It should be uncontroversial that sports teams subsidized with public dollars should have all of their games broadcast for free to in-market fans. No blackouts. No monthly pay subscription needed (basic cable fees are tolerable).

Omg, 💯—the details of missions I know anything about are remarkably faithful!!!

Love this game! The designers carefully researched and clearly love astrobiology and SETI!

Not sure how universal these are among SETI experts, but: The Wow! Signal is not that interesting, the Drake Equation is not foundational to how we practice SETI, the Fermi Paradox is not a puzzle that demands an answer, and we're doing our best to look for life and technology as-we-don't-know-it.

My new arXiv endorsement policy: If I don't know you and have never heard of you, your paper needs to: 1) be accepted at a peer-reviewed journal and 2) be entirely written by the authors and not in any part by an AI Thoughts? 🔭🧪

Appreciating this transparency by my local newspaper.

In addition to the last two papers I’ve been asked to referee being pretty obviously written by AI, I am now at least weekly asked to endorse someone on the arXiv so they can post their theories there. Many consider it a point in their favor that an AI thinks that there are worth publishing!

Enjoyed Project Hail Mary! I imagine the movie makes a *lot* more sense to people who have read the book. But Rocky is enough fun that everyone will enjoy it. I had a rough start to the book until I realized it is not as well researched or plausible as The Martian.

"Hi, home, I'm Dad" will never, never get old. Just used it again. Total banger, that one.

I feel like GOAT is a special category, above "world record holder." Isn't that how it's used?

Hivemind, I need your help: I think the "Greatest Of All Time" (GOAT) means *all* time, including the future. A GOAT will *never* be surpassed. That's why they're the GOAT! That's what "all time" *means*, right? My 11 year old isn't so sure. He thinks maybe "all time" just means "so far." ?????

I wrote about her (and mentioned you) on today's newsletter! Her book is on the I yernet Archie : archive.org/details/ceci...

In case you're looking for it, I think this is it at a reasonable price: www.amazon.com/dp/052148390... But check your library!

I just realized that “condensed matter physics“ is to physics as “internal medicine“ is to medicine. A huge miscellaneous catch-all category with a sufficiently vague name to capture like a quarter of the field. 🧪

Has anyone noticed mailto: no longer working on Chrome? Now when I try to use that handler in the address bar Chrome tries to take me to the domain of the email as if it were an http request instead of using the mailto handler I've specified. Is there a solution to getting mailto: to work again?

This is a good point I had not realized: It takes a 2/3 majority of both houses of Congress to permanently remove a president for disability against their will. It's actually *easier* to remove a president via impeachment (1/2 of the House and 2/3 of the Senate) than via the 25th Amendment.

Extremely important. Having applied and been on admissions committees, it’s so clear to me that many VERY qualified people aren’t admitted for reasons that have nothing to do with their qualifications. # of spaces, advisor fit, committee makeup, and sheer dumb luck all play a role.

Another analogy: package installation and compilation with pip is like this for me. I don’t understand how these things work, so I am at the mercy of pip and stack exchange to install software. When something fails I resort to the equivalent of vibe coding or asking for help.

I think this is a good analogy. Calculators are a revolutionary and often essential technology, but they do not and cannot replace the skills that come from knowing how—at least in principle—to do a calculation by hand. Same with using AI for literature searches, lit reviews, coding…

Every place where I’ve seen good use of genAI for research, it’s in the hands of highly-trained experts, not people working to get there. (The question of whether experts want to engage with genAI themselves is separate; I worry it will lead to skill degradation.)

Was thinking a little more about AI and pedagogy. People liken genAI to tools such as calculators, but we’d never say students don’t have to learn how to add because calculators exist. I worry a lot that the heavy use of genAI for research will be doing the equivalent: skipping skill acquisition.

It’s true! Helium is a byproduct of natural gas extraction. Radioactive elements like uranium in rocks decay by emitting alpha rays, which are helium nuclei. These nuclei slow down, pick up electrons, and become helium gas trapped underground until we put it in balloons and MRI machines.

Party balloons are filled with nuclear radiation that has finally chilled out and learned to have fun.

The last two papers I've refereed for journals have been very cranky and almost certainly AI generated. On the last one I could almost reverse engineer the prompt! 🧵🧪🔭

So, the publisher has made some strong statements about my textbook being the "first" SETI textbook since Shklovsky and Sagan's "Intelligent Life in the Universe" in 1966, but that statement needs a lot of qualificaiton! I think it's the most comprehensive book at a graduate level, but…

How do scientists search for extraterrestrial intelligence? 🧪 🔭 👩‍🔬 @astrowright.bsky.social joins #SETILive to discuss his new textbook on the science of SETI — from radio signals to technosignatures. 📡 Join us live! TODAY, March 19, at 2:30 pm PDT WATCH HERE: youtube.com/live/3n7SUuG...

This is a great example of a specific kind of non-explanation that drives me nuts. It's like asking what caused a car crash and getting back the answer "drivers". Technically true, but there are lots of drivers, and crashes are rare, so it's hardly a useful answer. xkcd.com/3221/ 🧪🔭

My textbook on SETI is published! Please see if your libraries offer a free download—mine does! iopscience.iop.org/book/mono/97... If you prefer your books in corporeal form, you can now purchase them here ($30 paperback, $99 hardcover): www.amazon.com/Search-Extra... I hope you enjoy it!

@benwaxman.bsky.social and President BendapudI call out Penn State Astrophysics and the @pseticenter.bsky.social!!

What if we made Election Day “Trump Day“ and a federal holiday? We could change the name later…

Once again these jackasses are not serious people. As a professional astronomer, I deeply, passionately do not care if Pluto is a planet. But I am damned certain the POTUS has zero authority to decide this.

Hey meteorology BlueSky: I‘m 8000 feet in Arizona and tried to teach a science lesson to my kids about atmospheric pressure but it failed because the pressure hasn’t dropped since we left Phoenix. How can the atmospheric pressure be so uniform across the state with such huge elevation changes?

New, super nerdy baby shower gift drops in November! 🔭🧪

Ah, that takes me back! (I remember hearing about the papers almost published. 😆) It’s referenced in the manual:

I can’t find the reference now, but there was a short-lived anomalous deuterium abundance measurement in the Ly-alpha forest made at Keck HIRES that turned out to be a bad part of the CCD where someone had made an ink spot to distinguish it from another CCD.

I understand federal law doesn’t allow states to do permanent Daylight Time, but I continue to be confused about why states that would prefer that are not legally allowed under some sort of statute just switch to the next Standard Time zone to their east.

Paging @publishing.aas.org

Fan et al. 2025 discusses the detectability of broadband transmissions from the Deep Space Network: rather than the carrier waves and planetary radar continuous wave transmissions that are detectable to much greater distances: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

My long largely hypothetical textbook manifests! No path to purchase physical copies in the US yet unfortunately (these are author copies), but you can buy the e-book anywhere!

I think some flavors of of crackpot science and psuedoscience by the lay public is driven by popular science writing. Specifically, mistaking pop sci and other scicomm for science itself. This isn't a knock on science communicators—in fact I'd say it's a sign of *good* scicomm. 🧵🧪🔭

It's funny that so many people think that because of his persecution by the Church Galileo was athiest or something, but he wasn't! Read his work and he is clearly religious. His daughter was a nun! My read is, like Newton and Kepler, he saw science as a way to illuminate God's creation.

I think this is an underappreciated point in the birthright citizenship case: the drafters and ratifiers of the 14th Amendment *obviously* intended to give birthright citizenship to the children of people on American soil "illegally": enslaved people trafficked here in violation of federal law:

Wild ride trying out different AI-based literature research tools endorsed by our university library. So glad the astro community has been blessed with the ADS for decades and hoping that it'll remain free from hallucinating AI-bots for the foreseeable future. 🔭

I ask my students to imagine sending a robot that looks like them to gym class to do their pushups or laps or whatever. They understand practice in the context of physical work, and somehow the analogy to mental work makes it click. (This also explains why it's not OK to resubmit old assignments!)

Tagging 🔭🧪

GR Bluesky, I need help! If I drop a mass m onto a Schwarzchild black hole of mass M and it falls straight in (so, moving near v=c at the horison), what is the final mass of the black hole? What if I winch it in slowly, extracting gravitational potential as mechanical energy all the way?

I also see a frequent “suggestion” that University Libraries (or departments) should absorb the costs in the absence of grants/agencies… and just guess which way University Library budgets have been trending the last 20yrs

Astronomy has achieved the goals of the broader open science reform movement comprehensively and can set itself newer and more ambitious goals. Posts about needing gold open access (when we have universal arXiv) or paying reviewers (in community journals) etc are importing grievances from elsewhere

So much this. Other fields have been revolutionized by the wonders of…Google Scholar, which compared to ADS is hot garbage. Other fields routinely submit to *multiple* journals, each of which demand major re-writes *before rejecting* papers. In other fields you often cannot access some papers.