On October 8, 2024, Hopfield and Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The physics community reacted with irritation: is machine learning really physics? The irritation is wrong. The energy function of a Hopfield network is literally the Ising Hamiltonian. The lineage runs from Giorgio Parisi’s disordered iron alloys in 1979 to the model that predicted the structures of 200 million proteins.
In September 2024, OpenAI revealed that its new o1 model had been code-named “Strawberry” internally — the same word that language models have famously been unable to count letters in. The irony was too perfect to pass up. But the counting failure is not a sign that LLMs are naive or broken. It is a precise, informative symptom of how they process text. Here is the actual explanation, with a minimum of hand-waving.
For decades, the mechanism of purring was disputed. A 2023 paper in Current Biology showed that cat larynges purr without any neural input: airflow alone drives a self-sustained oscillation. The secret is connective tissue pads embedded in the vocal folds that increase effective mass and lower the resonant frequency to 25–30 Hz — the same range used clinically for bone- density stimulation and fracture healing under Wolff’s law.
Education is supposed to be the great equaliser. The evidence says otherwise. Bourdieu called it decades ago: schools reproduce the social order they pretend to transcend. Privilege is the entrance fee that nobody admits is being charged.
The CD sampling rate is not a round number chosen by committee. It is the direct output of 1970s NTSC and PAL video engineering — and both standards, designed on different continents, converge on exactly the same number.
Cats do not scoop water with their tongues — they exploit a delicate balance between inertia and gravity at the air-water interface. The tip of the tongue just touches the surface; rapid withdrawal pulls a fluid column upward; the jaw closes at exactly the moment the column peaks. Reis, Jung, Aristoff, and Stocker (Science, 2010) showed that the lapping frequency of all felids — from domestic cats to lions — is tuned so that the Froude number at the tongue tip is approximately unity.
A follow-up to the August 2023 latency post. The numbers were fine. The hard part turned out to be everything else: governance, maintenance, invisible labour, and why most Digital Music Labs quietly die after the grant ends.
The German word ‘Barrierefreiheit’ promises freedom from barriers. That promise is structurally impossible. What we can achieve is Barrierearmut — a reduction of barriers. The difference is not semantic; it has consequences for policy, design, and institutional honesty.
Marc-Antoine Fardin won the 2017 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for proving, rigorously, that cats are liquid. The argument rests on the Deborah number De = τ/T: if the material’s relaxation time τ is shorter than the observation time T, the material behaves as a fluid. A cat filling a sink (De ≈ 0.008) is a liquid. A cat bouncing off a table (De ≫ 1) is a solid. The classification is not a joke — it is standard rheology, applied to an unusual substrate.
Finding planets around other stars sounds like it requires a space telescope. It does not — at least not the analogy version. This is the story of how a lamp, a ball, and a smartphone became a peer-reviewed physics classroom experiment, published in The Physics Teacher in 2024.