In my upper-year astro techniques course, I get the students to do basic ray-tracing for eg a Gregorian telescope. This is giving me lots of new ideas. :-) xkcd.com/3182/

Usually I find the Vancouver winter rain to be an OK tradeoff for warmer temperatures than the rest of the country. But atmospheric rivers are just gross (much more so for the people dealing with flooding).

In the last couple of days, I have had to push back on TWO requests to review proposals for the last week of December or first thing in January. After the term I've just had, I am not planning to work over the break, and no one should be trying to impose that expectation on anyone.

I like "Country Roads" as much as the next person who has spent time in WV. But, UBC folks, classes are not over yet, some of us are in frantic work mode, and having loud music blast on campus is just not helpful.

Hey you, at the entrance to the pool! That sign saying, “Please remove shoes here?” That’s directed at you. Your shoes are not magically cleaner than anyone else’s.

The doublespeak is astounding.

Hey so “underage girls” are…children. The word you’re looking for is children. They’re not like, women-in-waiting or women-lite or whatever. They’re children. I think some of you are very uncomfortable with what that means for you but it is still true.

Attention #YVR physics enthusiasts, especially high school students, there are two exciting TRIUMF Saturday Morning Lectures by @sfuphysics.bsky.social faculty happening next weekend (Nov 15th) in Surrey. ⚛️ 🎢 🧪

As we watch Trump & the GOP ignore the Constitution & the concept of human rights in the United States, consider what’s been happening in Canada with right-wing Premiers and Poilievre normalizing the common abuse of the Notwithstanding Clause to make Canada’s Charter of Rights & Freedoms irrelevant.

AND today would be ANOTHER good day for Pierre Poilievre to prove to Canadians that he’s actually capable of passing the same, normal security check, & getting the standard security clearance he’s STILL refusing to get. Until he does, I’m still assuming that it’s because he KNOWS he can’t pass it.

Timeline cleanse

We have people in power making broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproven. The degree to which those comments can undermine public health—is violence against the truth. - Barack Obama

Could Karen Attiah please be reinstated now? Himpathy—the endless prioritization of white men and their feelings over everyone and everything else—distorts who we rally around as well as who we memorialize katemanne.substack.com/p/what-we-do...

Autism does not need to be cured Ableism does The end

A plea on behalf of special-relativity instructors everywhere: could we have one major pop-culture franchise with plausibly relativistically-moving characters that is NOT owned by a problematic entity?

Someone took the chip from their Presto Card and put it into a magic wand.

I will say tongue in cheek it's a bit funny! Y'all be out in the streets fighting for the free speech of rich white men actors Stephen Colbert & Jimmy Kimmel. Alright now, we need that same energy for everybody else!

Teaching astronomical coordinate systems is always fun. Lots of arm-waving and spherical trig, and huge discussions about which direction the Sun actually sets in Northern summer.

Thys emayle koude have been a sonnet

Inviting an evil, racist, misogynist to speak to the cabinet is not a good look. I don’t care what playbook he knows. Don’t normalize this. www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Using Preview on Mac to annotate a pdf with tutorial solutions (yes, clunky, but for *reasons* I inherited tutorials in Word format, so I'm working with this scheme). Preview's annotate is helpfully trying to provide answers, with units, to the equations I type out. But they're incorrect!

A science journalist and PhD astrophysicist, Adam Becker spent the last several years investigating the futurological vision of our tech-bro masters – and found it’s a bunch of nonsense.

Not terrifying at all.

my daughter came home from her first day of 10th grade and said that her history teacher told her that if she refuses to use AI for assignments, she has to cite her sources. i asked how she’d cite it if she used AI, and she said, that’s not required. i’m still internally fuming up about this.

Good essay: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/o...

If we don't see it, it doesn't exist. Kinda like those job numbers. www.npr.org/transcripts/...

More academic freedom concerns, and I can’t help but suspect there could be racism involved, too.

NYT (Jan. 1963): MOSCOW REPORTS BOOMING ECONOMY "Every three months, statistics on results of the state plan are published. The statistics are unfailingly optimistic. Each time they raise questions ... about the relationship of statistics to reality." www.nytimes.com/1963/01/28/a...

You kan not run educacioun lyke a businesse. A businesse ys ther to make a profit. Educacioun ys ther to make the future.

When the campus coffee spot is training new people, and your iced latte becomes a lukewarm overly foamy cappuccino-type thing... Ah well.

Larry Summers lost all credibility 20 years ago when he talked about women having less innate aptitude for math and science. Why is anyone still listening to this guy?

The US coast guard had no right to cross over into Canada’s water jurisdiction and arrest this man. Quebec man warning Canadian boaters after he was detained by U.S. Coast guard, put in jail cell /1 thread www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/art...

This is bad.

reasonably sure this is the first time a regional government agency has launched a new service with an elaborate broadway musical parody

If we have to have an Orwellian dystopia, then I will use its language and call this double-plus-ungood. E.P.A. Says It Will Eliminate Its Scientific Research Arm www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/c...

A weird one, simultaneously discovered and published by a LOFAR team. The weirdness, and the necessity of the lead author finishing a thesis on other cool objects, meant that we took a while to get it published! phys.org/news/2025-07...

The better you are at a thing, the more "AI" will be a drag on your time, because it's operating at a lower level of skill than you are, and you have to fix what it does, rather than just do what you already know how to do.

This is a great opportunity for POSTDOCS WHO WERE DISPLACED FROM THEIR PREVIOUS JOBS FOR WHATEVER REASON I met like 40 of you at #AAS246 earlier in June. You know what to do!

What we all need right now is a baby elephant video

Oh I like this! Clear that the age of having a first child increases steady, but also that having kids when older* isn't a new thing. *older being 35+

New research from MIT found that those who used ChatGPT can’t remember any of the content of their essays. Key takeaway: the product doesn’t suffer, but the process does. And when it comes to essays, the process *is* how they learn. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088...

This mess. The slapdash AI-written code inserted at US Govt agencies. The Titanic sub implosion 2 years ago (CBC had a report on it tonight, so I was thinking of it). Common themes? Ignoring established safety standards. Arrogance about how easy things in other fields must be.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day website posted its first picture OTD in 1995. It was a computer-generated image showing how Earth would bend starlight if it had the density of a neutron star. APOD is *thirty years old* today! 🧪 🔭 apod.nasa.gov/rjn/apod/ap9... Image: Robert Nemiroff

It is really really sinking in for me the degree to which LLMs are the ultimate expression of right wing anti-intellectualism. Its proponents are literally mocking the idea that anyone would ever want to learn anything, know anything, develop any actual skill, or have a thought of their own.

Not sure why I’m posting this. Perhaps it’s relevant 🤔

I’m assuming Tamara Lich and Chris Barber have rallied the trucks and Rebel Media and Canada Proud and they’re all headed to fight actual tyranny in Los Angeles. Right? 🙄 #cdnpoli #uspoli

"AI" is going to doom us all.