Dan Riley

physicist specializing in software for data processing, currently mostly working for an LHC experiment. he/him. Politics snark, occasional photography.

Last Notes

2026-03-13 22:13:08 UTC

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The arXiv budget is just internal operations, it doesn’t make any grants or fund outside projects, so the CEO salary is going to be a larger percentage than for a place like the Simons Foundation that serves as a funder of many outside project (including arXiv).
While $300k sounds like a lot, it looks to be towards the low side of CEO compensation for a tech-oriented non-profit foundation in NYC.

2025-12-25 15:16:01 UTC

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The Fisk-Nanney organ at Stanford Memorial Chapel is an interesting instrument, with both fifth-comma and well-tempered tunings (in a pipe organ!). The “Brustpositive and the Brustpedalia are fixed in meantone and offer two sub-semitones, or split sharps, per octave, D sharp/E flat and G sharp/A flat”
https://cbfisk.com/opus/opus-85/
https://orsl.stanford.edu/memorial-church-organs
(My Mom, a student of Herb Nanney, loved playing this organ.)

2025-10-26 23:42:46 UTC

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Oh my, I wonder how they ended up publishing there? Hadronic Journal is a vanity publication of the well-known crackpot Ruggero Santilli.

2025-09-21 13:17:14 UTC

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Media consolidation makes this so much easier. Mega-corps are very dependent on a favorable regulatory environment, which makes them vulnerable to coercion by a government that doesn’t believe fairness is a virtue.
Companies like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have an enormous attack surface, and there’s only a handful of them that need to be coerced in order to change the landscape.

2025-07-09 15:50:45 UTC

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It seems a doubly strange wording. AIUI most molecules have IR spectral lines--nearly everything except noble gases and diatomic molecules like N2 and O2 that don't have internal rotational excitation modes.

2025-05-02 18:21:22 UTC

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“meta-methamatical” is a nifty typo

2025-04-15 06:08:06 UTC

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there’s a very similar (homomorphic?) suit vs DOE, also wrt indirect rates. I’d imagine this will eventually reach NSF too.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.283318/gov.uscourts.mad.283318.1.0.pdf
https://statements.cornell.edu/2025/20250414-doe-litigation.cfm

2025-03-30 19:46:17 UTC

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The LHC actually turned on in 2010, at 7TeV. In 2012 it saw the first preliminary Higgs signal, and by then had also eliminated most of the easy range of supersymmetry predictions. 2015 was after the first long shutdown, which increased the COM energy to 13TeV.
So the supersymmetry paper peak in 2012 was just before the LHC ruled out most of the natural phase space.

2024-09-14 00:19:20 UTC

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related to https://xkcd.com/2985/ ?

2024-09-08 17:39:35 UTC

How I’d like to feel today #silentsunday sailing off N Pender island between Victoria and BC
https://cdn.masto.host/federatesocial/media_attachments/files/113/103/141/040/097/366/original/f2552f42b490eb51.jpg

2024-09-07 14:42:55 UTC

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Historical note: the often brilliant but frequently heterodox astronomer Tommy Gold infamously argued that solar sails violated fundamental thermodynamics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0306050
(I think he made the error of mistaking an approximation for an exact relation. Still, Gold was right often enough that he's revered in Cornell astronomy.)

2024-06-21 00:47:57 UTC

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HHGTTG was an Infocom game, with Adams working with Steve Meretzky (who also did Planetfall).
If you want really frustrating, try Adams's Bureaucracy, which is explicitly built around being frustrating. Apparently he liked (designing) frustrating games.
Anyway, maybe now I can figure out what to do with the pocket lint, never could get past that.