Greg Egan

My new novel MORPHOTROPHIC is available now! You can read the first two chapters here: www.gregegan.net/MORPHOTROPHI...

Today I bought a pack of washers, which were described with dimensions like “28mm × 32mm”, which was simultaneously (A) perfectly comprehensible [inner diameter × outer diameter], (B) hilariously weird, and (C) an unforgivable transgression against the sacred dictates of mathematics and geometry.

Everybody in the replies is rightfully pointing to algebra and so on but also an Arab scientist won the Nobel Prize one year ago.

Fishing boat crew rescue kangaroo found 3km offshore www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10...

Are we asking the wrong questions about dark matter? People often bring up dark matter and wonder whether it exists or not. But nearly every astrophysicist has moved on to ask, "what is dark matter?" Here's how we'll find out. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro #cosmo #darkmatter

I have a new story, “Osculation Point”, in the anthology VASTER THAN EMPIRES www.amazon.com/Vaster-than-... Also, “Spare Parts For the Mind” (originally in Asimov’s SF) is reprinted in THINK WEIRDER Volume 2: thinkweirder.com

Think Weirder Volume 2 arrives Oct 29th and my short story "Jennifer Does Pushups" (originally published in @analogsf.bsky.social) made the cut. I'm excited - this is my first time in an anthology, and I'm sharing space with some really excellent SF/F authors. thinkweirder.com/index.html

MMX is on its way, with everything so far happening as planned. Congratulations to the mission team!

Now that we’ve abolished leap seconds, and won’t tweak standard time to match the rotation of the Earth until the discrepancy reaches 1 hour, we should establish a generation-spanning secret society that shuffles objects around to make Earth’s spin conform to atomic time instead.

Just to be very explicit, my claim is that the one simplest and best explanation for this, which resolves any apparent strangeness entirely, is that whoever is “speaking” in LLM output is a fictional character, and the real life thing called an LLM is a machine for writing lil stories about that guy

When I read Walter Tevis’s dystopian novel Mockingbird, I thought the telepathic ai bus was the least plausible element. Not anymore. I am finding the novel’s catchcry, “Bug off, robot” very useful these days.

#inktober #inktober2026 toss

Head of climate action residents’ group: "We cannot dig up coal, ship it overseas, watch it drive climate change, and then pretend the consequences have nothing to do with us and won't be felt by us." 3/5 judges in Australia’s High Court just agreed. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10...

Don’t you hate it when someone mixes up the Nobel Prizes and inserts ion channels in your neurons that open when exposed to neutrinos instead of light, and your brain just goes pffzzz ....

Francis Halzen has received the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.

If you pick 3 points at random in the unit disk, the probability that they lie on a perfectly straight line is zero. However, the probability that the curvature of the circle they lie on is less than ε is, in the limit of small ε, equal to: 1024 ε / (525 π²) ≈ 0.2 ε

I don’t know what cheesy LLM these scammers are using, but the glitches can be hilarious. [Though I have written a novel called “Morphotrophic”, “Morphological Regency” sounds like a token midway between that and the average of all titles on Smashwords.]

Oh, Hostinger, have you no shame?

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

Class solidarity.

Let’s hope that it doesn’t turn out that there’s a condition that closely resembles this, to the point where it could easily be mistaken for it, while actually being quite different. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudop...

Breaking: Tilly Norwood, Max Headroom quizzed on their positions re destroying all humanity in Senate confirmation hearings for AI Czar.

The large main-belt asteroid 216 #Kleopatra and its moons will have an occultation along a swath from Ireland to Ukraine on 2026 September 22: cloud.occultwatcher.net/event/2090-2... . For anyone who would like to chase the shadows. (It may also be barely visible from Greenland, but at dusk.)

Laurie Metcalf as Phyllis Gardner in “The Dropout”: “Don’t ever quote Yoda to anybody ever again.”

Wow: Giant new impact crater spotted on the Moon! An asteroid the size of an apartment building hit the lunar surface in early 2024 & created 220-meter (730-foot) wide McGetchin crater. It's "the largest contemporary impact crater found in the Solar System." 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/solar-system...

Now more than ever we need a Saturday Night Live sketch with Matthew Rhys playing Dario Amodei.

When an orbit is eccentric enough that the seasons from eccentricity win over those from obliquity.

I wrote this quickly at a bus stop and didn't realize it would go viral, or else I would have worded it better. But the point is that the media is too credulous about AI killing everyone in 10 years (how?) when climate change is killing people now and will only get worse (we know exactly how).

Breaking: a team of human mathematicians working in secret over the last 3 years, and at least two frontier AI labs with 7-figure budgets, are believed to be neck-and-neck in a race to determine whether the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture was posed by three people, or just two.