david hurn

@bnielson01 The Routine: He joked that guns should remain legal, but bullet prices should skyrocket to $5,000 each. The Logic: He claimed this would eliminate innocent bystanders, as people would think twice before shooting someone.

@david_hurn Interesting. The person that I overheard it from wasn't joking.

Overheard today: "Guns don't kill people. Bullets shot from guns kill people."

@phalpern Still underappreciated.

Statue of brilliant Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell on George Street in Edinburgh. It features his beloved Irish terrier Toby, with whom he used to discuss scientific ideas. Toby seems to have been a loyal friend and good listener 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇬🇧 edinburghnews.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-… #ScientificDogs #ScottishScientists

The brain’s code seems to be in constant flux - what does this mean, l wonder, for all those who liken AI to what’s between our ears? nature.com/articles/d4158…

The glory that is @durhamcathedral

Provocative claim with no explanation. I assume he means the human brain doesn’t have infinite memory. In that sense, nothing is Turing complete. But this feels like missing the point to me.

Here is a processing of some raw data from the recent @NASA Psyche flyby of Mars. This view shows a near true-colour image of the planet. damianpeach.com/psyche/psyche_… We are looking down on the southern hemisphere of Mars during southern hemisphere summer. The polar cap has mostly sublimated away, revealing some rifts across it. The large craters Huygens and Schiaparelli are clearly seen. Syrtis Major is the dark area off to the lower left, while the Hellas impact basin is just left of centre. Note that along the terminator, some discrete clouds are visible high in the Martian atmosphere. As a general observation, the atmosphere looks somewhat hazy or dusty in appearance, though no major dust storms are visible in this view.

Ask Ethan: Is the Universe the same age everywhere? Does our 13.8 billion year figure for the Universe's age apply to any observer anywhere as far as "now" goes? Several scientific effects say otherwise, but quantitatively, not by much. bigthink.com/starts-with-a-…

First ride, first blood...

Season is open

@ToKTeacher @grok I blame Devs youtu.be/Sn-fzkz_nj8?si…

@erotomanes Why aren’t such questions immediately followed by these simple 5 characters? @grok

why do quantum computers look like that

General relativity is not Newtonian gravity with a small correction. It is a theory without gravitational forces at all, replacing them with curved spacetime. It predicts phenomena that Newtonian mechanics cannot accommodate, such as the bending of starlight by massive objects or the fact that if the Sun were to disappear, we would only notice roughly eight minutes later, whereas in Newton’s theory the effect is instant. And yet, in many situations, curved spacetime behaves as if there were a force pulling masses together. That force is a fiction, but sometimes a useful one. Quantum theory works in much the same way. The world is not approximately classical in any fundamental sense. Nevertheless, quantum theory explains why it appears classical. Large systems undergo decoherence: they leave persistent records in their environments, which suppress quantum effects. The result is a world that looks classical, even though it is not. Quantum theory also entails, for instance, the existence of multiple universes, each of which appears roughly classical like our own. In each one, observers could be misled into thinking that classical physics is approximately true, even though it is not. The mistake, then, is to think that new theories arise by gently modifying old ones. More often, they replace them entirely, while explaining why the old picture was so compelling. Scientific progress is not about discovering that we were “almost right”. It is about learning why we were wrong in a way that nevertheless worked. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @Sam_kuyp

How building your digital twin would revolutionise medicine - and change your life. Look forward to this free online event on Wednesday 15 July at 4pm for @SCIupdate, with @PVCoveney: soci.org/news/2026/5/sc…?

You don't have to believe me when I say the Casimir effect does not allow you to extract energy from the vacuum. You could just do the maths. You must first change the boundary condition which, guess what, requires that you put in the energy which you can then extract again.

The laws of physics permit vastly more than the universe will ever do on its own. Without knowledge, most possibilities never happen. Our job is to create it and spread it across the cosmos. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @arjunkhemani

Cosmic beacon unveiled inside nearby active galaxy by JWST Just 45 million light-years away lies galaxy Messier 77. It has an active black hole, it's rapidly forming stars, it's bigger than the Milky Way, and JWST just viewed it. Wow! bigthink.com/starts-with-a-…

The great Paul Whitehouse is 68 years old today, which means I am obliged to post this (again!) - arguably the most majestically random but brilliant comedy sketch committed to celluloid for at least the last, what, forty, forty five years? Yes, forty, forty five years. Happy birthday Paul 🤘

@esa And on the surface of Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover took a blazing, backlit selfie. It took a lot of planning to make this animation happen! science.nasa.gov/photojournal/n…

@peterrhague Breaking Ted

You will never guess which show Grok is talking about here

It's actually the other way around: how a predictable (meaning, deterministic) system can (appear to) be random.

@peterrhague You can't hold a candle to that Sketch!

The general public probably doesn’t realise how much of professional astronomy is having a more intellectual version of this discussion, as if the fate of the universe depends on it. (The fate of the universe may in fact depend on it)