Thanks!

Do you have suggestions for popular QM or particle theory books that make serious attempts to explain various atomic-level phenomena that are fundamental to chemistry, like why electron orbitals work out the way they do, why nuclei are stable, why protons are very very stable, etc?

@seanmcarroll.bsky.social Hi! Can I ask you for a book rec (or recs)? My kid (age 12) is interested in chemistry and we are reading the excellent Cartoon Guide to Chemistry together. A number of our conversations about the book have dead-ended in "because QM", whee our usual intutions stop working.

Rubio already has too many jobs, maybe RFK can take this one.

Right, I mean it exactly your way, they advertised that the lottery would include seats they never intended to give.

The is how Cat 1 was advertised, to be very clear.

Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence Despite rising concerns about sycophancy—excessive agreement or flattery from artificial intelligence (AI) systems—little is known about its prevalence or consequences. We show that sycophancy is wide...

OK, I'm obsessed with this study in @science.org

It took Reddit "Am I The Asshole" posts & asked LLMs if the poster was the asshole. Aaand (surprise) AI was more likely to tell people they were NOT the asshole ... even when humans said yeah YTA 🧪

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Lol, good luck with this one, Parker Executive Search.

BRB, suddenly feel the need to invent the Sealion Lung.

King of England on a checkerboard pattern tile floor

Y’all might not appreciate it, but it took him 87 moves and 14 hours to get here

Just threw on Juno with my kid and like yep.

Oh for sure, but so often it's so obvious that it takes me home anyway! Bus going by in the background is enough.

And then there's Rumble in the Bronx, but I couldn't find a screenshot that made the point.

I'm from Vancouver, they pretty much all take place there now

We had a JetBlue flight for like a minute maybe 15 years ago but it didn't last long.

Fancy Man Enjoys Tea

Fancy Man Enjoys Tea https://theonion.com/fancy-man-enjoys-tea-1819569438/

Shouldn't the argument where you prove it first for collections of length 2^k by induction on k, and then in general by padding out a sequence of length n by appending 2^k - n copies of the average, just go over almost directly?

I don't get it. Why bother with AI subjects when you could skip directly to having the AI write the paper with fabricated data instead.

Everything Falling Apart, Reports Institute For Somehow Managing To Hold It All Together

Everything Falling Apart, Reports Institute For Somehow Managing To Hold It All Together theonion.com/everything-falling-apart...

A screenshot of an article published in popular science. It reads: “First known wild 'grue jay' hybrid spotted in Texas. Green and blue jays are crossing paths as temperatures rise.”

I’ve been training my whole life for this moment

Best place to wive it wealthily

Two tweets apart in my timeline.

Also Sunday evening, Monday morning through evening, Tuesday.....

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

Cosmology Summer Fest 2025 The 2025 Cosmology Summer Fest is in honor of Marc Kamionkowski and Robert Caldwell’s 60th birthdays. The event will be a 2.5-day science workshop during which we will discuss recent progress in a ran...

Enjoying a wonderful conference celebrating the 60th birthdays of cosmologists Marc Kamionkowski and Robert Caldwell. Can't decide which is more impressive, their scientific papers or the amazing family of former students and postdocs.

indico.global/event/14235/...

The notes for the Mathcamp course are here, for anyone interested:
tinyurl.com/p6bvnrwp
In 2 weeks / 10 lectures I made it to the end of section 3, i.e., the level one stuff.

(36/36)

Alright, let me stop here. Thanks for reading to the end. The moral, if there is one, is: thinking about how to explain interesting things to smart high school students is great, and if you have the opportunity, you should do it.

Less surprisingly, the LLMs were quite helpful with proofreading. Gemini especially caught some typos that I'm very glad it caught.

LLMs do get credit for one trick that made it into the paper, the idea of multiplying by (b/d)^2 in the proof of Lemma 4.9 (though what the LLM suggested was more elaborate and the version in the paper is streamlined).

It can often be useful to try to understand why some argument is wrong, and the points on which the LLM was most wrong were exactly the key points. For example the one multiplier system formula I use gives its values on a particular level 24 subgroup.

They tried to convince me that the multiplier system for eta(z) is trivial on Gamma(24) (false). And later it gave me a beautiful but totally wrong proof of Theorem 4.1 using Gauss sums.

But I would say that each of these mistakes stimulated my own thinking in productive ways.