I wrote stuff. Honest @saavikford.bsky.social !

pynucastro now supports the StarLib reaction rate library, which includes uncertainties on rates. With pynucastro, you can now create different realizations of the rates, sampling the uncertainties, to look to see how nucleosynthesis is affected: pynucastro.github.io/pynucastro/s... #astro

Pretty crazy how important the blockade of a trade route is right now

variations on email greetings: standard: I hope this email finds you well. happy: I hope this email finds you swell. desperate: I hope this email finds you. nemesis: I hope this email finds you in hell. yoda: find you well, this email.

The @axisprobe.bsky.social team learned that the phase A concept study report of AXIS (the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite) will not be reviewed because the lost personnel at NASA Goddard and government shutdown impacted our schedule and budget. 🔭 Here is the PI's e-mail with the explanation.

next week I'll be in Chicago for the High Performance Software Foundation meeting. I really haven't visited Chicago much since I graduated from UC in 2000.

The new ADS captchas are annoying. Change a search and it asks if you are human. More worrisome, it seems I'm only 50% human based on the tests...

remember to turn your clocks back 23 hours today.

Applications are open for our visiting grad student pre-doctoral program at the CCA @flatironinstitute.org ! More info here: www.simonsfoundation.org/2023-flatiro...

NEW: The bad news about international-student enrollments at American colleges just got worse. An exclusive @chronicle.com analysis of just-released State Department data shows new visa issuances in the summer of 2025 dropped by more than a third. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

is it me? or has the internet been getting flakier lately? sites seem down more often. Somehow I blame AI...

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10

Build Your Peer Review Skills at #AAS248 If you’d like to feel more confident the next time you’re asked by an editor to peer review a paper, consider applying to attend the upcoming AAS Peer Review Training Workshop in Pasadena on 14 June 2026. aas.org/posts/news/2... 🔭 @publishing.aas.org

computational science postdoc fellowship here at Stony Brook, through the SUNY Promoting Recruitment, Opportunity, Diversity, Inclusion and Growth Plus (PRODiG Plus) apply.interfolio.com/179315

asked my research group if anyone wanted to share at group meeting what AI coding agents could do with our codes. Most don't want to use them. So we will stick with handwritten, free-range artisanal code. Most of us agree that AI should not be used for art. Why are some okay with code?

Snow Day, part II

Broke two shear bolts in my snow blower. Guy across the street broke a belt. This snow was heavy... Luckily I had spares...

We're hiring a tenure-track computational / physical scientist. It will be joint with the home department and the Institute for Advance Computational Science. Job ad here: apply.interfolio.com/181179

Still no word on school closing for tomorrow ...

Why does the snow always happen Sunday into Monday?

In a new interview, Tony Gilroy doesn’t pull any punches in talking about: • ANDOR’s relevance to real life • How he would approach being President of Lucasfilm • Rumors about Dave Filoni disliking Andor + more Read what Gilroy had to say here: theholofiles.com/2026/02/20/t...

remember when it used to be fun?

Pup is having trouble walking (back legs don't zoom anymore). But the tail still wags, and treats are still always accepted.

2026 basically

Wow.

don't make me create a password just to submit a letter of recommendation!!!

@womeninhpc.org has launched a new “Messages from Women in HPC” campaign, inviting members of the community to share short messages of advice, encouragement, or inspiration that reflect the power of community support. We encourage you to take part and share your message: forms.gle/kU87fGCiyQrC...

Had a fun visit at AMNH today, to give a seminar. But I wasn't allowed to take a gem or dinosaur bone home 😞

David Hogg has written a white paper on doing astrophysics in the age of LLMs. It looks to be thought-provoking. My initial reaction is that either LLMs will destroy the field or they will force a reckoning with and re-imagining of the current system that often prioritizes output over quality. 🧪

The AIP stats team has released its latest data of physics & astronomy PhD trends, with breakdown by gender. What is extraordinary to me is how clearly the overall trends exhibit an important gender dimension, and that that story is quite different between physics and astronomy.

Carbon Dating xkcd.com/3205/

I can’t stop laughing about “and from New Jersey”

Mathematician Irene Stegun was born #OTD in 1919. A major contributor to the Works Progress Administration’s Mathematical Tables Project, she’s probably best known as co-author of the classic reference “A Handbook of Mathematical Functions” — usually referred to as “Abramowitz and Stegun.” 🧪 ⚛️ 👩‍🔬

I'm going to do a thread of all the references and context behind Bad Bunny's performance and what it means for Puerto Ricans to see this on the biggest stage. The opening title screen is a street mural in Puerto Rico that comes to life with footballs as coconuts. Follow along!

Very happy to advertise a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Exoplanet Science position with me and Christian Schwab at Macquarie University in Sydney. We'll be working on applying machine learning & differentiable physics models to extremely precise radial velocity surveys.

Astronomers/physicists: is the postdoc job market this year ultra difficult? I know seven people with no job offers right now, and I feel like they would have had many offers in previous years. In my career, I have never seen this lack of jobs at the postdoc level before. 🔭

Who we rooting for in the big game today? Team Ruff or Team Fluff? #puppybowl

please consult the chart

Seek shelter in a tauntaun, it's cold out there

The mood music is very bleak for UK astronomy funding at the moment. www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

this lady is the reason I can go anywhere w/out getting lost 🙌

one of my fears with the looming accessibility deadline is that people will remove their online open educational resources. That's why I am learning as much as I can now to get my class notes fixed-up (almost there, I think). Some of my colleagues are reverting to paper printouts of slides :(

couldn't figure out why I had 40+ notifications in slack. Then I remembers I have SLURM dm me when my jobs start at NERSC.

More fun with accessibility: how to add alt-text for a matplotlib figure in a Jupyter notebook when it is converted to HTML. Lots of github issues about this when you google, but no firm standard. Wound up with a hackish postprocessing script that does the job: github.com/zingale/matp...

Interesting paper on requirements for undergraduate astronomy degrees and how non-uniform they are, and how this impacts students with these degrees: arxiv.org/abs/2602.03959

also just learned about the `sphinx-rtd-theme-ext-color-contrast` package to fix color-contrast accessibility issues in the popular Sphinx Read The Docs theme. So far, the pydata-sphinx-theme seems to be the most accessibile (that I've tested). #accessibility

alt-text for matplotlib figures! arxiv.org/abs/2503.20089 gotta add this to my course notes. #matplotlib #accessibility