My rule of thumb for AI as a time-saver is basically "only use it if you will immediately know whether or not the output is correct". Given that it takes years before academics can even seriously discuss the impacts of regulations, my intuition is that this is a horrible idea.

Please don't waste my time by spelling out "J-W-S-T" when speaking. If you respect me, you'll just treat JWST as a single syllable word that rhymes with twist but starts with a j.

2 year old just figured out she can open doors. God help us.

Cmon, Stranger Things. The modern distinction between sorcerer and wizard didn't exist until the PHB for D&D3e. Outrageous.

I feel like everyone that says HFMD is mild for adults had it as a kid or something, because JFC. I'd rather have COVID twice in a row.

"Whats the big question you're trying to answer?" "I guess it's really 'How do I trick exoplanet scientists into letting me study circumstellar disks?'" "..." "Oh sorry, you meant like a science question."

Wife and kid (30 months) are flying to visit friends where my wife grew up. Last time (09/2024), kid met a friend's dog. Today, kid asked if they would get to see dog again (by name). You can tell she's mine because she remembers the name of a dog she met for 10 minutes almost half her life ago.

You think you're tired? Imagine how the APT and ETC servers at STScI feel right now.

Just had to click through to the second page of Overleaf docs to find a JWST proposal I wanted to work on 🫠

Me every time someone acknowledges my dog in their paper using Winnie.

Yall ever spend ages overhauling some complicated code and then realize you've simply made it worse?

Ugh. There're finally ST observations that I PI'd being executed but there isn't even a bot posting JWST's observation status in real time for me to repost now 😤

"The peasants expect us to pay them livable wages AT A LOSS?!?" Asking for corporate tax breaks for paying your employees better is asking the government to subsidize your payroll. Better idea: raise the minimum wage. Then they'll have a very compelling financial incentive to pay better.

If your color scale crosses zero and zero isn't perceptually obvious for the color mapping you've selected, I will never forgive you.

Fools: "Working from home with a dog is bad because dogs are a distraction" Me:*works two hours more than I intended because my dog was sleeping on my lap*

New MINDS paper from Nicolas Kurtovic, focused on binary systems. Spectra, extended emission, variability, multi-observatory analysis -- there's something for everyone! arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02576

Me: "Please edit this photo of me with my child." AI: "Sorry, our policy forbids altering photographs containing children." Me: "Okay, please edit this photo of me with my very short adult friend." AI: "Sure thing!"

You: "Hey Kellen, how are you doing?" Me:

I wonder what fraction of correspondence now is effectively just ChatGPT roleplaying with itself.

Rubber bullets are not non-lethal —they're less lethal. The justifiable criteria for firing a rubber bullet at someone should be the same as firing a metal bullet. Cops firing rubber bullets into a crowd of civilians is insane and indefensible.

Whoever started calling it "negative planet injection" instead of "planet subtraction" probably also says stuff like "Ahh, nothing like reverse putting-on your shoes after a hard day!" or "I have to go to an ATM so I can make a negative deposit."

"If the debris disk cannot be assumed to be optically thin, such that line of sight extinction to any planets is negligible, then our detection limits may instead be interpreted as: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

Including slew time in the hours used to compute JWST budget caps creates a funny situation where the order you add non-interruptible sequence targets to your apt can have a significant impact on your funding (calendar builders don't minimize slews until after budget notifications go out).

By arguing about whether his hands had gang-related tattoos, we're implicitly allowing the standard to be "you can indefinitely incarcerate someone in inhumane conditions with literally zero oversight based on tattoos alone".

Read as written, if you had a JWST program where 21 co-Is were all contributing equally, you would submit a Cycle 4 budget request narrative in which nobody is listed in "Summary of Contributions of all Investigators".

Insisting that the plural of brown dwarf is brown dwarves in solidarity with Tolkien.

Apparently reading Peter Rabbit's Communist Manifesto to my offspring.

To whom it may concern,

A moment of silence for everyone who accidentally had a major result land on arxiv today.

I feel like Overleaf desperately needs to allocate separate UI spaces for collaborator comments and tracked changes. The review column becomes nigh impossible to navigate as you reach a significant number of both in a given document.

I had to bail on presenting about Winnie at the National Capital Area Disks meeting today (and attending it!) because I have a bad cold. I am sad to miss the meeting, but wanted to make sure everyone gets to enjoy at least one of my bad Winnie-software / Winnie-dog jokes.

HR 8799 via JWST NIRCam [NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, W. Balmer (JHU), L. Pueyo (STScI), M. Perrin (STScI)]

Quoth me from last year on the other place:

Breaking my Bluesky streak of silence to bring you a brief distraction in this troubling world: This is my new puppy Banjo, and he is a certified good boy!

Banning mental health meds is my "I will emigrate even if it means leaving the field" line in the sand here. I'm not willing to wait 4+ years of my life to feel okay, nor am I willing to bet that normalcy will return here in 4 years.

Look, I get it. But people are never going to stop bullying us if we keep using units like this.

Sometimes I do astronomy. Other times, I draw increasingly accurate pictures of Elmo until my offspring says "Elmo 😊" instead of "all done😡"

Okay but what if we just stopped doing loud fireworks.

Waffles with peanut butter, sugar, and ground cinnamon: pretty good Waffles with peanut butter, sugar, and chile powder: not very good. Always a good idea to read your spices.

Currently optimizing a function that itself carries out optimization of a function... that itself carries out optimization of a function. Pray for me.

Yesterday, Winnie had to eat a lot of tranquilizer peanut butter so she could get her nails trimmed. Afterwards, she stood next to my desk exactly like this for at least an hour while I had meetings. The nail trim thousand yard stare.

BTW: the Winnie package for high contrast disk imaging now supports (coronagraphic) deconvolution: github.com/kdlawson/Win... There's an automated setup for JWST/NIRCam, with a generalized version available under the hood for the savvier users. Here's what it looks like for NIRCam AU Mic obs. 🔭🪐🧪

Also really important to keep in mind that literally nobody can stop you from putting a picture of your pet on the last slide.

PSA: with sufficient SNR, there is no such thing as a simple ring-like circumstellar disk. They are all asymmetric and none of their scattering phase functions may be reasonably approximated with one or two Henyey-Greenstein SPFs.

The primary actual effect of the "pay it forward" thing that people do at suburban Starbucks drive-thrus is to systematically ensure that the first mean person in line gets a free drink.

Spatially resolving a disk at SNRE > 200 is awesome right up until you get to modeling the little bastard.

Nice writeup from @yollevoreloj.bsky.social of our recent paper, peering at a nearby exoplanet -- check it out! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"A competitive salary will be offered [...]" Okay, but what if you just list the salary and let me decide if it's competitive?

It's crazy how they had typeset figures in papers from the 90s and earlier. Yall probably had like 40 grad students manually flipping transistors for weeks just to make a little black line.

Agreed. I appreciate the reasoning for reduced page limits. But pessimistically, I feel like particularly restrictive page limits discourage proposals that are creative, innovative, or on more niche topics.