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  Starting to hit aurora season...we're on the declining side of the Sun's activity cycle right now, but should still be some fairly good displays now that it's actually getting dark. (Timelapse vid from 2024, the thing darting around is a military helicopter doing tracer-fire training.)

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  Flight Lieutenant, did you really submit your flight plan with the callsign "Biggles'); DROP TABLE Airports;"? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/12/military-aircraft-reportedly-blamed-for-uk-air-traffic-control-outage

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  Don't get me wrong, machine learning is an incredibly useful tool in many fields, but I don't think it can mitigate the LLM based "no, seriously, intelligent" economic crash that's coming.

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  Today I learned.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYdXa_yp0fc

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  Just play it cool, nobody's noticed so far, blending right in, you've got this...

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  Realised complete scans of Dr Samuel Johnson's original 1755 dictionary are available free on Wikimedia Commons. So, of course, the first thing to check is whether he included "Sausage". And he didn't, although "Saucisse" sounds like it's closely related. Messrs. Curtis and Elton (Blackadder The Third, 1987) nailed it.

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  Reminded of this, because of one of J's projects: Mark Everett, of the rock band Eels, looks into the work of his dad, Hugh Everett III, the proposer of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Quite bittersweet in places, goes into his father's early death. https://vimeo.com/58603054

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  Higher Physics students (so ~16yo) arguing over quantum gravity today. That's way, way beyond what we teach. Nice. The main thread was whether theories that we have no idea how to test count as real science. Also nice. (My take is that it never hurts to have a self-consistent theory with no testable predictions in your back pocket, but you still need to go outside and catapult water balloons at technicians from time to time.)

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  Northern Highland #Scotland folk: if you live near a beach it could be worth looking for fulgerite tomorrow, patches of sand that have been hit by lightning. If you (very gently, they're fragile!) dig down you may find a branch-like structure where the lightning fused the sand into a kind of glass. Rare, special thing to find.

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  Tricky to film, I need to sit down and get a proper lighting/zoom/angle setup, but this gives an idea. The spikes form to balance the pressure created by the magnet pulling the fluid down, they basically follow magnetic field lines and the separation is down to viscosity/density. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u65e2UrdBWA

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  The mission patch for the lunar rover computations I'm funding* has arrived! This is going straight on my lab coat. Thanks @standupmaths, love it! *To the tune of £10 plus some more for the patch. As part of £150k to vet the code that will run on a small rover as part of a hundreds-of-millions mission. https://youtu.be/IY0pf0-Daew

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  @WastelandWandrr@freeradical.zone @TheBreadmonkey@beige.party Basically, yes. The far right of the graph is where you can both *use* quantum machanics and also have a new understanding of what "understanding" means in the context of QM.

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  @LappenjammerDieZweite@social.vivaldi.net How else do you do the big, expensive, profitable crucifixion scene every 5 years?

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  "So let me get this straight, you found our DNA, all 13 of us, on an old clay cup?" "The Grail, yes. You all shared it that one time." "And you made..." "Grew." "...grew copies of us? And now we all have to have dinner together every day because..?" "It's the biggest attraction at Jesusland." "What happens when we look too old?" "We start a new gen...

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  @Buster Our microbe, Which is basically everywhere, Saccharomyces be thy name. Thy kingdom Fungi, Thy phylum Ascomycota, On earth, as it is in the ocean. Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our infections, As we forgive those who gave us infections. For thine is the power, An- and aerobically, For far longer than us. A mould.

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  @csk If Erdös, Lemmy and Bacon are in there, everybody is implicated....

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  @moira What?

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  RE: https://mastodon.com.br/@xkcd/116480390342730879 There's honestly a certain element of truth in this. A mathematician specialising in topology once got chatting to a lady who was knitting, fascinated by the parallels, of which there are many. He approached her, very excited, a week later, with a whole new way of doing it. "Yes, dear, that's called a purl stitch."

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  Nice.

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  GARGH! NASA [edit: commentary] making the same mistake as the Scottish qualifications people, spacecraft don't generally heat up on re-entry due to "friction", it's down to adiabatic compression mostly, squeeze a gas and it gets hot. Squeeze it more and it turns to a plasma. Squeeze that even more and it starts giving off high energy photons. That's not friction.

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  If I was on Artemis I'd spend the 40 minute radio blackout rigging all the clocks, logs, instrumentts etc to show that 6 hours had passed, then refuse to comment on what I'd seen on the far side. This is probably why I'm not allowed on the Artemis.

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  Visit to the Inverness Botanical Gardens today, and their extensive Triffid collection.

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  Guess the reason for the photo?

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  In case you missed it, new particle just dropped. The LHC has confirmed (and in ridiculous accuracy) the existence of a heavier version of the proton. A proton is made of 3 quarks, up/up/down. This new particle is made of charm/charm/down, where the charm quark is basically the same as the up, just heavier. So not groundbreaking like finding supersymmetric particles, but still cool. Further confirmation that the standard model of particle physics is reasonable. https://home.cern/news/news/physic...

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  "And some people say 'These people, they're not even trying to be British. They come here, they bring their own culture, their food, speak their own language, and try to take over the whole bloody place.' Dunno. Sounds pretty British to me." ~Trevor Noah 😂