Two things can be true at once:
1. Personality tests are a pseudoscience.
2. At least two thirds of STEM professors are definitely INTJ.

The AI-written LinkedIn slop of the day.
1) Wiedemann Franz law is empirical and even boring metals don't follow it exactly.
2) Graphene is not even a metal so why would it.

My undergrad class, who only learned the modern theory of conductivity a few weeks ago, could explain why this is nonsense.

Screenshot of a Wikipedia page on "Landau theory". It then says "not to be confused with Ginzburg-Lansay theory". And the first line of the article reads "Landau theory (also known as Ginzburg-Lansay theory, despite the confusing name)".

Wait, what?

I know what these theories are. And still; what?

A biscuit tin with 8 chocolate cookies inside. They look delicious.

Hydrogenic atom chocolate cookies with Legendre polynomial chocolate chips.

I bake things for my undergrad class to give them energy when we have a particularly maths-heavy lecture. Photo taken yesterday *after* the ~18 or so of them took one each.

A 13 year old A3 😅

Forbidden to-go drink

When in a place with moderate hills, find a moderate hill and run up it.

(beamtime 10k from a few weeks ago)

Physicist top tip: set your thermostat to make room temperature calculations easier to work out 👍

Beautiful RIXS study.
Last author, Valentina Bisogni, will give an invited talk at our iWOE meeting in two weeks' time! (maybe not about this paper though... )

Today I taught my last class of summer. The students at the Cook County Jail were outstanding.

The county jail has a bad reputation but the education program here is doing a lot of good work with people who really want to learn. If you're an educator in the Chicago area pls consider volunteering!

The best part has been teaching the two undergraduate classes I had.

The worst part was agonizing over writing the exams (is it too hard? is it too easy?) and proctoring the students while they suffered through it. The second hand stress is very real.

Today begins year 2 of my tenure-track position. More senior colleagues have told me "don't worry, second year is so much better than first year". But honestly, the first year was wonderful, successful, and every day reaffirmed that I made the right career choice. Can second year be even better?

Which ones are you trying? Cariño is the best restaurant I've been to in the city so far.

Beautiful August evening at the only (?) top 10 University with a beach

I guess my lab hot take is that tweezers shouldn't be consumables

ERC backs cutting-edge research with €721 million in funding The European Research Council (ERC) today announced the winners of its latest Advanced Grant competition. The funding, worth in total €721 million, will go to 281 leading researchers across Europe. Th...

Gotta resist that European urge to give my NSF Career proposal a snappy acronym...

ERC Advanced Grants are announced, so here's my announcement of my favourite acronym. This year it's CATNIP: Citizen Attitudes Towards National and International Problems.

Congrats to all awardees

europa.eu/!JYKxkD

It was recently Oliver's 11th birthday. So here he is enjoying sashimi (yellowfin and roe).

I adopted him when he was a kitten, at the start of my PhD. Now he's lived with me in three countries and two US states.

What will the next 11 years bring!

From his Wikipedia "Von Ahn has used a number of unusual techniques in his teaching, which have won him multiple teaching awards at Carnegie Mellon University."

I suspect he didn't just have the students at CMU sit in front of an AI 😐

Exactly lol. Though I have to say my threshold for how sad a salad needs to be before I don't want it has been gradually rising.

This past week I got five free meals as part of work.

Sometimes students ask me why I wanted to do this job. The truth is that I just kept getting free food.
I've basically been domesticated by academia.

I have the opposite experience. I am surprised at how smart students are, some of them are super sharp thinkers. I also definitely had some homework questions in Physics of Materials that ChatGPT could have answered but students clearly weren't using AI 'cause they were getting it wrong lol.

You know, I didn't calculate it, but it's got to be close to the upper bound. Unless you're really optimistic about the lifetime of my career and the chamber!

Certainly the cleanest the chamber will ever be!

Sample #00001 is grown!

I recently had dinner with faculty from another University and they did nothing but complain about their undergrads. Even saying "if any apply to your grad program, don't take them".
Meanwhile, a decent portion of our department's group chat is gushing about how awesome our undergrads are 🤷🏻‍♀️

3️⃣ weeks to submit your abstract for QUOROM-12! Come be part of the vibrant quantum oxides community!

Learn more, register for free, prepare your abstract: quoromvirtualconference.wordpress.com

Today I went to the McMaster-Carr main warehouse to pick up an order that couldn't wait.
After years of ordering from their online catalog it felt like a pilgrimage to go there in person.

Oh dear...

Just learned my cryostat will be a few months late. But at least I got this USB-chargeable, LED-decorated, handheld fan from them to make up for it.

This just happened.

If you know, you know. If you don't know, well, this image just means that my lab set up is progressing nicely!