Alex Klotz

@aklotz.bsky.social

Physics professor at California State University, Long Beach. Interested in knots, DNA, and knotted DNA.

I'm in Australia and trying to use a command line on a cluster in Scotland. Typing is laggy because the round trip distance is more than 0.1 light seconds. This is the first time I've been hampered by the finite speed of light.

It's funny how my "internet not working right" workflow has shifted from checking my wifi connection to checking downdetector to see if there's a global outage of from something like AWS or cloudflare.

Environmentally and geopolitically it might be a disaster, but the Northeast passage between China and Europe could be made a lot shorter by digging a canal between Lake Baikal and the Amur River basin. Then you'd only need to sail the Arctic between the Yenisey and the White Sea-Baltic Canal.

If there's one thing I can attribute my success to, it's understanding the post hoc ergo propter hoc falacy. My career really took off after I learned about it.

If you're ever feeling bad, know that the building that houses the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, one of the richest departments in one of the most prestigious schools, designed by world-famous architect I.M. Pei, does not have a way to take the stairs from the second to the third floor.