Interviewer: where do you see yourself in 5 years. Me: still calling it Twitter.

Beamline users all around the world can gently twitch in sympathy...

Cool new paper from the PhD work of Haoliang Jin in Materials at TUoS Cements@Sheffield - simulating the effects of different cement blends in resisting alkali-silica reactions, including what I think are some really clever ways to apply thermodynamic modelling: authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S00…

We just need to invent a straw that lasts a little bit longer than 4 seconds but still less than a million years

"Buy a Roomba, it'll change your life", they say. Yes - I'm now several hundred CHF poorer, and have an intrusively noisy robot that can't pick up cat hair or common dust, but destroys loose cables, and bumbles around crashing into things till it gets stuck under the toilet. Yay.

People's reaction when you try to speak their language

#academicchatter

Is there any reason, other than pure evil and/or perversity, for the keyboard shortcuts for common formatting things (e.g. subscripts) to be different in the MS Word offline and online versions? It's maddening. Oh, and PowerPoint also has different ones of its own.

Having visited London recently with the 7yo, this seems a fairly (depressingly?) standard attitude there, regardless of the size/age of the person "getting in the way"... going for a walk on a Saturday afternoon was more like a combat sport than anything remotely enjoyable.

Well worth a read through this thread; the guy makes an astonishing set of comments about his life/"adventures". If he were alive today, with such a stellar list of academic qualifications and refined attitudes, he'd doubtless end up being appointed to Cabinet by the Tories...

Gee I'm glad Australia getting thrashed at cricket by Afghanistan came after the collapse of any meaningful social interactions on this site... the Twitter of old would've mocked me mercilessly, whereas the current flood of random bots seem to be leaving me largely alone.

Blargh. Ah well, T20 isn't real cricket anyway, is it? At least that's what we can keep telling ourselves... #AUSvsIND

Porsche Formula E team with quotes from the "classics" to liven up the cockpit surrounds a little...

😂

Addition recommended at the end of sentence “for the rest of your life”. #AcademicChatter

Yep, basically this....

Australia is finally leading the world in something other than cricket (or dangerous animals)...

Cats: What's that you're eating? Me: Lettuce Cats: Why do you eat it? Lettuce is pointless. It's green Me: I've seen you eat green stuff. You eat grass Cats: That's so we can sick up stuff for when you give us rubbish. Does lettuce make you sick? Me: No. Cats: So it's pointless

Ditto.....

In case anyone wondered how long academics have worn backpacks for… at least since 1500BCE it would appear!