Out: the doomscroll.
In: coming together to elect local leaders that actually care about us, our neighbors, and our planet.

The man says "Hey, let me tell you a quick history of the martini..." as he walks out of the bar, starting diagonally towards one corner, but soon rapidly running outside almost parallel to one of the cross-streets.

Bartender: "I never thought I'd see a customer go off on a tangent like that."

Peach-colored bearded iris

Azaleas and bluebells in bloom

White tulip (with fading grape hyacinths in the background).

Blue columbine

In the garden today. 💐💕

LAX may be Hell, but EWR is where you go when you've been bad in Hell.

Favorite real unit: the hartree (very close to twice the ionization energy of atomic hydrogen)

Favorite cursed unit: the barn-parsec, about 3 nanoliters (don’t confuse it with the “barpersec”, which measures the physical quantity known as “squish”, or pressure increase per unit time).

Random student question I got today: What is your favorite unit?

What is everyone's favorite unit of measurement?

There’s no way to couch this: Vance is getting pillowried during negotiations in the former Ottoman Empire sofar.

SPLASHDOWN!!!

Y'all, we just watched people go to the Moon AND BACK!

I applied to three schools in 1988: Harvey Mudd College (Claremont, CA), Reed College (Portland OR), and the University of Utah. I was accepted by all 3 and went to HMC. I am pretty sure I would have a hard time getting into the first 2 of those if I were an 18-year old now.

The situation is not only incomprehensibly hideous, it has gotten much worse in the last few decades.

I TA'd 1 chemistry course per term for a couple years as a grad student and got paid significantly more than that per course (almost 2x as much) .... in 1992.

Once again, the national average pay for adjunct professors with PhDs is a flat fee of $3900 per course.

Artemis II in Eclipse art002e009301 (April 6, 2026) – Captured by the Artemis II crew during their lunar flyby on April 6, 2026, this image shows the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun. From the crew’s perspective, the Moon appe...

Just gorgeous images to look at on the NASA Johnson Flickr this morning www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2...

A full disc image of Earth, as seen from the Orion Crew Module. The planet is a pale blue, swirling with white clouds and glowing slightly lighter blue in place from reflected light. At lower left, a large brown landmass is Africa, with Spain and Portugal with twinkling lights where the planet curves. At top right, auroras glow in a thin green glow, just barely separated from the planet's surface. Earth is set against the black of space (pic: NASA/R.Wiseman)

More context on this #Artemis II image:

* This is the night side, lit by moonlight. You can see city lights in Spain & Portugal, & a sliver of day at lower right

* The Sun is entirely behind Earth, which makes it a kind of solar eclipse, but w/ Earth doing the eclipsing instead of the Moon:
☀️🌍🚀🌕

Good lord, I swear I have to do this every three goddamn months: if you’re sharing the r slur just to show everyone some dickhead used it, all you’re doing is sharing the r slur.

Fucking blur that shit if you must share, and if you’re doing alt text as you should be, say r slur and not the word.

It is NaN days since the last incident with time zones, except when it has been -1 days.

Comic. Planets and Bright Stars Identification Chart. [Bright glowing dots over black background with labels underneath: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Sirius, Procyon, Antares, Altair, Betelgeuse, Vega, Polaris]

Planets and Bright Stars

xkcd.com/3219/

Just remember that though Reticulum Major (The Great Grid) is visible worldwide, and the position of all 12 objects is correct, this is the northern hemisphere appearance. You'll need to rotate it 180 degrees to get the usual orientation from the southern hemisphere.

astronomy is so funny because it's this fairly niche interest for a small community of nerds and also it's 99.9999% of everything that exists

AI World Clocks The current time as rendered by 9 different AI models. By Brian Moore.

Go to "AI World Clocks" (clocks.brianmoore.com), then roll 1d12 to determine the clock to set local time to (adjust die if the number ever changes). For poorly-legible clocks, pick an especially creative interpretation. Repeat once every 60 minutes (more often, if you are either bored or sadistic).

TESS confirms what we saw with Kepler and K2 - on average, ***every single small red star has a planet around it***! And a short-period one at that (<30 days).

And you know what the galaxy is mostly made of?

Small red stars.

PLANETS. PLANETS EVERYWHERE!!!

Happy weekend pondering that, everyone.

I don't think anyone pretending there isn't an effort underway by Republicans to eradicate trans people from public life can be taken seriously at this point.

Vmag<7.5

According to this site (a major astronomical database), if you can see down to about 7.5 instead of 6.5 (roughly, a Holy Grail of dark sites), there are 22K stars visible instead of 9K, so you might be able to see about 10,000 stars at a time. simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-s...

In dark but not pristine skies, the visible magnitude limit is about 6.5, and there are about 9K stars brighter than that. Of course, you can only see half the sky at a time, and stars near the horizon get dimmed a bit by the thicker atmosphere. So -- about 3K-4K. A bit more if ultra dark.

The asteroid Vesta is sometimes naked-eye visible (I've done it). But you need to be in at least a semi-rural site to have a chance at it, and go look when it's closest to the Earth. It looks like any of thousands of faint stars, so a good star chart is essential.

In astrophysics, yes, but in planetary science, no!

I'm sure it's rather more than that. To an astrophysicist, water is approximately 89% metal by mass; dry bone is essentially all metal by mass.

That’s a regional variant. The correct version around here is “crinġe” (“krinn-yeh”).

All Excalibur reactions necessarily involve an aqueous workup.

The force that teargassed workers, families, children, and elders who were peacefully protesting is the same force that has kidnapped sick kids and murdered two Minneapolis neighbors on our streets.

We can’t appeal to the moral conscience of a system that has none. We have to win.

*cough* A little bit of extra info to add here:

There's only one transit, so the true period is unknown. It could be anywhere between 300 and 550 days.

This is an exciting candidate! But (a) we don't know if it's real, and (b) we don't know what its temperature is if it IS real.