I also hate flashing lights. Is it just me or do flashing bike lights cause some kind of strange mild disorientation? In addition, they are distracting and stop me seeing other things.
I don't use Wero, yet, but I'm not really convinced when I read about it. Firstly, it lets anyone lookup the name associated with a phone number or email address, which is a privacy nightmare. Secondly, only a single bank account can be used with a phone number or email. This just seems badly designed.
We also released the 2nd half sky catalogue of the eROSITA X-ray survey at the same time, for 1.5 years of operations, in collaboration with SDSS. Here is a sky map and 3D plot with redshift: https://www.mpe.mpg.de/8215311/news20260731
This almost doubled the number of known X-ray sources to 2 million.
Personally, I think social media and academic publishing timescales, rewards and social conventions don't match very well. Social networking feels transient and impersonal. I would like to take some time to form my opinion about a paper, not jump in with a post. Maybe some comment box would be ok to write a couple of nice things about a paper, but it doesn't feel the place to write harsh criticism or have complex discussion where things could be misunderstood. Rather than write in the public record, if I think the paper has a deep flaw I would prefer to contact the authors first. This can be followed up by discussions in your own papers. Others may have different opinions, of course.
A surprising number of scientists seem to use it, likely because of the now terrible atmosphere for scientists on Twitter/X and the emptiness of bluesky.
What's the good of a perfect railway line if it never gets built? What happened to the capacity argument? There is likely a good optimum between the cheapest and most expensive possible for capacity and speed. We could all fly around in supersonic aircraft, but there's a reason we don't.
Isn't the problem that the requirements for line were "gold plated"? If they'd put in another standard rail line instead, it would have increased capacity, taken up much less space, would have been much cheaper, would have caused less disruption and would have had a clearer business case.
Pedantically, it's Einstein Probe (EP), not Einstein. Confusingly, in Chinese it has another name, Tianguan, commemorating the observation of the supernova which created the Crab Nebula.
Stunt Island was pretty good. However, there are more unusual games out there with reasonable budgets, like Death Stranding, The Talos Principle, The Outer Wilds, Portal and X4:Foundations. Even games involving shooting like Control or Alan Wake 2 are driven by unusual story telling.
With google I can't find things I know exist. For example, it doesn't find several of my github repositories with unique names that have been there for years. With old google you could drill down a couple of pages of results, but they're not there now. It also prefers worse sources for materials, for example some blog which poorly explains some API, rather than the original documentation.
Although Intel processors are efficient, modern AMD processors have much higher idle power usage, due to their chiplet design. They typically use at least 20W more power.
Unfortunately the LibreOffice Impress is pretty bad. PowerPoint is what keeps me using Office. LibreOffice formatting looks bad on the screen (it resizes bitmaps to make the fuzzy) and the user interface for constructing slides is both clunky, slow and buggy. I don't understand how the UI can be this slow in 2025 on a fast PC. Basic functionality, like resizing an equation, just doesn't work.
That's not right. I'm an astronomer, and I often look at colour images and colleagues do, too. For example, the galaxies in a cluster of galaxies follow a relation of colours - brightness (the "red sequence"), which can be used to detect the cluster. The eye is also quite good at helping confirm a cluster by spotting the galaxies following this sequence. I also use colour images to help identify spectral changes that change across an image, in my case in the X-ray waveband.
I believe many Atari ST models had their graphical OS (TOS/GEM) on ROM. The Archimedes with RISC OS felt revolutionary at the time, however. Several of the graphical desktop programs were written in BBC Basic and you could look at the source.
I have Django code which creates a tar file on the fly from a list of requested files and works well. It doesn't use intermediate storage. The tar format can be pretty simple. I got most of the way into implementing a uncompressed zip version, but then I realised that tar was good enough for my site.