In honor of Earth Day: a thread of environmental wins

Getting a PhD and then working outside academia is dope. My advisees who’ve done that are more or less uniformly happy and feel that they’re using the skills they trained on. (I talked to one today who just landed a great gig). Just wanted to convey that to anyone it might benefit.

A tightly cropped Hubble view of a vast star-forming region known as the Trifid Nebula. The top left is bright blue. Brown and amber colors run from top right through the center in irregular, overlapping lines to the bottom-center. At bottom right, the view is almost black. Tiny, amber-colored stars appear throughout the scene. Toward the left there is a prominent brown shape that looks like a head with two horns. The left horn points left and is wavy. The right horn is triangular and points up. The brown dust continues, flowing down, as if along a back, and up toward the top right. A prominent line, about the same length as the left horn, appears below the middle of the body, and changes from orange to red. A small, separate semi-transparent pillar is left of the head. A few slightly larger, blue foreground stars with four diffraction spikes appear sprinkled throughout.

Hubble marks its 36th anniversary with a shimmering close-up of star-formation in the Trifid Nebula! Tiny, actively forming stars are eating and spewing material all around. (One at top left in brown, and two fiery red jets.) Explore it all: https://news.stsci.edu/4cvi5jL

That's an interesting bug! Always nice when the fix is to delete code =)

Notifications for deleted shouldn't remain in any OS notification database, and we've asked Apple to address this.

In the meantime, you can prevent any preview text from your Signal messages from appearing in your notifications.

Signal Settings > Notifications > Show “No Name or Content”

I read a great book about cryptography which included a chapter on linear B (just looked it up - The Code Book by Simon Singh). So many code breaking techniques are just finding the right frequency table.

I would love for the city to implement a real knooppunten network! It makes planning recreational cycling trips so easy.

Assistant Director of EU Policy ...

Rare tech for good klaxoon: @eff.org hiring for EU policy

🦜 Remote in Europe w Brussels travel
🦩 ~$110k
🦢 Co-leading their EU facing advocacy policy efforts
🦆 EFF rarely hires and most of their roles are US based, so apply now if this is your jam

Been watching the Integrity/Artemis II splashdown and wanted to recommend the Lady Astronaut book series by @maryrobinettekowal.com - fantastic read if you like space and especially women in space.

With a crew that featured the first Canadian, first woman and first Black man to go into deep space, and powered by collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and other partners, the Artemis II mission is a win for science, transatlantic cooperation, and our strength in diversity.

The eclipse photo blows my mind every time!

Plain English is too ambiguous. If you try to remove that, you're just creating a new programming language or DSL.

This is my main problem with the idea of "specs" as the new level of code. Compilers are deterministic, so I know that the same code will result in the same behaviour. LLMs are anything but, so the fact that the spec looks okay tells me very little.

So this happened
www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sphere...
#smbc #comics #math

Digital drawing of two cats on a blue chair. A slender tabby with big yellow eyes is balancing on the back rest, while a round tuxedo loaf is resting on the seat. The chair is covered in cat hair.

We got this great piece from Mars at marsdrawn.com/pages/commis... . It's based on a photo of our cats and captures their personality very well.

Um OKAY. Breathtaking photos from the Artemis II crew's lunar flyby and eclipse viewing

Engineering Manager- Ruby and Rails Infrastructure ARE YOU READY? Join the fully-remote rocketship. Find your next quest to make commerce better for everyone. Unlimited growth. Crafters and hard workers only. Apply within.

My team is hiring a manager to lead one of our team of engineers working in the infrastructure for the Ruby language and the Rails framework. Come work with us! www.shopify.com/careers/engi...

Hoe ga je om met de enorme onzekerheid in data over tijdsperioden waar staten geen goede gegevens bijhielden? Bijv. schattingen van inwonersaantallen in pre-moderne tijd.

Even though this is about astrophysics, it captures many of my hesitations about using LLMs for non-trivial software development. You need to spend the time to learn your system and tools so you can tell when Claude is wrong.

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:
☀️🌍🚀🌕

Congratulations!

It’s time for bike share in Ottawa!

Our transit system is in crisis and our roads are congested. Bike share can help! A quarter of trips in Ottawa are under 2 km—well within bikeable range. Bike share is affordable, accessible, and efficient.

Learn more and sign our petition: OttawaBikeShare.ca.

What if it says Waldo isn't in the picture?

Janet Stephens is amazing, and also an example - as @bretdevereaux.bsky.social pointed out recently - of how if you do the work academic historians are excited by and welcoming of outsiders making serious contributions!

100%! I am more likely to buy from shops with good bike parking and sidewalk access.

A long, skinny map titled: "Life and Travels of the European Eel" with a subtitle reading: "From the Eel's Perspective." A label at the bottom of the map reads: "Begin Here." The map top half of the map is an mirror copy of the bottom half. I will put the full text of the column in the alt text in an image in the next post in the thread. The map goes from the bottom of the page up, starting in the Sargasso Sea. An set of arrows show the eels paths to shore, then up a river and into a marshland. The arrows continue up the page to show the eel leaving the marshland and heading back downstream, and out to sea. The land is green and verdant at the bottom of the map, because the eels migrate upstream in the spring. The land is brown and dry at the top of the map, because eels migrate downstream in the autumn. A column of text on the side tells about the eels' journeys and changes. It is more text than I can relate in the space allowed here. Each paragraph has an arrow pointing up to the next one, and they are designed to be read from the bottom of the page going upwards.

Several years ago, on a whim, I started drawing a map of an eel's life travels as seen by the eel.

I figured an eel thinks about its life as a linear journey, rather than a there-and-back again adventure. So I wanted to do a map to reflect this.

This morning, on another whim, I finished the map!

Miscellanea: The War in Iran This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any spec…

Well, I am not sure what my analysis here is worth, but here is my 7,500 word primal scream of a military historian's take on the War in Iran.

My best summary: this war is dumb as hell.

acoup.blog/2026/03/25/m...

Has anyone applied an autoresearch loop (successfully or not) to a Ruby project outside of Shopify yet? I would like to cover it in my RubyKaigi talk.

Man at Climate Summit says “what if it’s a big hoax and we create a better word for nothing” while a presenter discusses a long list of the broad benefits for people today of addressing climate change. #ClimateCrisis #ClimateChange

A classic. #UrbanTruth

Oh, neat! I'll check it out.