Benjamin Pope

Congratulations @frogsandstars.bsky.social!

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Theoretical Computer Science and Algorithms Full time, fixed term for two years (with the possibility of extension) Located on the Camperdown Campus, University of Sydney Base Salary Academic Level A $109,263 - $121,054 + 17% superannuation Abo...

On the postdoc job market? "As foretold" some time ago, the Sydney Algorithms and Computing Theory group at @sydneycompsci.bsky.social is hiring postdocs (2 years, renewable) in Theoretical Computer Science and Algorithms!

usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/USYD_E... #TCSSky

I'm going to expand this statement to say that astronomers should actually look at their data whatever the format. Yes pipelines and high level science products are great, but you learn a lot from just spending some time exploring the counts-on-pixels images, even for spectroscopy. 🔭

Crude oil prices, showing a very sharp increase in the last day, from around 65 to 101 dollars per barrel..

Oil prices wouldn't be all over the news today if more of our economy was powered by local, secure renewable energy.

This isn't an "energy crisis". It's a fossil fuel crisis.

44% of UK electricity came from renewables in 2025. More of that plus an electrified economy => no more oil shocks.

It fascinates me that humans want this connection so much. It's SETI on planet Earth.
And that there's an openness to consciousness in machines, but less so* to identifying it in most sentient, intelligent, socially complex non-human animals.

*I'm talking public, not researchers in either case

Australia, where we had to have a non-binding plebiscite on whether to grant non-heterosexual people equal marriage rights because it was apparently such a difficult moral issue, but they can just sign us up to be complicit or an active participant in an illegal war (again) without our consent

I can proudly say I sat behind this woman in many a seminar wherein she would sit in the front row quietly knitting the whole time and then ask a DEVASTATING question (complimentary) at the end.

this is true (and very dispiriting)

slightly tangentially, it should boggle everyone’s mind how much cultural life in our society is held together by good people volunteering or giving freely of their own time and skills to support others, and just how necessary and vital and important that work is

Part of Trump’s mass appeal (and of why he’s so dangerous) is that he really seems to share Joe Barstool’s worldview that there are no complex problems: Everything has a simple brute solution, which previous leaders were somehow too stupid or weak to deploy.

Seriously though, if you journal clubbed or astro-coffeed about one, you should also do the other. Both super interesting and meta.

Cover of "Picture an Astronomer: Best Practices for Retaining Talent in Astrophysics", which features an illustration of a 19-year-old Vera Rubin looking through a telescope over a backdrop of a first light image of spiral galaxies from the Rubin Observatory.

Happy International Women's Day!

Perfect time for me to (re)share our white paper on increasing the retention of women in professional astrophysics (really full of suggestions that broaden participation in academic science in general).

arxiv.org/abs/2512.24465

🧪🔭☄️👩‍🔬

You can tell how much Labor and the Coalition care about the poor Iranians by the way they hastily built a series of offshore concentration camps to imprison Iranian refugees *forever* when they tried to escape the regime.

If you were trying to kill as many people in South Asia and Africa via hunger and kill as many people in the Middle East by similar means as well as directly via bombing what exactly would you do differently here as the US administration?

Why do we do astrophysics? At time of writing, large language models (LLMs) are beginning to obtain the ability to design, execute, write up, and referee scientific projects on the data-science side of astrophysics. What implic...

tbh I think the argument in this is persuasive - we need to think about entirely new norms & processes or else this will make us all just have to be cops and we don't want to do that

anyone able to point me to R > 100 spectra in J band of any of these white dwarfs?

this is explicitly genocidal

"Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences."

neuroplausible: I Hate Matlab: How an IDE, a Language, and a Mentality Harm This blog post is inspired by a few Matlab-related tweets of mine, which turned into days-long discussions with fellow science and non-science tweeps. Those tweets of mine in turn are motivated by two...

Every time I am forced to use Matlab I can only conclude it is a language designed by and for sociopaths

Shout out to this @olivia.science blog post that I sent out on a neuro listserv back in grad school, that a prof there is apparently still mad about

neuroplausible.com/matlab

that's a great idea - the spectrum is pretty low SNR :(

doesn't have to be high res, we need R of about 100

if not HZ 4, we'd be happy with the consolation prizes of J band spectra for HZ7, HZ 14, LB 227, or LP 475-242

question for the astronomy hive mind, does anyone have a J band spectrum for the white dwarf standard HZ 4? will offer

- a beer or coffee at the next conference if there's a reference I've missed,
- coauthorship and eternal gratitude if failing that anyone can take a spectrum

The one and only

Epidemiology at Poxford

Locksford cryptography group

I want to know what a better world looks like

Finance at Stocksford

View of the lake at Macquarie University

Not a bad view from where I’m teaching