A screenshot of a BlueSky pop-up. The text says, “The laws in your location require you to verify you’re an adult to access certain features. Tap to learn more.”

Thanks Ohio…

Same…like why they specifically did moms and their kids. The full paper probably explains, but my brain is too soup to try parsing a neuroscience paper.

Has anyone figured out why back-to-back Zoom calls turn your brain to soup, while back-to-back in-person meetings may be tedious but don’t liquify the brain?

I didn’t realize how spoiled I was with LSU’s lack of IT oversight until I got here and now I can’t do ANYTHING without summoning our tech to enter his password or finding some hacky workaround.

(This post brought to you by needing a Microsoft Authenticator token.)

I hate having to do all this multi-factor authentication on my phone because, you see, every time I must open my phone to do that, I am tempted by The Other Notifications™️

I’ve really gotta stop accidentally leaving late on Fridays cause I keep ending up on the bus with a group of argumentative philosophy students and I really just can’t listen to that on top of *gestures at the general state of the world*

Happy International Day of Women in Science. The National Science Foundation’s list of flagged words includes both “Women” and “Female.”

I don’t even know if it’s possible to catch up with everything I’ve missed in the past two weeks I’ve been out of the country without needing therapy afterwards.

Wild being a lifelong southerner in Ohio today. You expect me to “work” with all this snow? I am meant to hoard bread/milk and frolic.

It’s quite the rollercoaster getting a positive referee report for your first first-author paper and your mother’s cancer diagnosis on the same day… Universe couldn’t have me getting big-headed or something.

You know what’s wrong with the world? We haven’t had a new Guitar Hero since 2015 or a new Rock Band since 2017. People don’t get to settle their differences over a video game guitar battle anymore. We used to be a society!

I may or may not have done this and highly recommend. At least for me, it gives ADHD gremlin brain a tangible sense of progress on a seemingly never-ending series of tasks.

…but I still managed to get a postdoc somehow, so there’s hope ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My dissertation work has been “basically ready” for like a year. But the goalpost for “basically ready” kept getting moved. Now I have a 39 page monstrosity that’s been sitting here for the last 2 weeks while I’ve tried to bully my grad advisor into giving me the funding info I need…

6 years of living in Louisiana did NOT prepare me for single-digit wind chills. Anybody wanna share their favorite soup/soup-adjacent recipes? 🥺

Picture of an in-progress cross stitch of the Pokémon wooper. Also in the picture, a cat is curled up sleeping, and the cross stitch pattern is displayed on an iPad.

Twinsies??

SynthPop: A New Framework for Synthetic Milky Way Population Generation We present SynthPop, a new open source, modular population synthesis Galactic modeling software to simulate catalogs of Milky Way stars along any sightline outward from the Sun. Motivated by a lack fl...

New paper from me + collaborators on arxiv recently!! It's the SynthPop software paper, a code that began as my undergrad project 8 years ago:
arxiv.org/abs/2411.18821

Late-time HST and JWST Observations of GRB 221009A: Evidence for a Break in the Light Curve at 50 Days GRB 221009A is one of the brightest transients ever observed with the highest peak gamma-ray flux for a gamma-ray burst (GRB). A type Ic-BL supernova (SN), SN 2022xiw, was definitively detected in lat...

new from me! We looked at very late time HST + JWST imaging of the exceptional GRB 221009A & see a break in the light curve + also see evidence for an additional component - maybe a light echo or a star cluster. 🔭

arxiv.org/abs/2412.02663

Decided to create a starter pack to highlight some of the awesome women of BlueSky that are connected to space in some way! ✨ If you don't want to be on this list (for any reason), please let me know, and I'll be happy to remove you. If I missed someone, suggestions are welcome!
go.bsky.app/No8DWnZ

When I got this slide on mine, I was thinking, “I can assure you I’ve made way more mistakes than that in the last year, Duo.”

OA Tier 3 since it’s the Paper-Neverending 🫠 I’ve heard whisperings of it being relatively easy to get help with the publication charges, but that still requires me to fill out how much everybody is able to contribute. So currently I’m in waiting-for-my-grad-advisor-to-respond purgatory…

I did the math, and if I simply find all 17 of my collaborators on Venmo and request $312.65, I can just pay for it out of pocket.

My AAS journal submission is ready to go. My arXiv submission is ready to go. I can’t believe after over a year of this paper being “almost done,” something as small as getting the funding information is holding things up an additional week and a half (and counting)…

can I code fast? no. but can I code well? also no. but does my code work? alas, no

The “Pale Blue Dot” Blues This Beyond Astrobites post discusses reconciling a career in astrophysics with eco-anxiety. When surrounded by our Earthly problems, specifically climate change, how can we find fulfillment in our…

Beyond just astrochemistry, I am passionate about using our understanding of other planets to better understand our own (and advocate for) Earth. A few years ago, I published an article in @astrobites.bsky.social on astrophysics and eco-anxiety (astrobites.org/2021/06/04/a...).

Giving thanks to Carl Sagan for 90 years of science inspiration Read about Carl Sagan and his legacy during your turkey break!

oh yeah I got to take a photo with ann druyan and hear some sick science a few weeks ago astrobites.org/2024/11/28/g...

Okay but it should be because of this!!!

A) yes, the world always needs more synthpop and B) our fave person almost gave me an aneurysm today hitting me with, “Maybe we should go ahead and submit all the data with the paper as supplemental material.”

Screenshot of a tweet from Twitter user Liza Brusman that says, “Sharing your data is cool but when are we gonna start making the playlists we listened to while doing our analysis publicly available? I need to know your data’s vibes”

Maybe, hopefully, fingers crossed, finally submitting my first first-author paper today, and I remembered this tweet I had saved from 2020. Maybe when I post the arXiv link + summary, I’ll share the playlist too…