Death: "MR JAMES EARL JONES?"

JEJ: "IS IT THAT TIME ALREADY?"

Death: "ARE YOU DOING MY VOICE?"

JEJ: "NO. PRATCHETT WROTE YOU WITH MY VOICE IN MIND."

Death: "WOW. THAT'S A FIRST."

JEJ: "AND THE ONLY TIME. IN ETERNITY. BEER?"

Death: "I THINK I NEED ONE."

James gently took his hand and led him into the desert.

@mcnees It may be time to let go and let them buy their own batteries? 😎🖖👍

@masukomi We teach the physics students to use vernier scales. I challenge them to a race, them using digital calipers, me on manual. I put the battery on the desk as soon as they realise I've removed it, but most still faff around replacing it rather than just reading the scale, as we've just taught them to do.

@masukomi (cc @mcnees, who I know likes a bit of reliable old-school tech witchcraft.)

@mcnees Huh! Guessing Conway shook hands with Donald Knuth at some point? So I'm five away...
(Do we now all need to calculate our Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath-Napoleon numbers?)

@mcnees
"You worked on the first proper computer in the US?"

"Yup, huge thing, several feet wide, it would fit on the corner of a chip these days."

"How did you know so much about computers back then?"

"I didn't...it was the first one..."

Brilliant 😎 🖖

@mcnees Huh, never realised that - makes a lot of sense though!

@mcnees Never thought of The Thing as a golem, but that makes a certain amount of sense 😂
(I do classify golem mythology as the first robot SF stories.)

@mcnees Does General Relativity not allow time travel if the *entire universe* is rotating or something? I may have misread it, but there's some sort of maybe-paradox-free time travel geometry?

@mcnees Can you do a thread about closed timelike curves sometime? Curious about the history.

@mcnees I've never heard who the (apocryphal?) third was, but I'm guessing Lorentz?

@mcnees @davidho Something to look forward to then. There'd be some interesting multi-messenger astronomy to be done in the last few milliseconds then...

@davidho The universe may just end without warning. A small part could undergo "vacuum decay", which releases a huge amount of energy, causing a cascade which basically destroys all matter and possibly changes the fundamental laws of physics. Given that it hasn't happened yet it's probably unlikely, but there's a non-zero chance.
On the upside, the effect would probably travel at the speed of light, so we wouldn't see it coming.

@mcnees You're coming down on the side that there are probably civilisations capable of interstellar communication in our galactic-ish neighbourhood? Interesting. I'm still not convinced *because* of the lack of signal, but we're on a circular argument there. Fun experiment of our own capabilities would be to try bouncing a high-ish power signal off a nearby exoplanet and see if we can detect the "reply".

@mcnees @rmathematicus Guy who invented Penrose Tiles isn't he?

@mcnees Are fibre optic comms and more distributed power generation and control systems improving matters do you think? Or do we still have too many long wires and single failure points?

In numerical terms, this must be one of the biggest corrections ever made by a newspaper.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/24/the-big-idea-why-the-laws-of-physics-will-never-explain-the-universe

@mcnees I can see why that would make you jittery. Perhaps it would just turn into a condensed version?

@mcnees That's three puns in eleven words? Impressive.

@mcnees I'll proudly admit to photocopying good graph paper when we run short. Not the cheapest solution, but if required.