So: I think I just finished writing a book.
Statuses
An overview of our recent work on the topology of the Universe, highlighted by Physical Review Letters.
From scratch, more or less.
If you take the literature at its word, some things are so improbable, they’re practically assured.
— The Paranoid Style, “I’d Bet My Land and Titles”
Yet another test, this time with formatting and a link.
This is test. Do not adjust your sets, &c.
RIP Daniel Dennett. His books on mind and evolution helped me understand the world.
I just received a referee request from a high quality journal.
I know it’s an excellent paper — since I’m one of the authors.
@help: I’ve just moved to a new self-hosted WordPress blog, and I am trying to set up the micro.blog iOS/macOS apps to post directly there. but I always get the message “An error occurred. Please try again.” Any ideas?
How wonderful and moving for the headlines to be about astronomy instead of, well, any of the other possibilities.
Most of my students choose Imperial for research or a lucrative job, but he came from Queens just to win at University Challenge.
(Somehow I didn’t know anything about this story.)
I’ve successfully transferred this site to a new (more modern and less expensive!) host, and converted all of the content to a new blog engine. Check it out, and let me know if everything works.
Maybe I’ll even start writing again.
Test after moving both my hosting provider and blogging engine…
Shabbat shalom. (And check out our new bread experiment.)
Last classroom lecture of the calendar — and academic — year! (50 minutes on gravitational lensing.)
Wintry, misty morning on the Thames.
Today’s reshuffle showing the deep pool of talent the Tories are able to draw from.
Has anyone else started seeing errors like this (& other stuff) when restarting/restoring sessions in Apple Terminal.app?
date: illegal time format
usage: date [-jnRu] [-I[date|hours|minutes|seconds]] [-f input_fmt]
[-r filename|seconds] [-v[+|-]val[y|m|w|d|H|M|S]]
[[[[mm]dd]HH]MM[[cc]yy][.SS] | new_date] [+output_fmt]
-bash: Saving: command not found
See also this: it’s coming from weird interactions in /etc/bashrc_Apple_Terminal (& similar for zsh). Is this widespread or rare?
Project: rye.
Unexpected Silver Jews tribute beer, courtesy Verdant Brewery in Cornwall.
Sconehenge.
Twins? Or octuplets?
This is the good stuff.
With “mascara” and “dial”, I was hoping for “Songs from the Replacements’ ‘Tim'”. (On purpose, I hope…)
Connections
Puzzle #123
🟨🟨🟨🟦
🟪🟩🟦🟨
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟪🟪
Sorry, I can’t take your paper seriously if it uses LaTeX equation formatting for italics in text.
The good news is that The Mekons* sold out their London show tonight. The bad news is that they sold out before I remembered to get tickets…
(*Well, it’s only about 20% of the Mekons, but any fraction is good.)
20 years ago, I wrote a paper with the late, great Don Backer, making quantitative predictions of a background of gravitational waves from binary supermassive black holes. Today, it looks like that background has been detected by the NANOGrav collaboration.
Introduced my kids to Star Trek via “The Trouble With Tribbles”.
(Having turned out to be a professional astrophysicist, I can’t overstate how important the original series of Trek was to me growing up in the 70s.)
It is 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@post.lurk.org in 1989.
This year, my partner decided to celebrate with a 4:45am swim in the Thames which is even more Druidic.
Devastated to hear of the death of Nick Kaiser: collaborator, friend, mentor. He helped bring me to CITA in 1994 and we worked on two of my favourite papers, minor works in his influential oeuvre. Simultaneously one of the smartest & nicest people I’ve had the privilege to work with. RIP.