It feels like every day there's a new Anthropic blog post which is tanking a different section of the stock market...

Australians are quietly patriotic, and why wouldn't you be? - Compulsory preferential voting. - Watching the cricket on free to air TV. - A quality, ad-free ABC. Today we can add: - A social media ban on under-16s. Sensible, evidence-driven policy in the face of megalithic corporate interests.

Read our CCS review in ACS Chemical Reviews to learn: - Why modern packings have pressure drop 10x lower than Sherwood predicted. - Why organic liquids have slow kinetics at high temperature - When agitation increases flux in a chemical solvent. And much more! 🧪🔌💡 pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

The Chemistry and Thermodynamics of Point Source CO2 Capture by Liquid Chemical Absorption and Its Impact on Process Performance

Point source carbon capture is a technology that has been developed to separate carbon dioxide (CO2) from gas mixtures prior to emission to the atmosphere. It is considered a crucial technology to man...

pubs.acs.org

I continue to vacillate on GenAI in teaching. This is ChatGPT on the isomorphism between the Ising and Gas Lattice models. Its explanation is the worst of both worlds: it sounds authoritative & plausible, yet is nonsensical. (We do have H[n] = H[1-n]). I worry about undergrads relying on this.

Been very happy to discover standardebooks.org A well-formatted ebook is so much more enjoyable to read. I've already read some Hemingway and the (hilarious) Jeeves Stories of P. G. Wodehouse; I now have some Agatha Christie lined up on my old kobo (plus more Wodehouse...). 📚💙

Standard Ebooks

Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover. Download free ebooks with professional-quality formatting and typography, in formats compatible with your ereader.

standardebooks.org

Quick Guide to STEM Mastery: 1. Learn math 2. Learn everything else 🧪 🧮

Is blue hydrogen as bad as grey hydrogen, or twice as clean as green hydrogen? Reasonable assumptions can lead to either result... www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-gr...

How Green IS Blue Hydrogen?

or Why Green Tech Evaluation is Really, Really Difficult Howarth and Jacobsen's How Green is Blue Hydrogen is one of my favourite articles to come out in the last five years. Not because I agree with ...

linkedin.com

Report from 2025's 3rd year "Entropy and Temperature" lecture: gosh this is difficult to teach. One day I'll master the 2h rigorous introduction to entropy... Next year we might experiment with some of the heat engine-based derivations (God forbid). Kardar's approach is tempting: elegant & brief.

Dr Thomas Moore@drthomasmoore.bsky.social · 2y ago

Entropy is one of the most difficult topics in all the physical sciences. There are as many ways to teach entropy as teachers who teach it. Today, I want to discuss a personal approach from a paper in Chemical Engineering Education. 🧵 journals.flvc.org/cee/article/... #EnergySky #ChemSky #Science

I spent some time this morning in Eisberg's Quantum Physics. It's stunning. There's a lot of hype about GenAI for learning. I buy it in domains where notation & facts are key (lean LaTeX; learn woodworking). But in science, nothing can replace a beautiful, well thought through textbook.

I spent the afternoon looking through CVs for a PhD program. All over the world, there are talented young engineers doing beautiful & subtle work. Yet so many of these bright minds have struggled to find work & stability in their home countries. It's heart breaking. We need to do better by them.

It's amazing how many equations which were historically derived via fancy math can, in hindsight, follow straight from dimensional analysis. To name a few, - Stokes equation - Darcy equation - Richardson-Zaki Any others?

Should be a fun weekend.

I take encouragement from the fact we have made so much progress in clean tech *in spite* of constant political pushback and a lack of sensible economic incentives. 35% of CCS projects are *not* run for the purpose of enhanced oil recovery, or any other purpose beyond preventing CO2 emissions. 1/

Among energy experts, "We DESPERATELY need a carbon tax" is uttered in private more and in public less than any other phrase. How did carbon taxation become toxic? Be creative. Link it to a UBI if you must. Because like it or not, market forces are our only way out of this mess. #EnergySky #GreenSky

Was talking with a senior colleague the other day about the multi-month process of submitting a manuscript before the internet. Typing a document, hand drawing figures, mailing the editors, mail from the reviewers. No wonder old papers show so much more love and care. #AcademicSky #EduSky

When should academics working on green technologies travel for international conferences? Asking for a friend. #AcademiaSky #GreenSky #EnergySky

There's a chance AI makes much engineering work redundant in the near future. But if it doesn't, it's certainly made it *much* harder to train engineers with assignments asking them to solve intermediate, stepping-stone problems. OpenAI's free O3-mini is scary-good at problems at that level.

Computers & Chemical Engineering has to be the most under-rated journal in terms of attention & respect received vs quality of articles published. There is no junk, no faff, and no care for 'hype': just hardcore math & engineering on real & hard problems. #Science #EnergySky #ChemSky

Rowan Williams' 'A Century of Poetry' has to be one of the best books I've read in years. Each poem is like a miniature puzzle expertly pulled apart by the former Archbishop. It's encouraging to see a book of such quality published today. #BookSky

Just threw my favourite reactor engineering problem at ChatGPT's new (free) o3-mini model and it nailed it. I came up with this problem years ago. It doesn't feel solvable at first: you need a good instinct for 1st-order reactions, and I haven't seen something similar in any textbooks. Impressive.

How did academics spend their time before personal computers were around? I forgot my laptop this morning; after the initial paralysis, I read a paper, got some writing done and responded to an urgent email on my phone. I like this pace. I might 'forget' my laptop again soon... #EduSky #AcademicSky

One of the best resources for applying learnings from the education research literature in the classroom also happens to be a post on teaching board games at boardgamegeek.com: boardgamegeek.com/thread/34301... #edusky #boardgames

Teaching Games: A Professional Educator's Perspective | BGG

There have been a few forums popping up recently about learning in board games. As both a board gaming enthusiast and a teacher with 15 years of experience, I wanted to share some of the principles th...

boardgamegeek.com

Pet Peeve: Capital Pi is a terrible letter to use for a dimensionless group, as it makes writing products of groups confusing. My students learn the Buckingham Phi Theorem.

Math Humour

Very happy to share our latest perspective in Nature Chemical Engineering, 'Accelerating climate technologies through the science of scale-up.' We discuss tools academics and R&D engineers can use to accelerate the scaling of new technologies. Read it here! rdcu.be/d30IM @nature.com 🧪⚛️ 🧮 🔌💡

Accelerating climate technologies through the science of scale-up

Nature Chemical Engineering - This Perspective argues that early assessments of technology-market fit, as well as how the physics governing system performance evolves with scale, can de-risk...

rdcu.be

Kazuo Ishiguro's novels are perfect. 💙📚 Go - go read them all. Whatever you do, don't read a review; they spoil the effect entirely. You can trust me. Start with 'The Remains of the Day'. That is all.

New rule: Peer review requests shall not be sent from 20 Dec - 2 Jan. 🧪

I remember doing research on Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers (Formic Acid in particular) and realising *just* how inefficient & expensive they are. Liquefaction is much easier. But it's still very, very hard. As usual, Michael Liebreich says it best. #GreenSky 🧪🔌💡

Michael Liebreich@mliebreich.bsky.social · 4y ago

A thread for those who think we're going to be importing lots of hydrogen over vast distances. 1. Shipping liquid hydrogen is not going to be a thing. To understand why, you need to understand that hydrogen is basically liquid, -253C escapey, explodey expanded polystyrene.

I've spent the last little while reading the excellent (satirically titled) textbook 'Understanding Deep Learning' by Simon Prince. The field is a joy, and full of surprises. Take Double Descent: the unintuitive behaviour which is the mathematical cornerstone allowing massive LLMs to be trained. 🧵

Machine learning is the statistical physics of the 21st century: - Phenomena that emerge at scale. - Criticality phenomena (phase changes; critical points; double descent criticality.) - Practitioners using tools that work, though no one understands why (ergodicity; entropy; superposition; SGD).🧪⚛️