Seeing that @thenrao.bsky.social has liked and reposted this and other skeets from our amazing trip to the Very Large Array, I need to preëmptively apologize for inevitable errors, incorrect attributions, and dumb mistakes. I am not a science guy 🤷🏻♀️
I am not. Should I be?
"I don't wanna hurt Bender's feelings. But this food actually tastes better as vomit!"
―Fry, “30% Iron Chef”
Like most parents I’ve lost count of the number of times I had to tell children not to lick things, but I gave up at uranium. The hell with it, let them figure it out.
My older child is obsessed with owning a cubic inch of tungsten. This item is in the ballpark for minimalist cool.
Watch “Contact” and reap the cringy Matthew McConaughey vibes that tell the 70s to hold their beer.
It is a very precious item. You would *not* want to drop it on your foot. As this object passed around the auditorium, no one receiving it was prepared for its mass. It was rather comical, given the high nerd quotient.
Grapefruit-sized orb of stainless steel, CNC-machined to within a handful of microns and micro-degrees to form, along with hundreds of its brethren + carbon-fiber struts etc, the supporting matrix of the ngVLA’s new dishes. It weighs 4.42 kilograms, which feels like more than it sounds.
The second-coolest thing: aerospace kid *won a piece* of the ngVLA!?
Lead engineer gave a crazy talk about machining tolerances (tldr: fractions of human hair blah blah blah). Asked for guesses as to insane numbers; kid’s guess was awarded a *node* from the ngVLA! (See alt text for details.)
For comparison: old radio-telescope antenna (1970s-present) on left, upcoming new version (ngVLA) on right. The details they told us about the machining tolerances of the new version were borderline unbelievable.
Jodie Bananas Foster
Are you coming to appreciate how evergreen this is turning out to be? You could dine out on this one skeet for years at the current rate.
The “smaller than the period at the end of this sentence” bit is a direct ripoff of Carl Sagan, but he was talking about all the matter in the universe prior to the Big Bang.
My (possibly future aerospace-sector) child was significantly less boggled, so it’s important to keep boggling in perspective (see alt text).
The place is mind-boggling with very little context, but the open house supplied more context than my small, rigor-free brain could process. The talks and tours put this visit on a plane with a total eclipse vis-a-vis boggling.
Great capture for driving by! We’re going to Puget Sound for a kid’s graduation at the end of the month and are looking forward to seeing some snowy peaks.
Desert landscape with shiny futuristic octagonal dish backed by New Mexico’s signature cloudless cerulean sky. The chemical etching process of the aluminium panels gives the dish a mottled, vaguely steampunk appearance.
We also saw the prototype of the dishes (244 of them!) that will make up the next generation Very Large Array (ngVLA). The dishes are smaller (at just 18 meters diameter) but with 100 times the resolution and 10x more sensitivity.
A desert landscape with distant mountain backstop. Looming in the upper left is 3/4 of one of the 25-meter dishes of the Very Large Array of the National Science Foundation. Stretching from right to left at the bottom of the frame, across the San Agustín plain, are at least seven more of the Array’s 27 dishes. The furthest is smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. That is an illusion thanks to ‘perspective.’ The furthest dish is actually 25 meters across.
I have returned from the National Science Foundation’s open house in Magdalena, NM, and can confirm that their Array is indeed Very Large. #VLA #ngVLA
Coffee shop is playing all the greatest hits from the 1970’s energy crisis.
I took two classes with him. One was fall of 1998 (or possibly 99); the other (when we compiled the List of Grievances*) was a spring class (I’m pretty sure) and almost certainly 2000.
*Which still exists BTW
the passive voice store was visited by me and you were known by everybody there
Rough couple weeks for sticklers about the original meaning of "decimated"
Easter is coming.
[scrolling greatest tweets] … but… but… but… is the Grink here
“About suffering they were never wrong, /
The Old Masters…
…the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse /
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”
Love my Congressperson!
Does it work properly? No.
Are the people making it acting in good faith? No.
Have they ensured it can't be used maliciously? No.
Does it make people's lives better? No.
Will it make people's lives better? No.
Is it profitable? No.
Is it popular? No.
Is it harmless? No.
The argument for AI.
A photo of the crowd from behind, showing a flag-bearing patriot wearing a backpack holding a chihuahua. An orange sign on the rucksack reads FUCK I.C.E. The chihuahua looks they would happily bite a fascist, just like me.
Resistance Dogs showing up at #NoKings in Albuquerque today. The crowd seemed both bigger and *younger* than the last one, when an estimated 37,000 pissed off Burqueños turned out. Resistance Dogs are the best dogs.
#NoKings. Auburn, #Maine representing all across the Longley Bridge.
Oh, and Susan Collins is going to be very unemployed soon.
The latest edition of The Onion with the headline Tearful Trump Claims He Was Sex-Trafficked by Epstein
Getting The Onion @theonion.com in the mail on #NoKings day seems perfect.
