The publisher Springer claims it can only discuss why it retracted some of Planck's papers with... Planck!

But until they hold a seance, they are happy to sell you completely redacted versions: blank pages for $39.95 or more each.

https://www.science.org/content/article/why-have-papers-one-history-s-most-famous-physicists-been-retracted?utm_campaign=News

While France roasted and England sweltered, Scotland had some fine sunny days - a rarety. Yesterday, however, a cold fog rolled into Edinburgh.

The Korean branch of Starbucks used AI to create a marketing campaign, but whoops - this campaign celebrated the May 18th massacre of Korean civilians peacefully protesting a military coup in 1980!

Nobody checked before they launched the ad campaign.

Result: massive protests and boycotts, legal actions against Starbucks, collapse in stock prices, etc.

Linkedin is annoying, but this article is great, and you can read it without registering. Just click the X on the top right of the box to make it go away:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-national-gift-insult-how-starbucks-korea-destroyed-tz0ve

This is a view of the sky through a 6-meter-wide hole at the top of James Turrell's huge new installation called The Dome. The color of the light inside this dome keeps changing - and so does the color of the sky, as the day goes by. When you look at a colored disk on a colored background, both colors affect how the disk looks.

"Outside, the Danish evening sky was a mottled gray. But to the viewers gazing up through the opening inside the huge dome that is the American artist James Turrell’s latest creation, the sky was a flat circle of pure color that morphed seamlessly from cobalt blue to teal green, to a yolk-like yellow and back to blue. With each cycle, the colors grew subtly deeper, gradually reaching an intensity that compelled several visitors to lie down directly below the aperture, as if waiting for the mothership to beam them home."

Quote from Lisa Abend at the New York Times (gift link): https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/arts/james-turrell-aros-aarhus.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rlA.jTIJ.r9iQQbaM_4d2&smid=url-share

Back in 2011 when I worked in Singapore at the Centre for Quantum Technologies, I visited Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples in Cambodia. On the outskirts, overgrown by the jungle, is Ta Prohm, made famous by that Tomb Raider movie.

I thought I might as well share my photos. I generally try to minimize travel these days, and I try not to glamorize travel either. But it also seems a bit silly to sit on these photos forever and die with them on my laptop. So here they are. Not great quality, but a great place.

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The JUNO detector, a huge sphere full of 20,000 tonnes of transparent organic goop, is detecting antineutrinos produced by two nuclear reactors each located the same distance away. After just 2 months, it measured some things about neutrino masses better than ever before! A paper was just published on this.

We're trying to understand the masses of the 3 neutrinos. A big problem is that most experiments can't detect the actual masses, only fancier things that are easier to measure. So, we don't even know which neutrino is the heaviest! JUNO may figure this out, though.

Let me tell you a bit more:

The 3 neutrinos have masses called m₁, m₂ and m₃. Yes, we physicists are very creative about naming things. We know m₁ and m₂ are really close to each other, while m₃ is further away. We also know m₁ < m₂, thanks to neutrinos coming out of the Sun. But we don't know whether m₃ is bigger than both the other masses, or smaller! So right now there are two possibilities:

• Normal ordering: m₁ < m₂ < m₃, so m₃ is the heaviest and sits above the closely-spaced m₁, m₂ pair.

• Inverted ordering: m₃ < m₁ < m₂, so m₃ is the lightest, sitting below the closely-spaced pair.

There's a bit of evidence supporting the normal ordering, which is why it's called the 'normal' ordering. Like I said, we physicists are very creative.

In about 5 years, the JUNO team should know which ordering is the right one! But right now, after just 2 months of taking data, they've just measured m₂² - m₁² more accurately than ever before. So they are happy.

But the whole business of neutrino masses is weirder than I've made it sound.

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@roryreckons.bsky.social writes:

"The question "What do 2 and 7 have in common?" on autism tests is extremely interesting in the responses, and relates to differences in reasoning. I will discuss these in this thread, but think about it for a second.

1) The most common neurotypical response is that they are both numbers, which relies on broad categorisation.

2) Autistic people usually discuss either shape, their mathematical significance (primes, factors of 14, roman numerals), rotation, angles etc instead of the most broad category.

When asked this question, it never occurred to me that they would be asking about whether they are numbers. It's obvious they are numbers to me, that isn't where I would start to look for similarities.

Autistic people tend to use bottom-up processing, and neurotypicals top-down. So, the neurotypical expectation if someone asked you this question would be "they are numbers"

If you replied with something else, they would likely indicate that this showed a deficit on your part for not picking the most "obvious" answer, or imply you are being pedantic. But I feel like it's generally insulting to my intelligence to assume that I didn't already know they are numbers, and that pointing that out might be insulting the intelligence of the person I was talking to also."

As for me, "they're both numbers" was way too obvious to dream of answering that way. Like:

Q: What do a duck and platypus have in common?
A: They're both animals.

Duh!

Since I'm a mathematician, it's also rather dull to say 2 and 7 are both prime. It's acceptable - but are too many primes for it to be actually interesting.

So I set out looking for a better answer.

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Oh-oh.

"The crux of our work is to demonstrate that advances in AI enable a standalone, self-replicating malware that is able to propagate across heterogeneous computer networks with no prior assumptions about host vulnerabilities, network topology, or system configurations. Existing works on cyber-offence predominantly use frontier models that excel at both logical reasoning and decision-making. The compute footprint of these models however precludes them from being integrated into a standalone malware, whose operation is independent from the availability of a model provider. We thus turn to smaller, open-weight models."

More geometry in music: the 'cube dance'. This shows all the chords called major, minor and augmented triads. Two of these chords are connected by an edge if they differ by just one note. We get 4 cubes connected at their corners!

Augmented triads are choke points: if you want to get from one cube to another, you have to go through an augmented triad.

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The rhombicosidodecahedron is an Archimedean solid with 12 pentagons, 20 equilateral triangles, and 30 squares as faces. You can draw it with all its vertices having coordinates of the form a + b√5 with a,b rational. If you replace √5 by -√5, you get something kind of wonderful! The squares stay square. The triangles stay equilateral triangles. But the pentagons turn into pentagrams!

Here I've only drawn the pentagrams, because it gets a bit messy otherwise.

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