Going to give our entire Office of Sponsored Projects a heart attack.

Please spread the word! In addition to becoming an important part of the MESA project, the person in this role would have opportunities to collaborate on scientific software across CCA, which has a vibrant, interactive community of scientists and code developers.

Me trying to learn string theory

100%. Transphobia, islamaphobia, and probably a bunch of others, the new atheists were so disappointing. They could have really pushed forward an intersectional defense of religious pluralism. Instead they just decided to ask "can you be a bigoted reactionary without God?"

An @ifbookspod.bsky.social episode on The God Delusion would be pretty lit tbh.

As a young atheist in Louisiana The God Delusion was pretty important reading for me at the time; it's really disappointng how Dawkins (and so many other popular science writers from around that time) turned out to be such racist/sexist pieces of shit.

There's something deeply pathetic about rejecting every aspect of Christianity *except* the parts people use to justify open racism and supremacy.

It is too early in the year for this shit

(even better when the bug didn't come from me...)

Ok it's kind of unreal that I can just plus Claude Code into a repository from the terminal, ask it to look for issues with the timestep in our multiphysics code, and it finds a potential issue that's been there for 15 years (and even shows who introduced it and how to fix it).

The problem with teaching a dynamics course is it constantly makes me want to go on sidequests in my research.

By which I mean someone please stop me from working on tides!

This is a cool result, but also as a GC person I'm wondering how many GCs there are just lurking in these galaxies. Is it enough to significantly change the number density of GCs in the Universe (currently about 1/Mpc^3).

I do have a concern here: the original recording of a faculty member without their knowledge occured *before* there was any policy. If they've rescinded this policy, but not explicitly stated that they won't do that again, it seems like they can now record us *without* notification or consent.

#paperday! RR Lyrae stars are a common, dependable Population II distance indicator, and provide an independent tracer of early star formation. We test the feasability of RR Lyrae research with archival JWST data using nearby dwarf galaxy WLM! 🔭

On the arXiv now: arxiv.org/abs/2602.21205

I'm going to make these undergrads derive Kozai and none of you can stop me.

I also just enjoy saying "the disturbting function" way too much.

Starting off my lecture with "a little perturbation theory is good for the soul".

Great thread on Kishalay De's disappearing yellow supergiant in M31. It likely formed a stellar-mass black hole, but quietly!

Screen grab from the Astro Rumor Mill, where someone's being salty about the Institute for Advanced Studies

Twenty bucks says I know who wrote that.

Intrusive thought, but I would pay real money for a special episode of The Pitt where every character, except Noah Wyle, was played by a Muppet.

Lot of great astronomers on the list this year! Congrats @yymao.bsky.social, among others!

I think it's inevitable that some of the hype is going to turn out to be false, but figuring out which parts are going to be transformative long term, and which parts are going to go up in smoke like NFTs, is exceedingly difficult at this stage.

I've been wondering if it's similar to self-driving cars in that respect: the first 80-90% of accuracy is quite do-able, but getting that last 10% working for complete reliability is by far the hardest part.

I suspect they, like arXiv, are just being constantly scraped by people training LLMs.

Damn ADS is struggling....

Well given that our Board of Trustees is currently being sued for conducting state business over Signal and illegally using private sessions to discuss policy, I think the answer is pretty straight forward.

Bold of someone to send me a manuscript to review without actually asking me if I will review it, then getting annoyed when I haven't reviewed it yet.

Bad Bunny’s pan-Americanism has me once again pondering the Worldwide Latina belt.

The worldwide Latina belt remains undefeated.

Praise him