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gregegansf.bsky.social
SF writer / computer programmer Latest novel: MORPHOTROPHIC Latest collection: SLEEP AND THE SOUL Web site: http://gregegan.net Also: @[email protected]
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22 years ago I pivoted from working on antibiotic resistance to pandemic viruses. Since then, I've argued that if we care about saving US lives in expectation, advance capacity for producing bird flu vaccine offers by far the greatest expected return on investment. ... We were so goddamn close.

submitted 19 hours ago • 110 comments

Suppose you want to factor 𝑦ⁿ+1, for odd n, into smaller-degree polynomials with integer coefficients. It’s easy to find the complex roots of 𝑦ⁿ+1; they are just the 𝑛th roots of -1, spread at equal angles around the unit circle: 𝑦ⱼ = −exp(2π𝑖𝑗/𝑛) 𝑗 = 0, …, 𝑛−1

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

"Conspiracy believers... massively overestimated (>4×) how much others agree with them" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40411402/ Everyone secretly agrees with me but there's a conspiracy to keep them quiet.

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

Now that @nature.com requires an account to read news articles, I thought it’d be simpler to sign on with Google vs opening yet another account. Ha ha, no. It was OK at first, but now Google wants me to prove I’m me by doing things on my phone before I can read Nature on my desktop.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

It’s a curious psycholinguistic result that a solid 10% of guests on the ABC Radio National Breakfast Show are incapable of calling the current host, Sally Sara, anything but “Sara”, whereas in all the years Fran Kelly was the host, I never heard a single person call her “Kelly”.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

Avoiding a crush in a crowd is more likely if people are encouraged to adopt two strategies: • Follow the direction that the minority of people in the room are choosing. • Change your decision to another exit as soon as you find a better one, that is, one with a smaller queue.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

A Wieferich prime is a prime number p that satisfies the condition: 2^(p-1) ≡ 1 (mod p^2) We only know two primes with this property: 1093 and 3511. But people still think there are infinitely many! Why should anyone care about Wieferich primes?

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

👀 arxiv.org/abs/2505.13775

submitted 7 days ago • 2 comments

Tom Waits is only 75, but after looking at his Wikipedia page I get the feeling he’s lived about three centuries subjectively.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

“If I were a science journalist writing an article about a supposedly shocking development like this, I would email some experts and check to see if it’s for real. But plenty of science journalists don’t bother with that anymore: they just believe the press releases.”

submitted 10 days ago • 13 comments

Hooray! It really is impressive that the Desert Fireball Network can track, locate and retrieve meteorite fragments so quickly. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05...

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Surprised to find myself enjoying “Dope Thief”. There’s nothing new in it — petty crims end up out of their depth after robbing the Wrong People in the drug trade — but the two leads are so good that they breathe life into it, and the result is grimly funny, intense and gripping.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

In the latest issue of "Photoniques" (the magazine of the French Optical Society) you can find a short article from yours truly about making scientific visualizations. www.photoniques.com/en/articles/... Big thanks to @sylvaingigan.bsky.social and Nicolas Bonod for inviting me to write it! 😃

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

TIL about the “Fermi-Dirac primes”, which mostly aren’t primes, and which AFAIK neither Fermi nor Dirac took any interest in. Ramanujan was interested in them, but he certainly didn’t name them this way, as Dirac was only 18 when Ramanujan died.

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

A computer scientist’s perspective on vibe coding:

submitted 12 days ago • 18 comments

In a preview of EMPIRE OF AI for @theatlantic.com, I share new behind-the-scenes details on what happened when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman—as well as the core argument of my book and why it matters to everyone. Gift link. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

submitted 14 days ago • 7 comments

TIL, from a great interview with physicist Sidney Nagel in @quantamagazine.bsky.social, that drops of liquid that fall in a vacuum don’t splash when they hit a surface! It’s only a cushion of air getting under the spreading droplet that forms the “corona” that breaks into smaller droplets.

submitted 16 days ago • 2 comments

I enjoyed the Pakistani animation “The Glassworker” (on SBSOnDemand in Australia). The visuals are stunning, and it’s such an undisguised homage to Miyazaki that it seems wrong-headed to decry it as derivative. Unsure what to make of the ending, but definitely worth watching.

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Today's the day! My new book MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER is finally out! If you want to understand why tech billionaires are so obsessed with impossible ideas about space and AI — and why that's dangerous — this book is for you. #MoreEverythingForever www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-...

submitted 36 days ago • 20 comments