rare bit of good news on this dreary Sunday morning plumassun.org/2025/11/22/w...

62 Years Ago Today:

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asked my students about how they thought astronomers should search for aliens & after the discussion subsided I said "let me prove there's life outside this classroom" and turned on this radio I built that I had hidden under the podium as an intro to SETI. a stupid gag that went off really well.

An article from Science about the changes LPSC has made to its abstract submission process. As my colleague @theplanetaryguy.bsky.social states, "This is censorship". www.science.org/content/arti...

Here’s an annotated version of our comet image. We also want to thank our downlink and uplink teams who spent a huge amount of time working on this. Our camera was not designed to image interstellar objects 19 million miles away, but their hard work and planning paid off.

quoted a bit in this CNN article about 3I, but here's what I really wanted to say: my god, I've published worse-looking comet data than what HiRISE just got on an interstellar object. they're taking good data on interstellar comets from the planet mars. holy shit. www.cnn.com/2025/11/19/s...

if I were convinced that a comet was an alien space ship, I would start most of my blog posts with a reminder to my audience that I am humble and my opponents are basically all automatons. this is a normal way to start an argument and will help me convince the naysayers of the flaws in their logic.

huge news for all of you comet composition nerds out there: according to this new ATel by Ganesh et al., C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) is another NH2-dominated comet like Machholz (!) or Yanaka (!!)

More than 34 million passengers climbed aboard Amtrak trains during Fiscal Year 2025, the railroad announced on November 18, a new record for “America’s Railroad” and a 5.1 percent increase over the previous year railfan.com/amtrak-break...

I know it’s hard. But you can’t possibly go to an academic conference that imposes restrictions on freedom of speech like this.

who has grilled me about whether or not I'm a part of the secret illuminati deep state conspiracy to hide the truth about 3I/ATLAS being a spaceship: a running tally - my barber (nice guy) - my stepsister (100% giving me shit) - several of my students (mostly giving me shit)

Not Sure How They Deal With Criminals In Your Town, But ’Round Here We Use A Restorative Justice Process

talking about the challenges in identifying robust biosignatures on exoplanets today in my 'life in the universe' class

one of the students in my gen-ed astronomy class came up to me and told me excitedly that they'd already signed up for my class next semester and were looking forward to it -- an extremely sweet little gesture -- and I didn't even cry! not even a little!

Not impeaching and removing every official involved with this remains one of the biggest failures of constitutional governance ever, and there is a direct line from that to where we sit today.

Strange Tales 72, 1959. Art by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

Zohran at the rally for trans youth on february 8 ❣️ he was polling single digits.

it's venus week in my "life in the universe" class so I'm getting ready to push this class fully off the rails (e.g., attempting to get a bunch of business majors to care about D/H ratios and phosphine and the weird ultraviolet absorbers in its atmosphere)

some jazzers have been griping about Hancock’s vocoder ad-lib segment, which he’s been doing every set. Allow me to set you straight. Herbie Hancock is one of the greatest musicians ever to live and in the context of music if he makes a choice then that is the right choice. Hope this clarifies

happy slippery rail season to all regional rail riders who celebrate

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same. Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

teaching rules. my students wrote a bunch of super interesting essays about this movie connecting it with the class ('is macready's "blood test" scene technically a hunt for biosignatures?' being my favorite out-there idea) nobody phoned it in, no AI bullshit, just good stuff.

got interviewed for this short & sweet article in the atlantic about moons, not-moons, "moonlike objects", mini-moons, moonlets, quasi-moons...

the title of this article feels like the kind of thing only a court astronomer standing on top of a step pyramid should be able to say www.space.com/stargazing/s...

in a hundred years i think Blade will be as well known and iconic as vampire as dracula. because Blade is like if dracula was cool and carried a katana

this new fun paper in Science calls the extinction of the dinosaurs "iconic" in the first sentence -- couldn't agree more www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Jacob Cuno, 1556, on ☄️ C/1556 D1: "Unfortunately, in these times the brute rudeness is the reason that no one looks into the sky and at the beautiful heavenly bodies. And they wouldn’t notice if the whole sky and its course would change. They just want to keep their lust, money and belongings." ☄️🔭

Oh ok they just said AGI is a decade away. Wow it sounded like they were really close there for a while. Lemme go ahead and check up on how long cold fusion has been a decade away

assuming this new paper is right and that the CI chondrites formed beyond Uranus, that means that I accidentally inhaled a bit of trans-Uranian material when my hands were shaking working with the CI Orgueil and a bit of the dust got in the air back in 2020. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

something about the crispness of the air during the fall in the northeast keeps reminding me of early winter in the desert, so here's a picture I took a few thousand feet above and a few miles north of Tucson about five years ago minus a few weeks

NEW — I dug into the story of ICE abducting a 13-year-old boy in Massachusetts and moving him 500 miles across state lines without notifying his mother, local cop's complicity, and how the federal government's justification for such cruelty is already falling apart:

> It is 2025 BC. I am a soldier from one of the outlying provinces called to defend the pyramid in Memphis > It is 2025 AD. I am a soldier from one of the outlying provinces called to defend the pyramid in Memphis

Planetary scientists - we have a continual lament that goes like, waaah we have too many meetings how can we work and put in so many abstracts! Here's a solution! Choose a different meeting!

just sprinted through a busy train station with a briefcase in hand and successfully caught my train, in 1958 news

giving my students a fun lecture on what did in the dinosaurs tomorrow which means it's time to refresh myself on all the fun ideas which were super super wrong

IMINT #52971 from GPS III-SV05 (ACCM) 1. Ziggurat of Silent Infrasound 2. American Abacuses 3. Prophecy Trench

really want to hear the PA GOP explain how this problem could be fixed with additional efficiency measures, futzing around with management, and austerity

got to see DEVO & the B-52s a couple nights ago as a belated birthday present from my fiancée -- really, really great.

I'm giving out an extra credit assignment this week for my gen-ed "Life in the Universe" class to watch "The Thing". the exciting thing about the thing is that the thing is available (the whole thing) on the internet archive as a scanned-in VHS, scan-lines and screwy audio and all -- it's amazing.

the fact that so many people frame autism as “a problem that needs to be solved” is a constant reminder that being “not normal” isn’t acceptable to a large amount of the world. it’s the same reason there’s a trans panic right now too. they think people are defective

this is the solution to the male loneliness epidemic I am 100% serious

getting back into just a little bit of research after a month of teaching: what a treat. there's a kind of strange and pleasant dissonance from telling your students "this is what the solar system is like and how it works" and getting back to your office and thinking "yeah but was any of that true?"