George Musser
contributing editor, Scientific American, Nautilus; contributing writer, Quanta; author, Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, Spooky Action at a Distance, Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory; planetary scientist, local historian, bassist, salsero
- Reposted by George MusserI'm at the Willard Hotel where I've been denied entry and kicked out of the Reclaiming Science event with NIH director Bhattacharya & other top agency leaders. @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social and I registered for the event months ago yet were told capacity was full, even as they let in dozens of others.
- "AI boosters talk of superintelligence, the end of work and of data centres in space. Here on planet Earth, the technology merely increases the chances of having the right number of pepperoni slices on your next takeaway." I can think of a lot of better uses for the $1 trillion being spent on AI.
- Reposted by George MusserI wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free
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- Reposted by George MusserPhoto by Pierre Lavie. Yes this is me. And I threw my Leica. It landed on the bass plate with hardly a scratch. Another Photographer grabbed it along with my phone and I was able to track him later. I was held face down tear gas deployed right in front of me and pepper sprayed directly into the eye.
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- The question of whether LLMs are conscious is now settled. @erikhoel.blogsky.venki.dev’s approach is agnostic about which theory of consciousness is right. Empirically, LLMs are equivalent to a lookup table, which is manifestly not conscious. But a future A.I. system that learns on the fly might be.
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- Reposted by George Musser🧪 EXCLUSIVE 🧪 from @science.org: Scientists have swabbed a 500-year-old drawing attributed to Leonardo da Vinci—and may have found a piece of his DNA. www.science.org/content/arti... Yes, really. A quick thread:
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- Reposted by George MusserEx-Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun has Lunch with the FT and in one of those instances so rare that you know he didn't sign an NDA, says exactly why as.ft.com/r/e503690d-8...
- Reposted by George MusserA reminder of the stunning rate of scientific progress: it’s only been 101 years that we’ve known the Universe is larger than the Milky Way. Now we know that it’s at least *1 million* times larger in linear size than the Milky Way (and probably 50 or more times larger than that, even).
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- "The silence from NJ’s loudest lawmakers was deafening last week after the Port Authority announced it would jack the PATH train fare from $3 to a whopping $4.... [A year ago] @govmurphy.bsky.social, @mikiesherrill.bsky.social... led a charge to try to kill the [Manhattan congestion] tolls."
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- Reposted by George MusserIf you are in the US and you would like to send a message to your elected representative about the proposed dissolution of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, @agu.org makes it easy with a template here: agu.quorum.us/campaign/151... #AGU25
- Reposted by George MusserIt is hard to overstate how critical @ncar-ucar.bsky.social is to climate science in the US and around the world. It's the beating heart of our field. Generations of scientists have trained there, and almost everyone I know relies on deep collaborations with NCAR scientists. It's end is unthinkable.
- Reposted by George MusserAGU has a Congressional email and call script up on NCAR:
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- OK to lie on a job application to pass AI screening? @maxread.info says yes. "You owe the recruiters to whom you’re submitting your job application as much care and respect as they are showing you. Which is to say, if they’re using automatic sorting systems for sweeping eliminations, not very much."
- "While elites of both parties have polarized ideologically... this process has been more precipitous for Republicans." Interesting analysis by @anastasiabzv.bsky.social and colleagues in @pnas.org. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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- "Everything that isn’t a ghost is usually woven." LLMs’ style is hilarious but sobering: They make the curious word choices they do because that’s what most people rate as good writing. (PSA: When you see me using “delve,” “—”, and descriptive triplets, it’s really me!)
- Reposted by George MusserYou've probably heard about how the rapidly increasing numbers of satellites are affecting #astronomy. A new paper in @nature.com looks at the possible future for space-based telescopes — and finds 96% of some images could be impacted. 🧪🔭🛰️ By @jennaahart.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...
- Reposted by George MusserScientists: have you been the target of an online harassment campaign, doxxing, or weaponized FOIA requests? I'd like to talk to you about steps you had to take to protect your digital security for an upcoming Nature story. (You can be anonymous if necessary.) RTs appreciated.
- Reposted by George Musser"Science is being destroyed across many agencies" say federal researchers. For my latest @nature.com piece, I spoke to 19 different scientists across EPA, NOAA, NIH, NASA, and USGS to document how science is being dismantled across US federal agencies.
- "New York City's Citi Bike system costs more to ride than any other major bike-share system in the United States, Canada or Europe."
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- "Witnesses said they saw KitKat sitting under the Waymo, and attempted to stop it from driving off.... 'It just…. ran over him.'" Well, why doesn't Waymo have some kind of emergency switch? Until it does, I refuse to ride in one.
- Putting an atom into a hall of mirrors ("cavity") can stop it from emitting light. Now remove a mirror. How long before the atom can emit? Immediately! No matter how long the hallway. Vlatko Vedral of @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social explains this bizarre case of quantum spooky action at a distance.
- Tech companies are spending $1 trillion on A.I. China built its entire high-speed rail network for that. It's hard to imagine A.I. would improve our lives by as much as a decent transit system (not to mention universal health care or poverty elimination).
- Mindblowing study of a 3800-year-old array of termite mounds in the caatinga shrubland of northeastern Brazil—200 million of them interconnected by tunnels over an area the site of Britain.
- A.I. makes it easier for students to cheat, but is otherwise the enemy of cheating, argues @economist.com. It empowers you against unscrupulous plumbers, car dealers, taxi drivers, and five-star reviewers. "Rip-off markets impose an effective consumer tax of hundreds of billions of dollars a year."
- "'[People] have to protest peacefully, they can’t commit crimes, they can’t attack the federal officers.' But what about when those protesters are attacked by the feds? What about their ability to exercise their rights in public?" asks @ndhapple.bsky.social.
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- Some journal websites such as PNAS and Science open PDF links in the browser, forcing you to go through an extra step to download the actual PDF. Does anyone know how to bypass the in-browser reader?
- Are there any good Trump-era protest songs?
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- "Many researchers are fighting to stay in an increasingly competitive academic system. 'You can work as hard as you want, but at the end of the day, it’s down to numbers. It’s down to luck.'" www.nature.com/articles/d41...
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- Reposted by George MusserIt was yet another rough night for CDC employees: Dozens — possibly hundreds, they are still self-surveying — were let go late at night, including those who worked on the prestigious MMWR reports www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/u...
- Swipe up to try a new variant on Conway's Game of Life. And another. And another. This is how artificial-life researchers spread the joy after the #ALIFE2025 conference! They say it's like TikTok, but I wouldn't know.... ⚙️🧫 rulehunt.org?rulesetHex=7... #cellularautomata #gameoflife
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- Tech is depleting not only material resources but also intellectual resources, especially common knowledge. Political polarization erodes agreement on the most basic facts and concepts. "It's almost like seeing the ozone layer deplete before our eyes," said @audreyt.org at #ALIFE2025. ⚙️🧫
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- Evolution has an arrow of time toward greater complexity. It's driven neither by mutation nor by crossover/sex but by symbiogenesis, argued @blaiseaguera.bsky.social (following Lynn Margulis) at #ALIFE2025. He showed lots of cool CoreWar-like competing programs. whatisintelligence.antikythera.org ⚙️🧫
- Richard Löffler creates lifelike oil droplets during the public event at #ALIFE2025. ⚙️🧫
- Another mirroring illusion for your puzzling pleasure, created by @eijiwatanabe.bsky.social, demonstrated by @sinalana.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. ⚙️🧫
- Here's a depressing solution to the Fermi Paradox: In a hostile Galaxy, we won't ever see aliens because, if we did, we'd be dead already, mused Georgii Karelin of @oistedu.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. ⚙️🧫
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- The usual explanation for great music is that it's predictable but not too predictable. But there's more to it, said @frosas.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. We prefer music when we perceive agency behind it. Improvisation trumps a prepared performance. See paper at www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy.... ⚙️🧫
- Monkeys on typewriters would take eons to generate π, but much MUCH less time to generate a program that would generate π, said @hectorzenil.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. He has a cool applet to prove the point at demonstrations.wolfram.com/InfiniteMonk.... ⚙️🧫
- For A.I. to feel empathy, it has to be able to feel pain, argued roboticist Minoru Asada in a provocative talk at #ALIFE2025. He has built a pain signal into his robots. I hope it doesn’t inure them to others’ misery, as we see all too often in people. www.er.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/asadalab/?pa... ⚙️🧫
- In this bizarre #opticalillusion, an object seems to switch direction when viewed in a mirror. Mathematician and puzzle-maker Kokichi Sugihara wrote it up for the @euromathsoc.bsky.social magazine at euromathsoc.org/magazine/art... and created a very helpful video at youtu.be/vGxTKpOt6xU?....
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- Interesting interview of Eliezer Yudkowsky by @kevinroose.com and @caseynewton.bsky.social. One problem I have with A.I. doomsters is that they equate intelligence with power. When I look around at who exerts power and accrues wealth, I see a fairly weak correlation between those two attributes.
- Reposted by George MusserAn incredibly important election in a tiny country just went the right way. Moldova has resisted a huge Russian disinformation campaign and will not become a Russian puppet state.
- For a history project, I need to translate a short passage of handwritten Swedish from the 18th century. Can anyone help?
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- As if to confirm my feelings of alienation from a world going mad, the German trains booked me onto car 24, but there is no car 24.
- Reposted by George MusserThe cells of your body follow simple rules and play off one another to form a complete organism. The researcher Alexander Mordvintsev has developed “neural cellular automata,” building blocks that can self-assemble into any form. @georgemusser.com reports: www.quantamagazine.org/self-assembl...
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- "Companies will spend $375 billion globally in 2025 on A.I. infrastructure, the investment bank UBS estimates. That is projected to rise to $500 billion next year." Which is, of course, the best use to which we can put that money. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/b...
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- Thanks a lot, cheaters. Students who cheat by using LLMs are ruining education not just for themselves but for everyone else, since universities are responding by emphasizing in-class exams, which "may benefit students who are good at thinking quickly, not students who are good at thinking deeply."
- "Rahma gazes up at those planes, she said, she wishes one would fly her family to a safer place. 'I imagine riding on it like a hot-air balloon, going to a country with no war — just food, school and toys,' she said."
- "Perhaps, the researchers say, mind wandering is like a form of light sleep." @norabradford.bsky.social in @sciam.bsky.social
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[Not loaded yet] - One experiment says the three neutrino masses should add up to less than 0.07 eV. Another says the sum should be greater than 0.06 eV. So that's close to an outright contradiction in the standard model of cosmology. digital.physicstoday.org/physicstoday... @physicstoday.bsky.social
- Reposted by George Musser“That attack took out Al Jazeera’s entire Gaza City news crew. … It was a direct hit on a journalist tent. Journalists are civilians, and to kill them in war is a war crime,” CPJ’s CEO @jodieginsberg.bsky.social told @skynewsrss.bsky.social. Watch here⤵️ news.sky.com/video/commit... #NotATarget
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- When UC Berkeley caved in to McCarthyism, it lost its entire theoretical physics department, including future Nobelists. Let this be a lesson to #Columbia and other universities that are now pursuing a policy of #appeasement. Great article on p. 18 of the latest @aip.bsky.social’s history newsletter
