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Lee Phillips

@badphysicist

Physicist and writer. https://lee-phillips.org/

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23.02.2024
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Latest posts by Lee Phillips @badphysicist

Yes, WaterLily looks good. I’ll have to check it out one day.

10.03.2026 14:50 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

You’re the second one for whom this was not clear. I need to redesign the interface.

10.03.2026 14:14 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

After placing the vortices, click the Start button.

10.03.2026 14:06 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

A very large juvenile diamond squid - this one measuring in at a whopping 3” - perhaps the 2nd largest I’ve ever seen!

Shot in the wild, using scuba, while out over the deep abyss, several miles offshore from Okinawa

#diamondsquid #thysanoteuthisrhombus #blackwaterdiving #gug #gugunderwater

05.03.2026 13:01 πŸ‘ 174 πŸ” 48 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 4
This is an image of the star WOH G64, taken by the GRAVITY instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI). This is the first close-up picture of a star outside our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The star is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, over 160 000 light-years away. The bright oval at the centre of this image is a dusty cocoon that enshrouds the star. A fainter elliptical ring around it could be the inner rim of a dusty torus, but more observations are needed to confirm this feature.

This is an image of the star WOH G64, taken by the GRAVITY instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI). This is the first close-up picture of a star outside our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The star is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, over 160 000 light-years away. The bright oval at the centre of this image is a dusty cocoon that enshrouds the star. A fainter elliptical ring around it could be the inner rim of a dusty torus, but more observations are needed to confirm this feature.

Astronomers watched as the star WOH G64 transformed from a red supergiant into a rare, shortlived yellow supergiant star...in just 12 years.

It's a dramatic, rapid instability in a star that is rapidly headed toward a cataclysmic supernova explosion. πŸ§ͺπŸ”­

theconversation.com/one-of-the-b...

10.03.2026 13:06 πŸ‘ 45 πŸ” 11 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
2D Vortex Dynamics

Try this vortex simulation right in your browser:

lee-phillips.org/vortex/

#julialang #fluiddynamics

10.03.2026 13:19 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
https://lee-phillips.org/TLexamples/

Document programming in #Typst and #LuaLaTeX: some examples

t.co/wKrWZOS5MW

05.03.2026 23:31 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Amazon.com

Rowe’s books and articles are excellent. You might find my book a somewhat gentler introduction to the history of these ideas: amzn.to/3YZZB4W

07.03.2026 20:56 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Emmy Noether Can’t Get a Break

lee-phillips.org/notweyl

β€œEmmy Noether Can’t Get a Break”

Where I complain about a recent video from Sabine Hossenfelder

#history #physics #sexism

03.03.2026 00:22 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Was Christianity necessary for the invention of science? What follows is a classic Renaissance Mathematicus rant! I haven’t had a really good rant in some time and this one was provoked by the following exchange on TSMSFKAT[1]. It’s quite long and I incl…

Was Christianity necessary for the invention of science?

thonyc.wordpress.com/2026/03/04/w...

I seem to hear the odd claim that somehow Christianity was necessary for science more and more often. So I welcome this demolishing of that idea.

05.03.2026 18:47 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
https://lee-phillips.org/TLexamples/

Document programming in #Typst and #LuaLaTeX: some examples

t.co/wKrWZOS5MW

05.03.2026 23:31 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Was Christianity necessary for the invention of science? What follows is a classic Renaissance Mathematicus rant! I haven’t had a really good rant in some time and this one was provoked by the following exchange on TSMSFKAT[1]. It’s quite long and I incl…

Was Christianity necessary for the invention of science?

thonyc.wordpress.com/2026/03/04/w...

I seem to hear the odd claim that somehow Christianity was necessary for science more and more often. So I welcome this demolishing of that idea.

05.03.2026 18:47 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

#Julialang and #Python: Slowly Converging

lee-phillips.org/juliabook/tr...

03.03.2026 21:53 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Emmy Noether Can’t Get a Break

lee-phillips.org/notweyl

β€œEmmy Noether Can’t Get a Break”

Where I complain about a recent video from Sabine Hossenfelder

#history #physics #sexism

03.03.2026 00:22 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

Do you have a website?

Pledge to your users that everything on it is human made:

lee-phillips.org/humanmade/

Join the movement against AI slop.

02.03.2026 18:52 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

It’s an interesting story, but read the article with caution. At least the details about Emmy Noether’s death are incorrect.

The real story is told in amzn.to/3YZZB4W

01.03.2026 16:23 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
4,500 Physicians Agree | Machiel Reyneke On breakfast, engagement rings, and regime change.

machielreyneke.com/blog/persuas...

01.03.2026 15:32 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Thinking about submitting something for JuliaCon 2026, but you are unsure if you have enough for a talk? You can also submit a poster!

The deadline is extended until March 7th!

Submit your talks at juliacon.org/2026/cfp

#julialang

28.02.2026 14:19 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 5 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

β€œ In addition to performance, Julia's language and semantics are much more ergonomic and natural for mathematical and algorithmic code. Even linear algebra in Python is syntactically painful. (Yes, they added the "@" operator for matmul, but this is still true).”

#julialang #python

27.02.2026 14:37 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

β€œthere are things we are doing in Julia with one or two PhD students that would be practically impossible (as in require an order of magnitude more implementation work) in any other language.”

27.02.2026 14:27 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

β€œWe use Julia at our quant fund. We looked into it and several other alternatives 5 years ago as a more performant replacement for numpy/scipy/etc....Julia won for a very simple reason...the Julia version was both the fastest to port and the most performant afterwards.”

27.02.2026 14:22 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Julia: Performance Tips | Hacker News

Discussion about optimizing #julialang on HN:

β€œWe've ported some tens of thousands of lines of numpy-heavy Python, and in practice our Julia code is actually more concise while being about 10x-100x more performant.”

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4712...

27.02.2026 13:57 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Amazon.com

This article gets the details of Emmy Noether’s death wrong. Read amzn.to/3YZZB4W for the correct story.

27.02.2026 03:36 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The article gets the details of Noether’s death wrong. The real story is told in amzn.to/3YZZB4W

27.02.2026 03:33 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Amazon.com

Many people (even physicists) are surprised to learn that the universe doesn’t conserve energy, as @neiltyson pointed out in a recent podcast.

Even most physicists who know this don’t know who first figured it out. Her story is here:

amzn.to/3YZZB4W

#history #physics

27.02.2026 03:27 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

Do you have a website?

Pledge to your users that everything on it is human made:

lee-phillips.org/humanmade/

Join the movement against AI slop.

26.02.2026 18:50 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

Do you have a website?

Pledge to your users that everything on it is human made:

lee-phillips.org/humanmade/

Join the movement against AI slop.

26.02.2026 18:50 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Giant Steps The chords in John Coltrane's Giant Steps are hard to improvise over, even though there are only nine distinct chords.

Check out this interesting note on John Cook's site about Coltrane's β€œGiant Steps”, and be sure to watch the excellent video that he links to:

www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/02...

25.02.2026 00:35 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
The importance of free software to science Free software plays a critical role in science, both in research and in disseminating it. Aspec [...]

The danger of non-free software to #science:

lwn.net/Articles/102...

#physics

24.02.2026 22:29 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Catching the moon at the right time with Julia The moon on a night sky is surprisingly bright, especially for a camera with limited dynamic range. And there’s only so many compositions one can do of the moon on a naked sky. For those reasons takin...

β€œCatching the moon at the right time with Julia”

jonathanbieler.github.io/blog/moon_an...

Wonderful article showing how to use Julia
to catch the Moon at good moments for photography,

#astronomy #photography #julialang

23.02.2026 22:36 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0