Colin Stark

18 Nov 2025

Nope. The headline should actually read “Astronomers using ML discover quasars acting as lenses”

Please stop watching Sabine Hossenfelder’s YT channel. She’s grifting trash.

Sam Gregson@badboyofscience.bsky.social

“Worse than climategate”!!! It’s hard for any “scandal” not to be worse than a debunked email hacking and disinfo campaign relying on quote mining scientists' emails to make it seem like they were lying about matters they weren't 🙄 No pattern of skewed presentation here. @michaelemann.bsky.social

This is apparently newsworthy, per the BBC:

Earthquake just now. Felt intensity ~3 in southern Kyushu. Long sustained shaking so it was a decent size maybe.

Not big as I thought: just M5.3, but fairly close and shallow

Sure enough, low angle thrust is likely mechanism, dipping to NW earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/...

@wordsfromtaiwan.bsky.social

BIG normal fault earthquake in the Tanngula Shan, NE corner of the Tibetan plateau. Mww 7.0 is *very* large for such a slip mechanism: earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/...

Colin Stark reposted

Min Chao

Photographer Marie Bell found that Taiwan blue magpies had developed an unusual nest-building behaviour using coat hangers. These magpies are found only in Taiwan and traditionally inhabit mountains. They are now moving into cities, and are showing their resourcefulness as they adapt to urban life.

PSA: this was a grammar joke

Colin Stark@cstark.bsky.social

You know you can get arrested if you walk around with Strunk & White in your back pocket and whip it out in public.

Risqué, even

🧪⚛️

Randall Munroe@xkcd.com

Momentum Demonstration xkcd.com/3312/

Colin Stark reposted

Randall Munroe

@xkcd.com

Momentum Demonstration xkcd.com/3312/

terrytao.wordpress.comWhy are we even doing all this?[This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out…

Ouch 🧪⚛️🧮 terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/15/w...

“Looking up at the stars in wonderment, or enjoying a complex puzzle game, or being inspired by an encouraging teacher, and dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that *might* be true…”

@nigelgoldenfeld.bsky.social

“that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO.”

Colin Stark reposted

Nigel Goldenfeld

🧪⚛️Mary Tsingou Menzel is her name. Her discovery, collaborating with Fermi, Pasta, Ulam was a surprise. The first computational test of a foundation of statistical mechanics (equipartition). It failed. This work was fundamental to the development of nonlinear dynamics and applied mathematics.

nytimes.comMathematician Who Waited 50 Years for Proper Credit for Her Work Has Died (Gift Article)At the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Mary Tsingou Menzel’s computer programming helped set the stage for chaos theory and other fields.

bbc.comRJ Mitte: Breaking Bad actor dies aged 34Mitte, who lived with cerebral palsy, starred as Walter White Jr in the Emmy-winning drama series.

Oh hell. This is awful. www.bbc.com/news/article...

businessinsider.comAI researchers are taking up smoking because they expect AI to cure cancer, says Palantir CTOSome AI believers expect the technology to make smoking-related health risks like cancer a thing of the past, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar said.

We live in the dumbest of all timelines

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com

"AI researchers are taking up smoking because they expect AI to cure cancer, says Palantir CTO"

bbc.comPM says it is 'clear' Russia interfered with Brexit referendumHe says voters were not "sufficiently" informed about how foreign actors sought to disrupt UK democracy.

If the PM says the Brexit referendum was fixed, he can safely suggest a redo. Such an obvious escape clause! But he’s too chicken. www.bbc.com/news/article...

theguardian.comAK Blakemore: ‘The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt was extremely silly and bad’The poet and author on F Scott Fitzgerald’s perfect novel, losing faith in Ernest Hemingway – and the recent debut that blew her away

A K Blackmore is funny! And she’s damn right about Donna Tartt: the latter’s “The Secret History” is pretentious twaddle. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/o...

Colin Stark reposted

Juice xkcd.com/3308/

I wish they’d started much sooner

Earthquake felt in Taipei just now. Decent size, around 30s duration, shaking intensity fairly low.

Just as I suspected, it was a moderate event but not so close to Taipei: 🧪⚛️⚒️

Local estimates put it at M5.9

Such a good headline

Colin Stark reposted

𝕊𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕒𝕖 𝔾𝕦𝕣𝕝

@sundaedivine.lol

I kid around a lot on BSKY but these are the top 6 Senate candidates where even a $5 donation will have an outsized impact.

This cannot possibly be a real photo of Jensen Huang: he’s not wearing a leather jacket! Must be AI-generated, which is some deep irony.

But we already understand area

Colin Stark reposted

Viz Comic

@vizcomic.bsky.social

subscriptions >>> shop.viz.co.uk/viz358bs

21 Sept

This sentence from a muckraking Daily Beast piece today about Rep. Boebert needs work.

Colin Stark reposted

𝕊𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕒𝕖 𝔾𝕦𝕣𝕝

@sundaedivine.lol

19 Sept

Okay, this got me.

Colin Stark reposted

Nicolas Hénin

@nicolashenin.net

Nice campaign by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products. Enjoy!

nature.comReimagining research papers as interactive and reliable AI agents - NaturePaper2Agent converts research papers into interactive artificial intelligence agents by turning manuscripts, code and data into model context protocol-based tool-invoking systems that reproduce origin...

To think he has tenure 😳

Ran Blekhman@blekhman.bsky.social

This is the future of scientific papers. Instead of a PDF, the paper is an AI agent that you can talk to, ask questions, run analyses. No more digging through supplements - just ask the paper directly: "what p-value cutoff was used in Fig 3B? Re-run at 0.01." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I thought it was about time I learned some QFT and then I read this 🧪⚛️🧮

All I really want to do is understand second quantization and how it might be applied to granular mechanics. I’m beginning to wonder if a textbook aimed at mathematicians might rely less on prior knowledge and ironically be more accessible than physics sources. 🙄

14 Sept

And here’s silly geologist me thinking the Himalayas were largely made of rock 😳 🧪⚒️⚛️

14 Sept

The sub headline is not much better: glacier ice is accumulating, flowing, and melting all the time, depending on where and on what season/weather. What matters is that ice accumulation/ablation has become unbalanced and glacial ice volume is decreasing. Also: permafrost is thawing, not melting.

12 Sept

Outstanding, in every sense

World Bollard Association™️@worldbollardassoc.bsky.social

The Marge Simpson bollard. #WorldBollardAssociation

@djamilaknopf.bsky.social

10 Sept

Good to know

Colin Stark reposted

Djamila Knopf

10 Sept

Replying to @djamilaknopf.bsky.social

Here they all are. The calendar is avialble here: www.djamilaknopf.com/store

Colin Stark reposted

Paul Byrne

@theplanetaryguy.com

9 Sept

Astrophotographer Adam (AJ) Smadi caught this image a few hours ago from Washington state. A thin crescent Moon, sunlight illuminating the rugged lunar surface. And 2,400 times farther away—and on the other side of the Sun—mighty Jupiter, and its moons Io (left) and Ganymede (right).

quantamagazine.orgIn an Age of AI, a Physicist Seeks What Endures | Quanta MagazineSarah Demers, chair of the physics department at Yale University, sees the potential for large language models to both help and harm her field.

7 Sept

@quantamagazine.org 🧪⚛️🧮 www.quantamagazine.org/in-an-age-of...

Colin Stark reposted

Robert Mills 🇨🇦

@pier8bob.bsky.social

6 Sept

Lacus Ontario—a lake of liquid methane on Saturn's largest moon Titan—was named after Lake Ontario here on Earth.

news.artnet.com/art-world/re...

6 Sept

news.artnet.comDid Renoir Actually Suck at Painting? | Artnet NewsAs "Renoir and Love" tours museums in Europe and the U.S., experts question whether the Impressionist was actually a good painter.

theguardian.comRich people more likely to steal children’s sweets, finds Ig Nobel prize-winning studyWe round up the winners at awards for achievements that ‘first make people laugh and then make them think’

5 Sept

Call me a sourpuss, but I think the vibe of the IgNobels is complete garbage. The whole thing is fundamentally ill-conceived and mean-spirited. Scientific research can often superficially seem absurd; it’s how it fits in the big picture that matters. 🧪 www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

5 Sept

One of the greatest moments in tweeting history:

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