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Sam Foley

@physfoley.bsky.social

800 followers 540 following 530 posts

Physics of membranes and self-assembly || Biophysics postdoc at Johns Hopkins || Previously Penn State -> Carnegie Mellon || for I perplex others not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself || www.samuelfoley.com

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Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · May 26

I’m excited to finally share our new preprint! Membrane-associated assembly processes like CME function as precisely-tunable, spatially targetable, robust on/off switches that don’t require energy at decision-time.

arxiv.org/abs/2505.17290

🧪

Top: Illustration of a lattice model of self-assembly coupled to membrane and receptor binding. An arrow along the bottom indicates that increases to various model parameters result in assembly nucleation events.
Bottom left: Theoretical assembly "phase diagram" showing the extent of assembly in the membrane adhesiveness-receptor concentration plane.
Bottom right: Decision boundaries, like the sharp transition seen on the left, plotted for various values of receptor affinity.

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Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 8h

Libre/Open/Only-Office are still only good if everyone you work with also uses them. I keep a Windows VM on my Linux laptop that I use exclusively for Word. It's the only software I have to do that for, though.

Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 10h

Or... Reformat and install Linux

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Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 2d

Now three weeks in, and I haven't booted back into the Windows partition since.

Slowly going through the process of backing up my secondary drives and reformatting them to ext4 for better Linux compatibility.

Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 23d

After going full time Linux for a year and a half on the laptop I use for work, and in the face of Win10 EOL in less than a month, I'm finally taking the plunge and switching my home desktop to Linux. Year of the Linux Desktop attempt #34

Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 3d

Either way, it's just yet another enshittification of a once-useful tool.

Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 3d

Here's something I haven't seen before: Google search apparently doesn't just directly feed your query to its "AI", but can try to distill your query into a shorter input, which in this case leads to a confused answer from the LLM. Trying to reduce token count to save on computation costs?

A screenshot of a google search of the query "baltimore population"

The "AI Overview" indicates that I searched for "Pop Baltimore", and it thus isn't sure what I mean, as "Pop Baltimore" can apparently refer to several things.

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Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 3d

When I used Google Maps yesterday, it told me a store's hours might differ from the usual due to Indigenous Peoples' Day. Today, it says the hours might differ due to Columbus Day. Gotta apply those last-minute patches to appease the administration.

Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 8d

POV: laying on the couch with kitty cat

Lenny cat lying on the couch. He looks tired.

Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 8d

Chicago style is now officially sanctioned though

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Reposted by Sam Foley

Keith W. Dickinson @keithwdickinson.bsky.social · 8d

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

The Verge @theverge.com · May 26

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry

Paul McCartne, Elton John and others signed an open letter.

buff.ly

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Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 8d

Pittsburgh being exactly on the boundary between Northeast and Midwest is perfect.

Reposted by Sam Foley

Rosa Lafer-Sousa @rosalafersousa.bsky.social · 9d

Over the weekend ICE abducted an NIH contractor when he showed up to a courthouse for his green card hearing. He is documented. His wife is a citizen.

He is also member of the skeleton crew of animal care staff that works through a shutdown, to ensure the health and wellbeing of research animals.

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Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 9d

I wrote up some notes on Brownian dynamics of (nearly flat) Helfrich membranes to help myself learn, and decided to post them publicly in case anyone else finds them helpful. Starting from Stokes equations and going through stochastic simulation in Fourier space.

www.samuelfoley.com/misc/

Misc - Sam Foley

www.samuelfoley.com

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Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 9d

Leaves the door open for future awards, I suppose

We've had one, yes, but what about second Nobel?

Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 9d

Or a really fast sketch artist given the assignment the night before the announcement?

Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 9d

🤔

Techmeme @techmeme.com · 9d

OpenAI's computing deals with Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, and others have topped $1T, commitments that dwarf its revenue and raise questions about how it can fund them (Financial Times)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Reposted by Sam Foley

Mallory Harris, PhD @malar0ne.bsky.social · 11d

IMO this hasn't gotten enough attention: a recent memo at NIH announces that peer review will be devalued in determining which grants get funded, granting more power to political appointees to make decisions based on the admin's whims over scientific merit

kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

Changes at NIH Give Political Appointees Greater Power To Fund or Block Research - KFF Health News

The National Institutes of Health’s long-held standard of peer review for grantmaking has been subverted by President Donald Trump and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who gave unprecedented power to po...

kffhealthnews.org

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Sam Foley @physfoley.bsky.social · 11d

Hard to trust the safety of new verb additives these days what with all the corporate lobbying from Big Dictionary.

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