Not the first time people in Syracuse have rescued someone and helped them escape to Canada. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_R...

The fact that a humane activity—in this case writing (essay, reference letter, referee report, etc.)—can now be gamed by AI pablum does not mean the activity should be discarded. Rather, it suggests that we should find ways to prevent AI abuse.

I call this principle Chesterston's Razor-Wire Fence.

I should note that it's unclear where the funding for this move will come from (for NSF and for HUD).

If you've missed it, here's why NSF is effectively being kicked out of their current building:

This confirms previous reporting by Jeff Mervis at Science.

Optical character recognition was presumably used to extract text from images of the emails. It's not perfect.

Update:

Fair enough! I read it as odd coming after #2, which he'd also discussed with Epstein.

Note: GRFP panels are typically not until January, so they may be spared from some of the chaos of rescheduling the fall review panels.

New: memo sent to NSF staff by acting director Brian Stone confirms that the agency recovery is going to be limited.

"We cannot recover the time missed during the lapse, which means we cannot conduct all the programs and activities that we had originally planned for FY 2026."

Some more physics-related stuff: In 2012 (after the conviction) Lisa Randall emailed Epstein, asking for his opinion about an invitation to Sundance.

Event was 84 Mpc away so unfortunately Tolman's paper and the Volkoff–Oppenheimer paper from 1939 have another couple hundred million years before reaching them. (Assuming the papers were beamed out in that direction at the speed of light.)

There are 2252 characters in the body message; take it up with Bluesky's alt-text limit.

In which Epstein proposes a new US-China particle collider.

"the cinese are willing to build a new collider. they will put up the money and build it , but need american tech. if he were to call it the obama xi collider. his legazy would be great in scinece and the project takes 15 -30 years."

Wow. Gotta say I was not expecting to find a mention of indirect costs.

In 2017 Ito fwds Epstein an email from MIT admin about the Trump admin policy capping indirect costs at 10%.

In 2017 Epstein emails Joi Ito and Reid Hoffman proposing that:

"you could organzie a huge public charity that would continue the work of many worthwhile orgs. not my thing but structurally beautiful. its the wealthiest now stepping into a quasi govt
funding."