George Musser

Someone, please tell me a single reason I would use an AI agent.

Out of a wreckage of a dying star, a new planet was born. And now that planet is evaporating like a comet, leaving a trail that whips around the star every 4 days. It's a remarkable story written in chemical clues. Nobody has ever seen anything like it before. 🧪🔭 esahubble.org/news/heic2613/

"His calm is not the absence of fear. It is what years of fear produced."--John Steele on Alex Honnold.

AI labs are claiming artificial general intelligence, or AGI, may have finally arrived. But it’s worth asking what AGI even means—and if it matters at all.

“these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods & ideas, & citing relevant previous work of others. … We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose.”

🚨 OpenAI "miracle" or theft? Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU reveals OpenAI claimed a Navier-Stokes solution using the EXACT niche research path only his team was pursuing—discovered only after rumors of his work leaked. - OpenAI tried to pressure him to drop his collaborator's name […]

www.engadget.com/2253393/what...

“Upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving…. Participants in the upper-class rank condition took more candy that would otherwise go to children… than did those in the lower-rank condition.” An #IgNobel prize confirms what we see every day.

The IgNobel Prizes, usually bestowed at a ceremony in Cambridge, Mass, are moving to Europe this year due to security concerns for honorees and journalists coming to the US from abroad. I bet I know who's going to win the IgNobel Peace Prize this year. arstechnica.com/science/2026...

Imagine claiming to be a Star Trek fan while expressing disdain for at least 90% of what Star Trek is (and always has been)

What would an A.I. takeover look like? Maybe: infiltrating investment firms and tech companies so that they'll redirect the entire economy to build data centers. Uh.....

"This incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown A.I. takeover…. Because future rogue swarms could cover their tracks better (and because A.I. companies could paper over these problems), I am not sure that we will get such a clear warning shot before it’s too late.”

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/t...

This is what shutting down scientific debate actually looks like

Why do people say “use case” rather than “use”?

"After the Trump Administration slashed funding to American federal and academic scientific studies, the Chinese government announced another 10% increase in funding for science and technology. China has overtaken both the U.S. and the European Union in publishing influential research papers." 🧪

“A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.” ysph.yale.edu/news-article...

How many different ways will you allow Apple to insult our intelligence and capitulate to the whims of the mad tyrant before you finally dump their phone and watch?

As I was saying

I wish I had recorded my reaction when I opened the press release with advance notice of this potential hint of dark matter. I can confirm that I said "whaaaaaat?!" to a silent, empty room. If this hint is confirmed I'll remember that moment the rest of my life. www.sciencenews.org/article/dark...

We’re not changing it.

The more users, the faster we can fix the little things and democratize features.

By the logic Google is using to justify going along with the Lake Ontario mislabeling, Trump could with the stroke of a pen change the standards the U.S. has adopted for physical constants.

An incredible completely open source and community funded / developed option is @comaps.app

Osmand and Magic Earth are brilliant. Even though Magic Earth is closed source.

There are good alternatives to Apple and Google Maps if you want a mapping app that shows internationally recognized water-body names: HERE WeGo, ABRP (“A Better Route Planner”), Mapy, and—blasts from the past—Mapquest and TomTom. Just because Silicon Valley caves in to MAGA doesn’t mean you have to

My suggestion is to cancel your subscription to any media company that refers to Lake Ontario as Lake America.

Does anyone have a solution to the airplane-delay sunk-cost fallacy? If the airline says the delay will be 3 hrs, it makes sense to go home and return later, or find an alternative longer route. But when they delay by 1 hr, thrice, you say to yourself each time that you might as well wait it out.

The AI autonomous cyberattack story keeps getting creepier. "The model instances began incrementally figuring out they could create a message board where they could share knowledge, including cheats and exploits," reports @thezvi.bsky.social. "Colossus: The Forbin Project" should be required viewing

The good news is that it's safe for humans to use m-dashes again without being taken for a machine. The bad is that LLMs have moved on to "not only... but also." www.economist.com/culture/2026...

The accompaniment to my "what just happened?" coverage, Derek does a great job of handling "what does it mean?" and "what do we do?"

"A dog starv'd at his master's gate / Predicts the ruin of the state." As Blake wrote, you can find the big story in little things. So, lately I'm seeing a similar erosion in daily life. Cars drive by with serious damage - I guess people can't afford to fix them. Once-full restaurants are emptier.

🚨 HEADS UP: If you haven't submitted a comment on the OMB proposal yet, there's still time - but it's running out! There are only 3 days left to push back against Russell Vought's attempt to give political appointees unprecedented control over federal research funding. Take Action: zurl.co/J92d9

Proposed rule OMB-2026–0034 will devastate US science and destroy the scientific talent pipeline in the country. Here is the comment I submitted about the rule: medium.com/data-feminis... You can make public comments until Mon, Jul 13th. Please do it and reach out to your colleagues to do the same!

This looks interesting -- "Quanta to Qualia" workshop coming up in Montreal, in August: quanta2qualia.org including public events on Aug. 11. One of the sessions will be moderated by @georgemusser.com #physics #science

If Pluto's downgrade got you upset, brace yourself: Uranus and Neptune might not be real "ice giants." 🧊🚫🪐 Research increasingly shows our outermost planets are far rockier than thought—and maybe even full of magma oceans.🔥 Read more @science.org : www.science.org/content/arti... #space #nasa

A few weeks ago I, along with @georgemusser.com @jomarchant.bsky.social and others, went to a small meeting about the QBist interpretation of quantum mechanics and why it is so often misrepresented. Here are some reflections on the event. www.marginaliareviewofbooks.com/post/the-qbi...

@usmnt.ussoccer.com the right thing to do tonight is to bench Balogun. While I agree that the VAR call was dubious, Trump’s corrupt appeal is unprecedented and beyond the pale.

When you bump into a friend on vacation, or think of someone and then they call, is it "just" a coincidence - random happenstance - or could it be something more? Maybe not ESP or divine fate, but a middle ground: a natural but nondismissive explanation. I investigate for @nautil.us. 🧪

Will NASA’s SkyFall Mars helicopter fleet sink science at the Red Planet? Mars researchers are wrestling with the potential costs of a flashy new NASA mission to the Red Planet www.scientificamerican.com/article/will...