The names of 72 female scientists will be added to the Eiffel Tower, to accompany those of 72 male scientists that are already engraved there tinyurl.com/e2satnyp 👏👩‍🔬 🧪

You can tell that LotR was written by an academic because Gandalf disappears for like 20 years doing research to answer a single question.

Holy Potatoes.

I am SO FUCKING TIRED of having to ask this question constantly every single time a see an image. SO FUCKING TIRED

Just a hint of pink on the skycam tonight in the northern direction.

"Quantum Theory of Angular Momentum" by D. A. Varshalovich et al. This book is chock-full of useful identities, some that I haven't seen anywhere else. Recommended.

This evening's skycam view.

The skycam captured a helicopter flying overhead as the streak of light on the right.

Just found out python supports operator overloading for user-defined objects. Well then *rubs hands*

I want this thing so badly! source: x.com/EagleAlpha19...

Run!

Today's small victory after days of struggling with Racah algebra and incompatible definitions from different sources.

New paper: "Back and Forth with Akito Arima", link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.00093

That's not the convergence behavior I was hoping for from my code. Needs more work...

New books have arrived!

Work in progress. Now the instructions say I have to insert that little pin at the bottom into a hole in the railing, but in order to do that I have to pull the whole thing apart and undo all the work I just did to make enough room to insert the pin. 🙄

Someone built a giant Lego version of the Agamemnon from Babylon 5 😮 www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJJm...

I remember playing pong when it was still a novelty.

I was going to use an old NUC pc I had lying around to do some light computations that don't need to be constantly supervised. Unfortunately, it looks like it just died on me. Time to look at other options, maybe an RPi5...

3D printed for my hobby area, came out pretty nicely. Now working on another one to organize the million cables I have lying around.

Happy birthday to German-American theoretical #physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1972), the 2nd woman to win the Nobel Prize for #physics. 🧪🐡👩🏼‍🔬 #histsci As the series of increasingly large atomic nuclei grows with additional nucleons (protons p & neutrons n) from hydrogen to transuranic elements 🧵

New paper: "Summary Report of the Physics Beyond Colliders Study at CERN", link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00947

I get my fair share of these on a regular basis, so watch out!

Last night's skies.

It was still pretty cloudy last night, but I did capture some star trails.

Star trails from my sky cam from a few nights ago, when the sky was relatively clear.

Here is my first pass at the enclosure for the skycam. Because it's fairly well sealed (I even have some putty inside where the power cable comes in to keep out insects), I was a bit concerned about overheating. For now, it's just sitting outside while I monitor CPU temperatures, so no pics yet.

Experimenting with the Fuzzy Skin setting in Cura as a way of hiding Z-seams and layer lines: it works really well. #3Dprinting

After 3 years of sitting in a corner unused, I'm surprised my old 3D printer still works pretty decently. The spools of filament that have been sitting in storage all that time are another story though. I'll need to run them through a dehydrator to see if I can salvage them.

I've got my Raspberry Pi all set up to run as a skycam. Next comes the trickier bit: building an enclosure for it.

My patch of sky at dusk.

The partly cloudy night sky overhead tonight. The bright light is the moon behind a tree, and the rightmost of the three pinpoints at the top is Mars.

Just ordered parts to make my own sky cam and take pictures of the night sky. Let's see how far I get with this DIY project.

Another day another email from Photobucket warning me that they will delete my inactive account soon unless I upgrade to their paid service. They've been sending me those emails for 3 years now.

Work in progress: cutaway view of a contour plot of the calculated density distribution of nucleons inside a 6He nucleus. The plot still needs tweaking, but not bad.

Spotted today on the UC Berkeley campus.

I'm searching for people who love science and Lego to share and SUPPORT my Lego Ideas Periodic Table project so it can become an official Lego product Please consider sharing 🧪 #science SUPPORT here (it's free) ideas.lego.com/s/p:7ea5c858...

looking back everything went to shit when Schoolhouse Rock stopped airing

Anyone who writes a routine for a library should be required to also provide at least one complete example of how to use that routine. Looking at you SCALAPACK. 😠

New paper: "Theory of resonances", link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02654

I did too much math today. Can't math anymore. Disconnecting brain...

Robotics Class is Open

It's a very long way down... #HorizonZeroDawnRemastered

The conclusion of this evening adventures in derivations: only off by 1/3. Progress.

Nickel-58 nucleus may host elusive toroidal dipole excitations. phys.org/news/2025-01...