@brashtech
Born to love 🪐, forced to live on 🌎. Professor of physics, knitter of things, drawer of earnest pictures, planetary astronomer. Goal: Spiral back into control. My opinions are my own, and not my employer's.
Radcliffe graduation photo of Ellen Dorrit Hoffleit, who is seated and wearing a cap and gown.
Astronomer Ellen Dorrit Hoffleit was born #OTD in 1907. She discovered more than 1,000 new variable stars over the course of her career, worked in the Harvard and Yale observatories, and edited the Bright Star Catalog. 🧪 🔭 👩🔬
Image: American Association of Variable Star Observers
Panel 1: Two swans, floating on a water, very swan-ily. P2: Same POV, but now the swans have raised their wings. P3: Again, same POV, but now the wings are fully up, and the swans' necks are lowered and extended. P4: GO! The swans shoot forward at speed, leaving trails of water in their wake. Their necks are fully extended, beaks open. P5: A side-on view of water against a green sky. P6: Same POV, but now the swans have burst into view. However, the only thing moving --at tremendous speed-- are their necks, stretching out impossibly. P7: We close in on a side-on view of the swans' heads, beaks closed in a look of swan-y determination. They are literally neck & neck. P8: The background begins to swirl as the swans pick up speed. They spiral towards the centre from the upper left & lower right corners. P9: A dramatic reveal of a Jack Kirby-like cosmic scene, with a blazing sun in the bottom right corner, and a "krackle" filled purple sky. The swans' necks spiral around each other
territorial dispute
Radio image with swirls
Looking at some radio data hot off the MeerKAT telescope today! MeerKAT is a South African radio telescope with a huge field of view for astro. I'm calling this one "Radio Starry Night" bc a calibration error off that bright source has made a lovely swirly van Gogh sky if I may say so myself.
🔭🧪
me and the other scheming viziers are wearing shoes gifted to us by the king that are way too big. we look ridiculous. the whole court is laughing at us behind our backs. honestly this is a pretty low point for us, the scheming viziers
My brain also wants to rearrange it into "no more boats," since "no more" is a much more common construction that "moor no."
I’m at the mid-career slump.
I’m at the national research funding & infrastructure crisis.
I’m at the university budget cuts.
I’m at the nonsensical war.
I’m at the demolition of our democracy.
I’m at the combination mid-career-slump-national-research-funding-&-infrastructure-crisis-university-budge
LPI continues hitting it out of the park. Where "hitting it out of the park" = making LPSC less and less attractive.
Bruce Sterling is not stuck with AI; AI is stuck with Bruce Sterling.
Pretty crazy how important the blockade of a trade route is right now
None of them can talk coherently about strategy or goals but they are completely in sync in all their macho posturing because that is all they’re really focused on. Everything else is just whatever limply offered fiction is convenient to them at the time.
American tax dollars subsidize defense contractors' yachts. War is their product. Our tax dollars buy it.
Republicans funnel our money to the War Hawks & bypass EVERY tax funded program that would use our hard earned money on the American people.
WAKE UP, VOTERS.
War is profit - not security.
Kilauea poppin off!!!
Open Lecturer in Planetary Science position at UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory (Dorking) The successful applicant will be expected to perform research using data from the Rosalind Franklin Mission, but also other planetary bodies, such as the Moon and the Outer Planets icy moons. ☄️🔭🧪
Thank goodness, the food continues to be provided so these parallel/intersecting rituals seem satisfactory to the powers that be.
… could not figure out how to join this ritual. He eventually started running all the way around the house, getting yelled at by the other two each time he made a pass through the kitchen. …
We adopted two sisters as kittens and they did a dinner-summoning ritual of running in a circle in the kitchen while we prepared their food bowl. We later adopted a housepather who, among his many sins…
I really need to make a version with the Gas labeled as Accelerator and Brake spelled correctly. It annoys me every time.
Mission accepted.
Sarah, Madame Hengler, portrait depicting her as a young woman made up from the fireworks of the business she ran for 40 years - and eventally died from when her home and fireworks factory caught fire and she died in the blaze #IWD #IWD2026 #IWD26 #Women #InternationalWomensDay #WomenInSTEM #FeministSky #circus #fireworks #WHM26 #WomensHistoryMonth #WomenInSTEM
Sarah Hengler (1765–1845) Fire Queen of Vauxhall Gardens, The King's Pyrotechnic. Businesswoman, firework artist. Matriarch of family of acrobats & performers who founded Hengler's Circus. Invented rocket element for early shore to ship lifesaving equipment en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_H... #IWD26
IOWA CITY, SEPT. 16 You were driving your Cybertruck south on N Dubuque Street past the 1-80 ramps, and I was driving north. I didn't see your face, and I'm worried you didn't see my middle finger. Just wanted to make sure you got the message.
Okay first of all that is a gorgeous instrument.
In 2013 Aaron Swartz committed suicide for facing 35 years in prison for mass downloading scientific articles.
13 years later, Meta is almost getting away with an infraction orders of magnitude larger.
The law didn't change.
torrentfreak.com/uploading-pi...
The tiresome kayfabe of "I'm not calling you a liar, but, regardless what you intended and the process you went through, this paper is indistinguishable from deliberate plagiarism, and there are penalties for that."
I luff mine. They are good performers in my heavily-shaded flower garden.
Idiotic levels of inefficiency.
how I am CACKLING
Sounds like the excuses that students give for good old-fashioned plagiarism, where they claim they were using word-for-word copy&paste as placeholders and were planning to rewrite those parts but missed them or forgot. So, it was either rank dishonesty or absolutely terrible writing practices. 🤷♀️
Today I Will Look The Burrito Man In The Eye and other stories of manifesting success
My eyes refuse to parse his name whenever I see it.
