WITCH KING: No man can kill me <Tree blows over onto him>

The exact moment I realised I shouldn’t have let the cat in the room while I was working out.

I completed my important task for the day: installing a cute little cat in my editor! For VS Code cats, see here: https://github.com/tonybaloney/vscode-pets Pets from other suppliers might also be available. #cat #vscode #editor

It’s squirrel appreciation day! Squirrels are not literally dark matter. Thanks @xkcd.com

Chemical Formulas xkcd.com/3040

For a little more reading in anticipation of future maths classes, a useful term to look for may be solid angle en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_a...

Exciting gravitational-wave candidate from yesterday S250114ax If real, the source is probably a binary black hole False alarm rate 1 in 7.7×10^18 yr GraceDB gracedb.ligo.org/superevents/... GCN gcn.nasa.gov/circulars/38... Rating 🖤🪿🤝 [🧪🔭⚛️]

Mom would have been 82 today. She died at 55. I recently realized that I am now older than she ever was, which seems like a fundamental wrongness in the universe. I was particularly thinking about her penchant for taking a direct and vivid role in her schools’ disciplinary approaches. /1

tldr the medium-range weather models are hemming and hawing over sending the East Coast more uhhhhh Weather and much deeper cold early next week. I wish there were more professional weather nerds on here so I could share some analysis but dang

COMPANY: We’ll set you up with a call with someone who can go over the many benefits of solar! ME: Let’s try this again. ME: I want solar for ethical reasons. I want to give someone money to make solar happen. That someone could be you. COMPANY: … ME: … COMPANY: We’ll send a guy out Tuesday.

BOROMIR: I told you we should have put salt down last night ARAGORN: Leave it, Boromir. BOROMIR: But nooo. SOMEONE has a new weather app on his phone. ARAGORN: It said 'light snow' BOROMIR: Light snow is it? ARAGORN: Fucking hell dude. Just leave it. Are you going to be this all day? BOROMIR: Yes.

Dawn reveals that the snow has stopped but that the trail is buried both ahead and behind. Aragorn and Boromir spend the first hour of daylight clearing a path back downhill. They reach the deepest drift last, flung across the trail almost as though to prevent their escape.

😂 he comes to CCA all the time! David Neufeld.

Our house is safe. We are very grateful.

Fully concur with @emily.space. @esa.int ‘s Gaia mission has been transformative & a triumph for #openscience. Kudos & gratitude to my colleagues at the agency and to the whole Gaia data consortium for stellar work 💫✨🔭

Yes, I am old & have been guilty of cutesy titles & even a few of the archaic ‘On…’ style titles. I have been fully won over by the young people. No one reads anything anymore. Your best chance of anyone knowing what you did is making it the WHOLE TITLE.

On Monday night, essentially the entire US will be able to see the Moon occult Mars, passing directly in front of the Red Planet and eclipsing it! This happens around 9:00 Eastern time, but can vary wildly depending on your location. This site has timings: lunar-occultations.com/iota/planets... 🔭

I am a single issue voter and that issue is that I do not want to get leukemia from a retaliatory Ottowan dirty bomb strike on DC

You guys I just don't see how any of the wildlife survived with everything burnt down. Maybe Patch found a safe spot I dunno. Maybe the bobcats found a house shelter. I did see some deer yesterday. But I am sad and scared. So much destruction.

I had the weirdest dream: I was at a big dinner filled with my mentees… and my (beloved) thesis advisor… Oh wait, I’m actually organizing that dinner FOR THIS UPCOMING WEDNESDAY 😳😂

Applying to grad school this year in physics/astronomy? Think living in a funky Pacific Northwest college town surrounded by nature, working with lovely colleagues, is your jam? The University of Oregon Physics dept deadline is January 15! 🎢🧪🔭🦆 naturalsciences.uoregon.edu/physics/appl...

The Judge actually understanding what Bitcoin IS, is a problem for James' lawyers because their whole case pretty much depends on arguing that this isn't just covered by a very basic principle of English and Welsh law best summarised as: "You binned it. Stop being silly." /12

It is with a heavy heart that I must report that 'galactic archaeology' isn't actually at all what it sounds like.

German colleague asked why so many people live in California with disasters like fire, mudslides, earthquakes. I used to live in Los Angeles. The disasters are evidence *for* how nice a place it is to live. If everyone lines up at a kebab stand in a war zone, you should believe it is damn good kebab

TWO gravitational-wave candidates today S250109f and S250109bi If real, S250109f's source is probably a binary black hole False alarm rate 1 in 11,000 yr GraceDB gracedb.ligo.org/superevents/... GCN gcn.nasa.gov/circulars/38... Rating 🦢🍦🍊 [🧪🔭⚛️] 1/🧵

🔭🪐👩🏻‍🔬 #jobs

Meet the destroyer HMS Glowworm. In April 1940 she was forced to fight the German Heavy Cruiser Admiral Hipper, ten times her size, and Hipper's destroyer escorts. Her extraordinary last stand earned her captain the first Victoria Cross of WW2. In part because THE GERMANS nominated him for one /1 🧵

Me and the cats are now in our second evacuation spot after the first one needed to be evacuated. The cats, needless to say, are not pleased. I assume my house is gone, but we will see what the dawn brings. It's all just stuff. We saved what matters.

The quantum reason that ultra-massive stars are forbidden Black holes can be many billions of solar masses, but no star has more than a couple hundred solar masses. There's a quantum reason for that. bigthink.com/starts-with-...

We have had different level evacuation plans for a while. What to take with a day warning, hour warning, no warning. I just got to do the no warning version where I grab me, grab terrified cats, and split. We are now out of the path of the Eaton fire, but I paid in blood to get the cats secured.

@hogg.bsky.social & Kate Storey-Fisher’s quasar catalog makes the year-end roundup!

ICYMI: One of our biggest 2024 stories was the release of a new map co-created by #FlatironCCA scientists with ~1.3 million quasars from across the visible universe that could help scientists better understand the properties of dark matter. simonsfoundation.org/2024/03/18/l... #science #astrophysics

Great git commit style tips for @dgerlanc.bsky.social dangerlanc.com/posts/git-gu...

we just moved so the house has been a cat’s paradise (boxes everywhere). I started breaking them down yesterday and turned around to find the kitten watching me with a look of horror on her face 😢

Useful paper by Ting on biases in ML arxiv.org/abs/2412.05806 Very related to things Villar and I said in arxiv.org/abs/2405.18095

Durham on the weekend from Liam McCormick

TWENTY-FOUR LADY YOU ARE ALLOWED TO SAY NO.

Time to plan out my intro physics class that starts next week, I really need to focus and get this done. [four hours later] 🔲 plan lectures 🔲 set homework schedule 🔲 decide on quiz dates 🔲 decide on exam dates 🔲 write syllabus ☑️ use pgf/TikZ to draw a very fancy, very empty calendar in LaTeX

Classic astronomy ... when you have more than 6 data points, time to do a demographic study! nice work, Fu et al. :) arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02081

Taylor Swift saved my life. How? There was 10 min left of my brain MRI scan, and I was singing All Too Well (10 min version) to get through this. So thanks, Taylor.

If you hate statistics like I do, then you'll love my free lectures. Putting science before statistics, 20 lectures from basics of inference & causal modeling to multilevel models & dynamic state space models. It's all free, made with love and sympathy. 🧪 #stats www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Ok, I have finally knit a skirt (@asleepywanderer.bsky.social I did do it!)! #ShowMeYourKnits (sorry off theme this week) And it is astrophysically-themed—the 3rd in a series of gravitational wave inspired garments! I’ve now covered the frequency span from LVK to PTA! 🧶🔭⚛️🧪

Happy birthday GW170104, here's a new gravitational-wave candidate S250104v If real, the source is probably a binary black hole False alarm rate 1 in 33000 yr GraceDB gracedb.ligo.org/superevents/... GCN gcn.nasa.gov/circulars/38... Rating ⛅️🎱🍰 [🧪🔭⚛️]

Happy perihelion! At 13:28 UTC, Earth reached its closest point to the sun in its orbit, a mere 147,104,000 million km distant, about 1.5% closer than average. It's all uphill now until aphelion in July.

One more 2024 gravitational-wave candidate S241230bd If real, the source is probably a binary black hole False alarm rate 1 in 510000 yr GraceDB gracedb.ligo.org/superevents/... GCN gcn.nasa.gov/circulars/38... Rating 🐌🍦🕊️ [🧪🔭⚛️]

Dec 29 - Dispersion Relations & EFT arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9... Donoghue shows how to use subtracted dispersion relations to expose the structure of EFT. Specifically, this technique precisely illustrates UV information can be traded to local contact interactions.

One cat always tells the truth, and one cat always lies.

Now that I write code as a full-time job, I didn't think I would do adventofcode.com this year, but I couldn't stop myself. I just finished collecting all the stars, and it was great fun as always! Thanks for the fun ride, @was.tl!

Merry Christmas from @booplefloof.bsky.social

Dec 25 - CMB Peak Locations arxiv.org/abs/1603.03091 Pan et al. use (semi-)analytic methods to model the location of all the CMB peaks at the level of the Planck peak measurements in TTTEEE (<1%). Many corrections are 1-10% and thus are essential for consistency with data.