adding fictional characters to art: thread

NASA cancelled VIPER last year. Now it's got another lease on life—flying to the Moon with Blue Origin in 2027. This is a *massive* win for lunar science.

Great place to watch some baseball, a New Jersey, and a Joe Davis bobblehead. I find it amusing that the bobblehead has less blush than it always seems like Joe Davis has on in the broadcast booth.

Going to the Dodgers game tonight. Kershaw’s last home start and a JPL-themed jersey and a game that matters near the end of the regular season. No complaints.

This is amazingly awesome news. VIPER rises phoenix-like from the ashes! (Sorry for the amateur poetry imagery). www.nasa.gov/news-release...

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

Taking a look at Båth’s Law, which says the biggest aftershock is usually ~1.2 magnitudes smaller than the mainshock. For the M8.8 mainshock that's roughly M7.6 for the biggest expected aftershock - so this M7.8 aftershock is huge, yet still within the expected range. 🧪⚒️ #geology

Mount St. Helens as seen by Sentinel-2 on Sept. 16, 2025. 45 years old volcanic ash was kicked up by wind. h/t @wisc-satellite.bsky.social @wed-explorer.bsky.social @sangasso.bsky.social 😊👍

Am I the only one who sees all the hash tagged bluesky community names (like latinsky, etc) and initially reads them as Polish surnames? I assume I’m not the only one suffering from this pathology.

Time wears on us all; Venus was also a lot cooler when it was younger. www.quantamagazine.org/why-is-venus...

Our paper (led by Joel Hurowitz and with a large team of Mars 2020 scientists) describing potential signatures of past life on Mars was just published: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Okay, I’m doing this one on looks. The radial growth patterns of many #wavellite crystals give nice creepy eye energy and it got my vote.

Clearest gravitational wave detection yet confirms Hawking’s black hole theory Discovery joins a list of the greatest hits of the LIGO detector, which ten years ago became the first to detect gravitational waves. 🧪🔭 www.nature.com/articles/d41... @nature.com

Space green? Space green. Vote #kosmochlor

Just realized Oasis is playing less than 2 miles from me and I could theoretically walk there before they take the stage, but stubhub doesn’t have anything cheaper than $160. So I have to walk away, but I promise not to look back in anger.

Jesus. Home run to break up a no-hitter with 2 outs in the 9th.

Fairly certain this is fake. No news reports on this that I can find, and no politician would do this without calling every news network. Don’t fall for slop, please. And feel free to prove me wrong. Sometime people on the left act like only MAGA is susceptible to disinformation.

This is a face made for portrait mode.

Do any banks still have those tube things?

Flaming Lips put on a much more involved show with themed inflatables for every song. 20 foot tall pink robots are quite something.

I listen to a lot of bands that I don’t actually know what any of the band members look like. Modest Mouse just finished their set at the Greek, and the lead singer looked just like I expected, which was basically middle-aged engineer slightly possessed by the spirit of David Byrne.

I would argue that it’s pretty good at buffering water to be only slightly basic rather than super basic.

Few minerals need their own cabinet to display all their different shapes!

Some say it is bland, others say it's full of variety: #calcite Left ist from Letmathe, Germany, right one from famous Elmwood Mine.

#calcite is a no questions vote for me every time. I’m from southern Indiana. I’ve gotten drunk and swam in limestone quarries (ill-advised as that may be). Doesn’t matter who it’s against.

This is the first match that I don’t have a favorite. Piezoelectric is fun, so that could be a reason to vote, but on this #MinCup25 matchup, I’m going with #TeamUmlaut and voting for #Haüyne. It’s what Motörhead would have wanted.

Puff balls or dark, dramatic spikes, reminiscent of the Iron Throne? #Stibnite has gotta be my vote this match! #MinCup25

#Stibnite for the black eyeliner vote. I may not have ever been full eyelinered goth, but I did wear a black trenchcoat and smoke clove cigarettes. #MinCup25

This is not an exciting video, but a minute before this, the otter was knocking a shellfish against a rock it was carrying. And it let me use one of my core skills: saying information I read on a sign 5 minutes before as if it were something I always knew.

I always vote for interesting over pretty. Current voting results suggest I’m in the minority in this one, but join me and cast your vote for #Chrysotile. Yea, it’s scary and can give you cancer in a couple decades, but you don’t actually need to inhale it to vote for it. #MinCup25

This one goes out to #TeamPoison : #MinCup25 It's so eldritch! #Chrysotile is an airborne hazard, it doesn't leech or radiate, so best practice is often "manage in situ". Like... Sshh. The #Chrysotile is sleeping :) It's safe :) if you don't touch it :) And if you do :) It will curse you :)

Thaddeus is helping move my daughters into their new college apartment and can totally lounge in the beanbag like a college kid.

I have given it around two seconds of thought and will once again advocate for misunderstood, but huggable, minerals. Just don't breathe #Chrysotile and you will be fine. #TeamPoison #MinCup25

Guys. I need you to do this for me. Vote for chrysotile. Every year in mincup i scrounge for asbestos minerals and this year ROUND ONE, MATCH ONE, MY BEAUTIFUL CARCINOGENIC WIFE, CHRYSOTILE, HERE SHE IS!!!!!! SHE'S A SHEET SILICATE *AND* A FIBRE BECAUSE SHE IS A *TUBE*. SHE'S SO TALENTED #MinCup25

Team #Chrysotile because there was a cabinet in the mineralogy classroom at one of my old institutions with a display piece of this that had fallen apart and therefore could never be opened again without an asbestos abatement team.

Interesting to me in this is they say 0.24 Watt-hours, which as someone who works on designing space missions sounds like a whole lot for one text prompt. Like that’s 3 or 4 minutes of Farside Seismic Suite operations at night just for one of millions of prompts.

There was a coyote hiding in the tree/bush thing at the corner of my apartment building all morning. I saw a neighborhood cat staring down something rustling and poked my head in there and saw this guy. He moved away from me but won’t leave the area. Hope he’s not hurt.

My wife and daughter took Albert (seen below cat-trapped) to the vet. Apparently, he was relaxed, hopped up on the exam table on his own and was being super friendly to everyone. Everyone who worked there came in to see this chill cat, and at the end he just voluntarily went back into his carrier.

This one is only for Blueskyers of a certain age.

And the overleaf link is officially emailed out. One more quick meeting and then I’m calling it Labor Day weekend.

I think I’ve got about a 75% chance of managing to do this for a different paper today before I head home this afternoon, thanks to a (nearly) meeting-free day. Might as well just retire at this point because I’ll probably never send out 2 first author paper drafts in 2 days again.

Sent a paper draft out to co-authors and I’m taking a break to randomly walk around the lab in celebration.

And as the New York Times editorialized in response to the scientific reports, this marked “the beginning of the end of Mankind’s grand romantic dreams.”

This number seems genuine. I’m totally going to answer this.

Ok, what the hell is this? 🧪⚒️ From the Quanta magazine article linked in the alt:

I’m blocking people and/or bots who post AI-generated pro-Newsom memes only infinitesimally slower than MAGA crap. I mean, I’m glad he’s trolling Trump, but we can do better than an amoral panderer who won’t hesitate to throw people under the bus himself. And the uncanny memes make me uncomfortable

🌔What's inside the Moon? A series of Apollo missions deployed seismometers that have revealed a lot about our favorite natural satellite. Read more ➡️ https://loom.ly/-1ZM_vs

A win that ends with a strikeout of Machado is a good win.

Ok, I just want to know. The resist comment people who always put terrible AI memes about Trump etc… does this work for anyone? I block on sight, but does this bring anyone any positive outcome? Does it generate engagement for them? What’s the game here?