The jobs you're looking for are rare, but they do exist. There must be a bunch of them in this project, for example:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-22/lake-george-earthquak...

In my case, the unicorn factor worked both ways. The job was advertised for a year before my hiking partner encouraged me to apply, and it took a few months more before I did. From that point, the job was easy to get.

In this job market, supply and demand are reasonably well matched; the problem is that the market is very illiquid. Science jobs are rare to begin with, and people stay in them for decades, so vacancies are even rarer.

On the one hand, a programmer at my company who was interested and capable of switching to optics could have had my role by asking for it. On the other hand, if you joined the company as a programmer, you would have had to wait 5 years for an optics role to come up.

So my advice is to stay in touch with your friends from the earth science days, and expect this to take a long time. Good luck!

Microsoft is using IoT in a loose sense. The "thing" could be an industrial PC at the train station that plays a recorded message saying the 8:15 will run late today.

The existing daily pill is really expensive. Australia knew that PrEP would practically eliminate HIV transmission. Even so, the decision to pay for it took years and was fiercely contested. That was before COVID, and people are more willing to pay for public health today. But cheap PReP would make a big difference in the poor countries where HIV prevention really matters.

I was surprised by how many ways Sussman and Wisdom found to modernise the Landau and Lipshitz treatment. There is the obvious change, where the first time they solve some equations of motion, it's done numerically, and the solution is chaotic.

There is also a more subtle change, where they keep sneaking in the concepts of differential geometry. The word "manifold" is reserved for a footnote, but if you know what tangent spaces and sprays are, it's straightforward to translate the "local tuples" and see what they're actually talking about.

I think this is a good idea. If physics undergraduates were exposed to manifolds and tangent spaces in their analytical mechanics course, then saw some exterior calculus in their first electromagnetism course, they might be ready for curvature and geodesics when they study general relativity.

As an Amethyst user, I'm approaching this comparison from the other direction: is there one compelling reason to switch?

The improvement I'd most like to see in Amethyst is more stable window placement when I remove a monitor then add it again (I do that a lot with my laptop).

It would be fantastic to have integration between Amethyst-managed spaces, Firefox windows, and Proton Pass vaults. As in Space 1 knows that new windows should use the Google account in my Work vault, and Space 2 knows that new windows should log out from Google because there is no Google account in my Personal vault. I doubt that's an imminent prospect, though.

In general, I prefer the Amethyst approach of extending the builtin OSX window management to the Aerospace approach of replacing it. Clearly the Amethyst developers weren't convinced that it's impossible to move windows between spaces with hotkeys, because they went ahead and implemented that.

Overall, I'm really happy that these window managers are being written. I use a 42 inch monitor, which would be awkward without them.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850930

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts

In March 2020, it was natural for people to leap to conclusions, because the only thing anyone knew about the coronavirus was that it "came from" a Wuhan market with weird animals.

Weird is socially relative. You eat pigs and pat dogs. Billions of people think that's weird and a bit gross. Fair enough, seeing how many diseases people have caught from them. Animals can carry germs that are dangerous to people. Wash your hands after you touch them.

Objectively, a wet market is just a slaughterhouse. Here's what, in 2022, you should deduce from the fact that the first large coronavirus outbreak occurred in a slaughterhouse: coronavirus outbreaks occur in slaughterhouses. Obviously some animal carried the virus to the Wuhan market. It's very likely that animal was human, because of all the species there, only humans are known to catch the virus. Even if you found an infected pangolin, you'd have to suspect it caught the virus from its handlers.

It's not doing the people of the Latrobe Valley any favors by playing along with their pretence that coal mining has a future. They might well have a future in electicity storage, but it won't involve digging things up or burning them.

On the other hand, this is an impressive achievement, and it would be fairly straightforward for Australia to generate hydrogen with no greenhouse emissions. The only question is how many governments we'll have to overthrow before we get there.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30016188

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

https://www.theage.com.au/national/djokovic-farce-at-airport...

More cynically, this is a great opportunity for the most dishonest prime minister, and most corrupt government, in recent Australian history to put on some theatre about their respect for the rule of law.

On the other hand, this isn't the first time that someone has arrived in Australia with a visa, been taken aside at the airport, questioned by immigration officials, and told to leave the country. The usual reason it happens is when the immigration officials suspect that the person told some some fibs on their visa application. To my ears, "failed to provide adequate documentation" sounds very much like a euphemism for "told us a pack of porkies." This would explain the confusion over what the Immigration Department and the Victorian Government discussed after he arrived, and the Victorian Government's rush to distance themselves from him after that discussion.

Entirely possible. The sad thing is, when I've seen physicists take the "no such thing as bad publicity" approach, it's worked. University presidents watch the news too.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=C6BzRwwAAAAJ

You'll have to take my word for it, as I don't currently have a university job. For some reason, Google doesn't let you authenticate your Scholar account with your ORCID account, even though they trust ORCID to verify that you wrote the papers.

This paper sounds legitimate to me. If it was made up, it would be a fraud, not a spoof. That's unlikely, because the authors come from the most legitimate institutions there are (The University of Oxford, The National University of Singapore). ArXiv verifies institutional affiliation. Even if it is made up, the experiment is plausible.

I can get how it sounds like a spoof. I laughed out loud at:

> We simulate the electric fields and capacitance shifts using ANSYS Maxwell where the tardigrade is modelled as a cube of length 100μm

I.e, they literally assume a cubical tardigrade in a vacuum!

Actually, I did present this experiment as a spoof, at a physics department O-week camp 20 years ago. I think we used a monkey instead of a tardigrade. It was as lame as it sounds.

> My favorite laugh line from the paper: "Maximum likelihood estimation was then employed to prevent the resulting density matrix from having nonphysical properties."

What they did is totally legitimate. Reconstructing density matrices is numerically unstable, a bit like any computerized tomography. This is similar to constraining a noisy CAT scan, to avoid the "nonphysical property" that the air at some point in your lungs has density less than zero.

Engtangling a live animal is a hell of a party trick. No doubt about that. So how much does this matter scientifically? Here we're getting into subjective territory, and what follows is my opinion.

The surprising aspect is biological, not physical. I might have guessed that, if you cooled a tardigrade to the temperature that quantum electronics operate at, you could use it as a quantum electronic component. I wouldn't have guessed that the tardigrade would get up and walk away afterwards!

The philosophical significance? It depends, of course. For materialists like me, who make sense of quantum wierdness the Everettian way, it makes no difference. Of course electrons can get entangled, and the electrons in a tardigrade—or a physicist—are still electrons. (The price we pay is a very, very, odd sense of personal identity.)

For idealists, this is quite a big deal. If you insist that you are a definite state of consciousness, then you need to draw a line somewhere, between the part of the universe that is you, and the other parts that can be quantum superpositions. Twenty years ago, that was easy: you're an animal, not an atom, duh.

This makes it a bit harder: you're a ... big animal? How big, exactly? You could be some non-electronic degree of freedom, but surely that's a stretch neurologically.

It's a lot easier to draw a categorical distinction of animal vs mineral than of human-like observers vs other animals. If they can entangle a tardigrade, then in principle they could entangle your pet dog. Is it much comfort that they can't, yet, entangle you?