Yes, commercial academic publishers currently have excessive profit margins. As most scientists, I am in favor of open-access (all my papers are freely available online). But those who wish big academic publishers dead often haven’t thought about the consequences. 1/13 First, the facts. Publishers do provide services. Besides editing and copy-editing and getting print magazines to print, that’s notably data-storage and retrieval systems. 2/13

There's lots of advice on the net for how to give talks, but sorely missing seems to be advice for how to properly invite people for talks!

Here's a minimal checklist for your invitation (thread): 1/10 Where is the talk supposed to be?

Chances are I have no idea where your institution is located. Don’t direct me to a website unless you are sure that website has an address on it.

String theory is interesting and a worthwhile research topic. But I often wish that popular science articles about string theory were less hype and would also inform the readers of the shortcomings of the approach. Here is a reminder 1/10 #physics String theory, as a theory of quantum gravity and a unification of the forces, has zero experimental evidence speaking for it. 2/10