as inline text, but this is still pretty great.)

Just to be precise, the uncle with whom Trump “talked about nuclear” in preparation for the Korea summit has been dead since 1985.

Neil Turok discussing Hawking & Mandela — they shared a love of tea and a sense of humour — at the start of his 2018 Peter Lindsay Memorial Lecture “Quantum Universe” here at Imperial College.

This seems like an extreme reaction to GDPR: what data is The Baltimore Sun keeping that breaks the new privacy rules?

Wow, both Wussy (@wussymusic — the best band in America?) and @Superchunk in London the same week! (Too bad neither is doing an all-ages acoustic show. Not sure I can make it to both!…)

“Austerity has had nothing to do with economics.… It’s about… abandoning vulnerable people.”

“We are making cuts that I think Margaret Thatcher, back in the 1980s, could only have dreamt of.”

In Britain, Austerity Is Changing Everything – The New York Times

Oh yeah, this is why we didn’t want to give him credit for that whole “Korean Peace” thing.

www.nytimes.com: Trump Cancels Meeting With Kim, Citing ‘Open Hostility’

Planck continues to rack up the awards: High-Frequency Instrument PI J-L Puget has won the 2018 Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

The Planck Satellite team has won the 2018 Gruber Cosmology Prize!

Hayakawa et al, Sunspot Drawings by Japanese Official Astronomers in 1749-1750 — better figures than most papers on the arXiv! https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08614

Sri Lankan hoppers for brunch courtesy Weligama at The Pear Tree Café, Battersea Park.

Academic friends: when you post about a paper on the arXiv, please link to the web page for the abstract, not the pdf download.

The illusion of time: “Andrew Jaffe probes Carlo Rovelli’s study arguing that physics deconstructs our sense of time.”

I saw Facebook’s “Protecting Your Information” top-post today, which I think means that Cambridge Analytica didn’t use my data to overhype their lame data science and amoral political consulting.

This morning, my 2 1/2-year old daughter asked me about telescopes. Beaming.

The U.K. Is Doing Just Fine, Thanks – The Wall Street Journal

“For a country supposedly crawling out of the ruins of the Brexit vote, the U.K. has been having a strikingly good year so far.”

But, um, Brexit hasn’t happened yet.

Yes, John Bolton Really Is That Dangerous

“There are few people more likely to lead the country into war…”

Yikes: I remember Bolton’s terrifying talking head from the bad old Bush days (let’s use this as a reminder not to valorize Bush merely because he wasn’t as bad as Trump).

In Brexit Give-and-Take, Britain Gives and the E.U. Takes
“They need us more than we need them”?