And five of them as well! That’s, uh, quite a train ride…

A ticket with ‘5 Geschlechtskrankheiten’

Not sure how this train booking platform works, or how this happened -

AI translated ‘STD’ meaning ‘Stunden’ (hours) into English as ‘Sexually Transmitted Disease’.

So it appeared as ‘Geschlechtskrankheiten’ on ticket.

www.krone.at/4109338

My Lithuanian friend’s great-grandfather is in Yad Vashem for saving Jews during the war. He had the entirely correct view that Hitler and Stalin were two sides of the same coin. Unfortunately, saying this got him sent to the gulag, where he died.

Like you say, picking sides was complicated.

I mentally associate “Jesse’s Girl” with “867-5309 (Jenny). It has some of the same vibes and may or may not have been written about an actual person, but it definitely created a whole bunch of problems for people (Jennys or not) who had that number by chance.

Plus it’s a banger.

Photo of dinosaur footprints at Dinosaur Ridge, Colorado. There are big footprints made by a dinosaur with three wide toes and smaller ones with three narrow toes. They’ve been artificially coloured in darker grey to stand out from the light grey sedimentary rock that preserved them. There’s a small sign describing them.

Congratulations, you’re in the 99th percentile of their distribution! 🙂

I lived in Kansas for a good chunk of my life but I never knowingly saw a dinosaur print until a recent trip to Colorado. Pretty amazing that they’re just along the side of a road.

13/15, I think that’s probably fine for me. 😂

They were extremely controversial when they were first installed.

At the closing session of #FusionFest on the geopolitics of fusion energy, an online questioner asks if it’s possible to weaponize fusion technology. Panellist Atte Harjanne, a Finnish Green MP, draws laughter by replying, “I think fusion technology has been weaponized pretty effectively already.” ⚛️

"The Trump administration in the US is doing a great job of helping the fusion community by making hydrocarbons less and less viable." - Jeff Lawson of Inertia Enterprises at the @economist.com's #FusionFest in London today⚛️🧪

Lots of countries in Europe had part of this week and last week off for the Easter holiday, and many schools (+ their scientist or press officer parents) have a break now as well. Similar EurekAlert lulls happen over Christmas.

(It is also Passover, but that’s likely a second-order effect.)

Michael Banks with Physics Around the Clock

It’s US/North America publication day for PHYSICS AROUND THE CLOCK 🥳. Thread incoming!

The Moon: oh wow you guys decided to come back

Artemis II crew: earth’s haunted

So on the night that might be the last night for the great civilisation of Iran which might never be brought back, lemme tell you that y’all gonna miss us. We were a great civilisation, we gave you all tahdig and you still thought we are barbarians.

Good luck dealing with civilised T-rump and Bibi!

You’ve read/experienced the sequel 20020 as well, right? Best thing about the year 2020, right there.

Threatening the destruction of "a whole civilization" is just explicitly a threat of genocide. Even if it is just a bargaining tactic, even if it is just bluster, it is a threat of genocide. Everyone who has furthered, and continues to further, the aims of this regime is morally culpable.

Back when I was a PhD student, another student asked whether we were having our usual Monday morning group meeting the following week, as it was a bank holiday.

The head of the group replied, “We are not a bank.”

The meeting went ahead as usual.

Happy April, Gabriella!

Even if you don’t buy any of the ethical, personal development or environmental arguments against using LLMs in published writing (and plenty of publications and journalism-adjacent folks seem not to), you ought to pay attention to this one.

“You could violate copyright law by accident” is an underappreciated reason for avoiding LLMs in published writing. If you’re writing about new things, the plagiarism machines won’t have ingested enough text to make their plagiarism undetectable yet, creating legal risk for you/your publication.

I'd hate to do without gen-AI audio transcription. For English audio (including technical language and accents), it is pretty good and extremely fast. You do still need to check for hallucinations and mis-transcriptions, but that's *easily* 20x faster than transcribing an interview from scratch.

Marc Andreessen Sergey Brin Safra Catz Michael Dell Jacob DeWitte Fred Ehrsam Larry Ellison David Friedberg Jensen Huang John Martinis Bob Mumgaard Lisa Su Mark Zuckerberg

Inbox: Trump is announcing the new PCAST membership. It is dominated by CEOs and includes only one academic scientist, John Martinis.

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light!

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand;
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

Plus one called “Little Thomas” about a boy who eats so much he explodes.

March Meeting 2026

Under this metric (which they’ve obviously chosen for a reason), yes.

Ever wonder what distinguishes a quantum device from a quantum computer? Jiri Stehlik of IBM puts the boundary at 100 qubits. Any bigger and it’s a computer, any smaller and it’s just a sparkling quantum device. #APSSummit26 🧪⚛️

My views align more or less with the "humble case for quantum computing" laid out in this talk. In other words, there is a business case, but for scientific studies that might otherwise require a supercomputer, not mass market. bsky.app/profile/drml...

My #APSSummit26 dilemma earlier this week: should I depress myself by attending the session on “The Crisis in American Science”? Or restore my faith in humanity by finding out “How Early-Career Physicists Are Solving Society’s Greatest Challenges”? ⚛️🧪 physicsworld.com/a/the-coming...

This is a great thread that goes into more detail on renewable grid integration, a topic I touched on in a report from #APSSummit26 earlier this week. physicsworld.com/a/wanted-an-...

Do the people who are putting up the money know it? 😜

Ramamoorthy Ramesh on a stage in front of a set of Earthshots symbolised by Olympic rings

After the Kennedy-era Moonshot and the early Obama-era Sunshot aimed at drastically decreasing the cost of solar energy, Ramamoorthy Ramesh is talking about a Biden-era set of “Earthshots” that included reductions in CMOS energy consumption. #APSSummit26