Sam Foley

As usual, I owe my knowledge of this (and most other things in statistical physics) to @markusdeserno.bsky.social

"What is temperature at the microscopic level?" A person answers, "Molecular kinetic energy!" His irate, glowing-eyed boss then throws him out the window of a tall building.

I have found that many people don't know about configurational temperature, so I wrote a short note about it on my website.

www.samuelfoley.com/misc/

You know, I knew things would be wacky, but the white house posting Yu-Gi-Oh war inspo videos was not on my bingo card

There aren't any in the official standard, but I know the POCO C++ libraries are very popular for networking (sockets, HTTP, etc). I haven't used them myself though.

A large collection of useful libraries for C++. Used to be practically a universal dependency of large open source projects, I think it's used less nowadays, mostly because many boost libraries were added to the official C++ standard libraries.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boost_%...

Okay, third version of boost, Nth configuration, I'm sure it will actually compile the libraries I need this time, right?

Trump's trying to find the guy who did this.

Incredible to me that Google Docs is a more feature-complete web editor of docx files than Microsoft's own Office web suite. (Office web cannot display equations, Google Docs can)

[low-detail sketch of Ars Veruna in the background of a comic] Ars Veruna Biographical Information Homeworld: Naboo Died: 33 BBY, Naboo

Cracking up at this guy's Wookieepedia entry. Glad we have this artistic depiction of the character.

Always delightful to read one sentence in a paper that you don't fully understand, so you start doing some math and just keep stumbling over insights that aren't necessarily deep or profound, but just hidden under a layer you never would have peeled back without that one sentence.

This is fair, but only for older Treks. Someone wearing TNG or DS9 related merch is trustworthy. Picard or Discovery, ehhh...

^ What if I don't want to connect my school account? No problem. You can upload your own study materials — lecture slides, PDFs, notes, textbook chapters — and Einstein will help you understand them, create interactive learning tools, and guide you through the material step by step.

Love this change too. It's now telling students to violate instructors' copyright and upload our materials to it.

The passing of the gavel! At this morning’s Biophysical Society Business Meeting, now Past-President Lynmarie Thompson welcomed Karen Fleming into her new role as BPS President!

Nature's tiny little lightning rods

It's a fun and well done edit, and usually I'd just leave it alone, but that's also the kind of video that will end up giving a bunch of high schoolers concussions when they try to recreate it.

It's definitely edited, you can see the clouds in the sky snap into different positions before and after the pitch.

My guess is they had the apple on a batting tee, and after a good throw they had someone come in and sit quick, then just did some light compositing to put it together.

I think that's just how their batting boxes are. The video is edited though. Watch the clouds in the sky snap into different positions before and after the pitch.

I don't think this one counts for credit, though 🙄

Carnegie Mellon, a school I haven't been affiliated with for almost 3 years, expects me to spend an hour of my day taking their online "security 101" course or else I'll be locked out of my alumni email account.

lol. lmao, even.

I think we still need more FOSS developers, actually.

That drop is more than the entire NSF budget.

Lipid geeks rise up!

Maybe if you want Decepticons to win

When I started grad school I kept my git repos on Bitbucket because GitHub didn't allow users to make private repos for free, it was a paid feature. They nearly fully captured the git ecosystem when they removed that restriction in 2019. And now MS is on the verge of squandering that lol

WARY

Discovering a single unified tofu model

Who knew that GUT really stands for Grand Unified Tofu

(screenshot from doi 10.64898/2025.12.10.693552)

Hot (?) take:
"in order to" is a very useful phrase when applied judiciously, and the fact that MS Word universally recommends it be replaced by "to" is Very Bad.