iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Black Power is blue though, but the Mongrel Mob is red... bsky.app/profile/slan...

Ive heard that Alpher spent most of his subsequent life being upset about this because adding the 800 pound gorilla Bethe to his already fairly impressive advisor made his contribution look negligible.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 18h

Tbh academic freedom is not about trivialities. If you are asking for a million dollars of public money you should probably keep a straight face while you do it. My take is that haters gonna hate but don't make it easy for them with stuff that fails the front page of the Herald test.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 20h

Jefferson Airplane. Time is a flat circle.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 20h

Got to come as a huge disappointment when youre parents say they are "taking you to Starship" and you find out it is not an actual starship but actually a hospital and you're 6. First Santa and then this.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Looks like the Herald vote link hit a big Facebook group?

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

I thought his hand was shaking at one point.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Just got email ending with "Thank you for your attention to this matter." Was about to reply "____ you, make me" when I saw it was a polite request about exam formatting. I knew Trump would mess up a lot of things, but didn't realise old school inter-office communication would be one of them.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Glider, technically. Shuttle pilots all flew T-38s regularly, but there was no special license beyond NASA assigning you to sit in that seat...

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Trick question. Anyone who'd actually piloted a space shuttle knows that you don't need a special license to do it.

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Reposted by Richard Easther

Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

So, happy 89th anniversary of the day Oswald Mosley tried to sell fascism to Liverpudlians—and someone concussed him with a brick

A man in a suit, standing on top of a van with loudspeakers on it, flinches as projectiles are hurled at him

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Just realised that it's 25 years since Mum died. The funny thing is that she's often still here. I can see her enjoying a garden, smiling at an accidentally amusing news story, loving her grandchildren, admiring a picture, writing it all down.... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley...

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Nice photo - the blurry foreground, rising birds and the crisp subject.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

He was pretty amiable. He did once take a child's bike off our porch but swore that he thought we were giving away. (I believe him - he seemed genuinely mortified and always greeted me "hello neighbour" after that)

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

(Always assumed it was not actually mobbed up; that would be too blatant. But one old guy on our street was reportedly a retired low-level guy)

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Our place in New Haven was round the corner from a restaurant called "Goodfellas" which showed mafia movies on big screens while you ate dinner. Assume that canoli was on the menu.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Cookers. So stupid it hurts.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Amazing (ok, maybe not) that being a cooker about vaccines also makes you a racist about migration.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Worried Jamie has caught up with my personal tally of "Ivy League library cards held."

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

But Kitaev, Bennett and Preskill maybe.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I had lunch with Berry a year or two ago. Lovely guy.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Yep. But TOP on 4.9% would be bad for the left I think.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This struck me as a much stronger case for the electrification

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

He spent most of the last 15 years in the US East Coast at the UN and other places, so seems a bit off to blame him for not being in Chch. (Full disclosure- I met him the other day and was impressed) the green candidate will get in on the list I assume - both in parliament woudl be a good outcome

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

So you're not suddenly rocking some fancy pilots' chronometer?

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

What did you win? Other than a line in your bio :-)

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Google reverse image search is your friend.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

One of the best things when you are doing a talk or lecture notes in my area is that anything from NASA is public domain.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Closer to users. And part of their point is that can operate out of airports. (And Cornwall was developed as a launch site for Virgin Orbit which was airdropped from a 747)

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

And Crux.aero is doing cool things with hydrogen flight. 2/2

crux.aero

CRUX

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Two cool (new to me and maybe news!) stories from #nzas26 - Dawn Aerospace will operate their Aurora spaceplane out of Cornwall UK 1/2

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Aerospace summit kicking off...

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

(It's not strictly accurate since the problem i tried involves writing a small code that then algorithmically generates a lot of code that you then run to solve your problem. But I also now have 300 klocs of C/C++ that I did not have a week ago.)

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My sense is that physicists are mostly more pragmatic since we are more interested in answers. But either way the raw capability of the tools is far beyond what I would have expected a year ago, and that fact is not going away. But it is also still a very limited and specific domain.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Nothing I didn't see a week ago. TBH I think physicists are more pragmatic about it - pure mathematicians are worried that grinding out proofs to famous problems will make them "unnourishing" - and that is more about a tension between why mathematicians do math and why other people think they do.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Mattermost has simple boards.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

They all read his posts. Some more nervously than others.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Wait till you see what they did with the "girlfriend problem"

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Well, what I do know is that Claude and presumably other frontier models can do what would be months' worth of work for a talented PhD student or postdoc in hours - admittedly in some specific cases. That is way ahead of my expectations and that of most of my colleagues from a couple of years back.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I said "many" not "all" or even "most".

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

My instruction was "read this paper, and see if you can generalise it to these more complicated cases" and it basically did that with minimal further advice.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

But to the original point, nothing this transformative will stay in an academic box. It's already changing the way all kinds of code gets written by "industry" and many assumptions about the fallibility of AI ("six fingers! look at the silly clanker") are likely to evaporate, IMO.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

That's true without AI. The average gamer has more compute in a decent desktop rig than a whole weapons lab did a few decades ago.

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Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

i used Claude over the weekend to do a calculation that would have taken me months or maybe years when I worked directly on the topic. It won't change everything all at once, but it would be brave to claim that he is wrong.

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