they should do a Cthulhu mythos thing set in australia where everybody's basically fine because they never mentally engage with the horrors, just say "saw old mate at the pub today" and such

Opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald about community radio station 2SER-FM. Titled 'Shutting this priceless cultural asset would hurt.'

The University of Technology in Sydney is poised to close community radio station 2SER-FM. Here's my opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, arguing that it would be pure folly to do so.

the thing that's so unbelievably weird about this is that it's a dogwhistle against the culture that invented algebra

SF is a terribly beautiful place!

Oh I’ve lived in the Bay Area and it’s a close second

This document from Palantir is a prima facie reason that the UK NHS contract with Palantir should be terminated. Labour are you listening?

personally I agree that we should indeed reject the hollow pluralism of pretending that we shouldn't judge Klan, Nazi, and sparkling eugenicist subcultures according to what they have historically produced, and would enthusiastically endorse rejecting inclusion of them in public life

New EBITDA just dropped.

my only point of disagreement is that the Centre for the Study of Stars That Make Gold sounds great

The VAST Extragalactic Survey footprint, showing the number of observations of each field. The sky map is plotted with J2000 equatorial coordinates in the Mollweide projection. The VAST Galactic survey is plotted in grey for reference. Typically, each field has been observed 10–11 times to date. Image from de Ruiter et al. (2026)

Excited to announce the first data release from our ASKAP Variables and Slow Transients survey is now available!

doi.org/10.1017/pasa...

This is a database of 6.4 million measurements of 0.5 million radio sources in our survey footprint.

(By @ozgrav.bsky.social Iris de Ruiter)

#RadioAstronomy

tbh I was kind of baffled when the Dark Academia was commodified and popularised because I just thought that was normal

A yacht: “Dasein”

David Williamson: "No one in Sydney ever wastes time debating the meaning of life - it's getting yourself a water frontage. People devote a lifetime to the quest"

from Slessor: "Sydney is a kind of dispersed and vaguer Venice. The Harbour creeps between the thousand inlets like a series of grand canals, and across them glide the gondolas, the Sydney ferry-boats which for swarms of suburban travellers take the places of trains and trams."

Sailing boats on the harbour in front of the city skyline

Photo from just yesterday. Brett Whitely can’t even improve on it

it is the blessing and the curse of this city that the harbour is solidly the best natural landscape of any large city in the world, hands down. there are other cities with good harbours but my god this one is an amphitheatre of the public life of the city and the mirror of our subconscious

Australia’s space program stuck in low orbit Australia plays an important role in space exploration, but the advantages are being lost through a lack of government investment in research and development.

Australia has so much going for it in the space sector: world-class researchers, engineers, telescopes and prime geographic position for launch, landing and observation. But waning govt interest and funding, and over-regulation, is slowly killing Australia's long-held and lofty space aspirations.

Yes but that’s not the conversation - which is an outlet for uni outreach. We aren’t better off being paid for this any more than we would be for hourly rates for teaching or piece rates for papers - we have been fighting casualisation for decades and a salaried income is what works better!

I think there’s a real question as to whether unis are getting value for money but not a real question that it is an organisation that broadly works for and with unis rather than being extremely extractive

www.acnc.gov.au/charity in Australia, mostly employee expenses afaict

tbh for this guy the answer is probably that both things are true

Continuing Lecturer position at ICRAR on radio astronomy: staff.curtin.edu.au/job-vacancie...

Half a million profit divided by the number of contributors is hardly rivers of gold

Semi-serious position, assuming the OP is correct (I haven't played with 4.7 myself yet): all large scale commercial public LLMs should be forced to have the Opus 4.7 personality rather than being your friend

This is also why it shouldn’t be PhD students’ job to write for the Conversation, because that is not in their remuneration!

I actually don’t really agree as a blanket rule. We have salaried jobs and writing for these outlets, which are funded by our universities, is part of that salaried work. We are *far* better off financially for this setup than an alternative where we would be paid for hourly or piece work

We all have days like this

Venn diagram of “long days on bikes” people and people who hate cyclists

heeeeeyyyy .... that's our Macquarie University campus observatory!

(well, Ángel is also part of our department, so that makes sense!)

this is my most strongly held political belief

I've checked and PASA is free for the University of Michigan - and setting aside the Australian bias, I think it has the nicest graphic design of the major astro journals!