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mcnees

@[email protected]

Physicist and professor at a school on the north side of Chicago. Black holes, quantum gravity, cosmology. Rocky Top, Tar Heel. Science, dogs, lake photos. Faves are spooky action at a distance, boosts are Lorentz transformations to another inertial frame. Opinions are mine, not my employer’s. #BlackHoles #Gravity #SciComm #Dogs

Level 14 Prof of Physics, Neutral Good, S:11 I:16 W:15 D:11 C:12 Ch:11, HP: 68, THAC0: 11, Equipment: Vorpal Chalk, Periapt of Tenure, Tweed Jacket (Cursed)

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@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

This was posted in a shorter format as a thread on Bluesky and it worked marvelously. One of the most innovative uses of the form that I’ve seen.

https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

I knew that one day the Stars Would Be Right, but didn’t think I’d be in my grocery store’s parking lot when it happened.

A license plate on a car in a parking lot reads “GRT OLD 1”
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@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

Astronaut, author, professional football player, and STEM educator Leland Melvin was born in 1964.

Here he is in the greatest photo ever produced by the US space program.

Image: NASA

Astronaut Leland Melvin posing in his flight suit with his two dogs. He is smiling and looking at the camera, while the dogs climb on his lab and lick the side of his face. The flight suit is baggy and orange, with a black ring around the neck where the helmet attaches. A US flag is in the background, and a model of the space shuttle is partially visible.
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@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

This is incredible. An MTV simulator with almost 30,000 videos, organized by decade along with special sections for Headbanger's Ball and Yo! MTV Raps.

https://wantmymtv.vercel.app/

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

We can’t pay for USAid, scientific research, daycare, school lunches, social security, unemployment benefits, or healthcare, but apparently there’s no problem launching an illegal war that will cost US taxpayers billions of dollars and enrich all the grifters, goons, and ghouls in this administration.

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

Accidentally typed “shatbot” instead of “chatbot” and decided to cancel the autocorrect and just let that one escape into the wild.

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

It is pretty wild that a news org (a “news” org) is running a piece that quotes loads of grok output but has no quotes from humans, other than a combative auto-reply to an email.

Even the language here — “grok said” — is so wildly irresponsible. Grok didn’t “say” anything. It output a string of words that met a complicated set of likelihood criteria for the question “what would a reply sound like?”

People made this and allowed it to be used this way.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/grok-says-safeguard-lapses-led-images-minors-minimal-clothing-x-2026-01-02/

Screenshot of a Reuters wire story with a headline reading "Grok says safeguard lapses led to image of 'minors in minimal clothing' on X". The graphic is a cellphone showing "xAI" and "Grok" logos.
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@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

101 years ago, in 1925, Edwin Hubble announced that Andromeda and other spiral nebulae were definitely separate galaxies outside the Milky Way, in a paper read to an AAS meeting by H.N. Russell.

There was no doubt that the Universe was more than just our little island of stars.

A black and white photo of M31, the Andromeda galaxy. It is characterized by spiral arms and dark lanes of dust and gas, with a bright center.
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@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

Happy to all who celebrate!

Max Planck presented work on blackbody radiation to the German Physical Society in 1900.

His novel “quantum hypothesis” suggested that matter should be treated as it it emits and absorbs light with frequency f only in discrete chunks of energy E=hf.

Image: AIP

A black and white photo of Max Planck. His arms are crossed and he is looking at the camera. Planck has a substantial mustache and his hair is receding. He is wearing a heavy, dark suit with a high-collared white shirt and a small black bowtie.
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@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

I’m not an expert, but I’ve seen this paper described as an important justification for claims about the safety of Roundup.

And now it has been retracted by the journal it appeared in over 25 years ago.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0273230099913715

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies.

mcnees OP ,
@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar

Machine learning (umbrella term, I know) is a useful, sometimes transformative tool in the hands of trained researchers who understand how to deploy it and critically assess the results.

A chatbot is not useful in the same ways (though underlying technologies may be, in other contexts).

mcnees OP ,
@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar

Lumping them together as “AI” gives readers the impression that a single class of tool is discerning novel protein structures, teasing subtle patterns out of mountains of LHC data, writing a student’s History 101 paper for them, and arguing that a ketamine-addled billionaire could post up Shaq in his prime. No.

mcnees OP ,
@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar

This is a marketing trick that helps the Sam Altmans of the world steal Machine Learning valor to prop up a bunch of gross plagiarism machines that have all our worst biases and failings baked in.

Do not help them!

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

“Doctors who blame an imbalance of bodily humours for health issues are viewed negatively by their peers”

https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/10/27/doctors-viewed-negatively-for-ai-usage/

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

There is no scientific basis for this claim. This is hype cycle escalation and rhetorical sleight of hand.

There are many tools that a marketer might lump into a category they call “AI,” that are useful when deployed by trained researchers.

But will an LLM cure cancer? No. Get serious. Something like AlphaFold has nothing in common with the sorts of “AI” chatbots and half-baked technologies these companies are pushing right now.

https://fortune.com/2025/10/26/google-ruth-porat-cure-cancer-in-our-lifetime-with-ai/

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

Interesting article. Now I’ll just take a comically large drink of coffee and start this book I’ve been meaning to read, Kurt Vonnegut’s classic 1963 novel “Cat’s Cradle.”

https://gizmodo.com/how-scientists-turned-water-into-ice-at-room-temperature-2000672050?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

I commonly use an owl with my keyboard so needless to say I was both hurt and offended when the captcha denied my response.

A captcha that shows a picture of a keyboard and instructs you to “Tap on things commonly used with the shown item.” One of the options is an owl.
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@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

Take all that energy use projected for “AI” data centers in the US next year, and that’s about how much work you’d have to do to accelerate a 100kg space probe up to 1/3 the speed of light.

Now, we don’t yet have the technology to do that. But to be fair, we don’t have AI, either.

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

This morning, during some chaos, this zipped by on one of my feeds. Maybe it was here? Maybe it was BlueSky? Hard to overstate how much this made my day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver-engineered_dam_in_the_Czech_Republic

Beaver-engineered dam in the Czech Republic Article Talk From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In early 2025, beaver activity in the Brdy Protected Landscape Area, Czech Republic, contributed to the restoration of a wetland ecosystem. A family of beavers constructed a series of dams that coincidentally accomplished environmental goals of the Czech government, which had delayed its proposed project since 2018 for bureaucratic and financial reasons. The beaver-built dams saved the Czech government approximately US$1.2 million, providing ecological benefits including improved water quality, enhanced biodiversity, and better water retention.
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@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random
@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

My students are often surprised to learn that LLMs aren’t answering their questions. Rather, an LLM answers the question “what would a reply to this look like?” It’s one of the first things I explain in the “Should I use LLMs?” portion of my syllabus.

It reads “But that's not the only problem. Interactions with LLMs feel like a dialog, so it's natural to think the usual rules of conversation apply. You ask a question and expect the response will be an answer to that question. It's important to understand that this is not what's happening. An LLM is designed to generate statistically likely responses to the question "What would an answer to this query sound like?" This is not the same thing as answering the question. It might produce what you are looking for, or it might not. This is one reason why output from an LLM will sound authoritative even when it's wrong, and apologetic when mistakes are pointed out. It isn't authoritative or apologetic, and it isn't "thinking" about the question. These are just the sorts of responses that best fit a very complicated set of likelihood criteria.”
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@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

Hello, lovelies.

A vivid monarch butterfly, its wings pointing up, perched on top of a bright orange zinia.

A vivid monarch butterfly, its wings pointing up, perched on top of a bright orange zinia.
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@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

A few months ago, while visiting family in Tennessee, I started digging through my parents’ substantial vinyl collection. They do not listen to them — the records were just sitting in closets and a spare room, in record crates. I pulled a bunch of records to take back to Chicago. It was quite a haul.

A square grid displaying nine album covers: The Supremes A Go-Go, Elvis Costello’s “My Aim is True,” De La Soul’s “Three Feet High and Rising,” The Byrd’s “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” REM’s “Murmur,” Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue,” The Clash’s “London Calling,” John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” and the the Velvet Underground.

A square grid displaying nine album covers: The Supremes A Go-Go, Elvis Costello’s “My Aim is True,” De La Soul’s “Three Feet High and Rising,” The Byrd’s “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” REM’s “Murmur,” Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue,” The Clash’s “London Calling,” John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” and the the Velvet Underground.
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@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

This meeting could have been an email hacked by the Russians and leaked before a big election

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

Yesterday morning I was explaining Ozzy Osbourne to the kids in my daughter’s carpool, doing the whole RIP tour of Black Sabbath and his solo stuff, and one of them nodded solemnly and said “Fly high, metal grandpa.”

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

Caught the dog reading again.

A scruffy golden doodle stretched out on a window seat, with his front paws on either side of a hardback book like he’s about to open it and start reading.
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@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

Hard to believe the tech companies weren’t being completely honest with us.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-datacenters-worse

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

In Texas, being paid to not mine bitcoin is more profitable than mining bitcoin. This has moved from a simple grift to hostage-taking.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/08/27/why-texas-republicans-are-souring-on-crypto

mcnees OP ,
@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar

[at the crypto meeting]

“Okay, I know we all agreed this would be a standard grift, but look how good the numbers are when we take hostages.”

@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

Lynn Conway, electricial engineer and computer scientist, co-architect of the VLSI design revolution, and transgender activist, was born in 1938.

She invented Dynamic Instruction Scheduling at IBM, but IBM fired her when they learned she was transitioning.

Photo: Lynn Conway

A woman with red hair in a black shirt and light grey skirt, smiling, standing in front of a curtained window and floral wallpaper, behind a striped cushioned chair or sofa and dark wooden table with vase and bouquet of white, blue and pink flowers.
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@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar mcnees , to random

This is probably the best thing I ever posted on Twitter. The memory is pretty dear to me; I'm sharing it here so it still exists somewhere if that place collapses.

Robert McNees (@mcnees….. • 8/13/20 Somehow I've lucked out and have an 8yo who thinks secretly reading under the covers past her bedtime is an act of rebellion, and it hasn't yet occurred to her that her flashlights never seem to run out of batteries. Replies 1,746 Retweets 37.8K Likes 378K
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