Ah, OK!
And practically, what does that mean? Can you use DLPNO-CCSD with the EPR module in Orca? Or is this a case where even the Hartree-Fock reference is better than DFT?

WFT?

The contributed talk abstract submission deadline for the 8th @thomasyoungcentre.bsky.social Energy Materials Workshop has been extended to next Wednesday the 22nd of April 2026. Get your abstracts for talks in now. #compchem

No, it's me, I'm cursed.

I started to write the git commit message and realised I'd done something very dumb: merging samples (for plotting) between the MC chains as elementwise addition, exploding the variance.

A rather rough and ready scientific plot, titled "PIMC energy samples by permutation family" with y-axis "Density" and x-axis "Energy (Hartree)". Below the axis is a rug plot, showing jittered raw samples from the 16 cycles, and above the axis are k-density estimators on top of that sampled data. The data is not particularly Gaussian, some of the permutations have multi peaked and extremely broad distributions.

I'm starting to think that Fermions are cursed.

(7 electron fully spin-polarised UEG.)

A timely and eloquent essay, well worth reading by anyone in science.

I've spent the entirety of my adult life being repeatedly shocked at the complete failure of governments to act.

The science of climate change was fully known by 2000; renewable technology was cheap enough to deploy at incredible scale by 2010, just as the cost of money fell to ~zero.

Here’s the Actual Difference Between European and American Butter And why you might want to keep both around.

But the real crime is watered-down American butter:

www.epicurious.com/ingredients/...

I never understood why it didn't taste of anything until an American friend told me to go find 'premium' (?!) butter

Uhm, I think this is actually the same in the UK, but perhaps with different spec?
Perhaps you bought some milk ice? ('Mini milks', still very common as ice lollies for kids, intentionally low in fat.)

bryantresearch.co.uk/foodlaw/labe...

I have been having SO MUCH fun following up some QMC work on actually predicting the PIMC exchange probabilities (arxiv.org/abs/1409.3262).

Only problem is that with so much time staring at 'magic number' diagrams like those below, I'm starting to feel like Max in π www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a4f...

It is a very hard problem because the batteries you would need to shift from windy->not-windy (~a week) are ENORMOUS; thus much more expensive than you might imagine.

Chemical storage really is best for beyond a day at grid scale.
(Electrolysis of water to hydrogen is one route for renewables...)

Really interesting and quite exciting! That's for writing this up.

It's OK (I moved a couple of years ago), but sometimes Google is a lot more powerful, so if the results in duckduckgo are trash, I still find myself trying Google...

Spain's renewables build-out has structurally decoupled its electricity prices from gas markets. Gas now sets the price in only 15% of hours, compared to 90% in Italy.

Countries that invested early in clean power are far less exposed to fossil fuel price shocks. Those that didn't now pay the price.

As with any means-testing it gets complex, quickly.

What if you have a lot of people living in your house?
What if you are a pensioner living in a big 'empty nest' which is expensive to heat?

Perhaps best would be to just bung everyone £100 and take it back as tax in future years.

I have the start of a draft of a book in Quarto, but again, the complexity increases the friction of actually working on it...

I had a slightly-swanky group-website based on Jekyll static-site generator, but I found it a bit frustrating and wasn't updating it: frost-group.github.io

SO I ripped that out and replaced with raw HTML + simplecss.org ; and THEN I replaced that with Markdown+pandoc, github.com/Frost-group/...

There's a simple logo-like programming language built into the little computer.

One note: often these appear to have been played with one Christmas, then put away with the Alkaline batteries in-situ, so I've had to clean all the chemical crud off the battery contacts to get them working!

Lego Mindstorms NXT - Wikipedia

PSA: For anyone with kids who like robots (i.e. anyone with kids!), you can acquire the Mindstorms NXT kits for ~£40-60 if you key an eye on eBay / Vinted.

These are 'obsolete' but work just fine.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mi...

Congratulations to Charlie Bennett and Gilles Brassard for winning the 2026 Turing Award (akin to the Nobel Prize for Computer Science)! They invented quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation. awards.acm.org/turing 🧪 ⚛️ 1/

This is a big deal. A lot of lives saved through this.

And to use an example from your thread: previously you might have intentionally hired a student to essentially be the programming / tech lead for your group, and now you can just Claude Code / Cursor your way through...

Totally agree!

But there are only so many hours in the day, so if each project becomes more productive with these tools, more hours of supervision / collaboration are required, and so the optimal size of a group shrinks.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.

But I don't think your thread is that much different than the article?

If AI automates the intellectual 'busywork' of science, we will move to a fewer-students Nash equilibrium.

This was always the case in theoretical physics: often a Prof would only have one student at a time, but invest deeply.

The environmental / climate necessity of renewables has been clear since at least 2000; the technology was on 'learning curves' to make it affordable since at least 2010; hopefully the current security threat / wake-up call is enough to make all countries finally follow through!

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

Anyone who attempts to use a pure DFT functional in a Gaussian basis is, of course, living in a state of sin.

What beastly molecules! I'll definitely have a read.

LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER - Eins, Zwei, Drei - Official Music Video YouTube video by LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER

The UK's Eurovision entry this year, actually a banger! www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XR2...

Converting between chemistry and physics is sometimes quite easy!

sed -i s/b3lyp/PBE1PBE/ *.gjf