Paper about big double donut knots in now published, and open access! iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
Alex Klotz
@aklotz.bsky.social
Physics professor at California State University, Long Beach. Interested in knots, DNA, and knotted DNA.
At the International Conference on Packing Problems and you can tell the organizers have really put in a 74.05% effort putting this together.
Guy who loses his boarding pass on the bus from the gate to the plane because he likes probing edge cases.
Spectroscopist A: *shoots self in arm with laser* Spectroscopist B: "That really doesn't reflect well on you."
I like big knots and I cannot lie. arxiv.org/abs/2603.02416
Tight Bounds for Tight Links: Ropelength of T(Q,Q) torus links
Ropelength, L, is a parameter characterizing the minimum contour length of a knot or link. There exist upper and lower bounds on ropelength with respect to crossing number, C, including a universal lo...
arxiv.org
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.
Any aspiring cleos out there who can find an evaluation of this?
Guy who walks around tourist areas with a big magnet to mess up people using phone compass navigation.
ACAB includes websites that don't have a Reject Cookies button up front
Calling variables in bash reminds me I should be in a different dollar bracket.
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.
Someone in a pub asked me how I don't get cold running in shorts and I got to give a whole thermodynamics lesson.
After hanging around kids several times in the past few weeks I can confirm that the 6-7 thing is annoying.
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.
Boss: "This new invention that rotates the pistons in our engine is great! What should we call it?" Jim: "A jimshaft!" Cam: "I have a better idea."
I bet Ryerson didn't count on their name change setting themselves up for "Temu U of T"
You are eating because you're hungry, I am eating because I'm bored. We are not the same.
Guy who insists that arrays begin at index 0 but that the ground floor is the 1st.
My biggest shame from high school English class is that I DNF'd Jane Eyre right before we found out about the wife in the attic.
Good news, we now have evidence that there was a two month period in which planetary-mass black holes did not collide within our solar system. journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...
Experimental Limits on Planetary Mass Primordial Black Hole Mergers
The multimode acoustic gravitational wave experiment (MAGE) is a high-frequency gravitational wave detection experiment featuring cryogenic quartz bulk acoustic wave resonators operating as sensitive ...
journals.aps.org
Solving the helium atom in quantum mechanics 🤝 Cancer prevention Understanding the importance of screening
Teaching thermodynamics but pronouncing "metastable" with the same cadence as "metastasis."
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.