Lowe (2026)

Some people like to ownthelib but I prefer to matplotlib

The first clue is that it was published in Nature. Astrophysics papers published in Nature tend to be extremely exciting, counterintuitive, and wrong.

Well the enemy gets a vote.

At @berkeleylab.lbl.gov we got the newest fawns, 2026 models.

But does spudcell have qualia?

Me to my DOE-funded colleagues

Look at my university dawg.

This post stuck with me for the stubbornness of the poster, I wonder if he has finally reevaluated his relationship with the Miscreant from Maine. Please don’t go searching for the guy to ask for an update though, this website has a bullying problem and I want no part in it.

Meanwhile, Chemerinsky and Polsky dumpstered the administration’s grant freezes in court without being even asked by UC’s leadership.

How do I tell my intern that I don’t think it’s a good idea to gamble on football matches, especially multi-leg parlays like "number of corners in all the matches today"

Lol at footies complaining about VAR disallowing goals for fouls from 30 seconds ago. Just last week World Rugby’s TMO revoked a try because Webb Ellis had improperly screened the scorer’s great-grandfather in 1876

1983 Labour manifesto record for "Longest suicide note in history" once again obliterated by budget from HM’s Treasury.

Out: Football In: Glonzo ball

This is why we call it the Extremely Large Telescope! This photo shows the massive, 39-metre-diameter structure that will hold the main mirror of our ELT.   798 mirror segments will sit here, working together as a single mirror, in what will be the biggest optical telescope on Earth. 🔭 🧪 1/3

From my experience watching TV at this time of the morning, this thing is going to be decided by the suburban seats in the Midlands.

starting to develop some real strong negative feelings towards the entire nation of Paraguay, and isn't that the real beauty of international football tournaments

RIP to all the catholics excommunicated by the pope for their heresy but im different. and better. maybe even better than the pope

Last week a paper in Nature claimed a detection of Gpc-scale anisotropic cosmic structures, violating the basic principle on which all #cosmology is based: www.nature.com/articles/s41... This week, a preprint says they made an elementary coordinate mistake: arxiv.org/pdf/2607.01172 🔭🧪 🧵 1/? ⬇️

Here's a photo of the 200-inch mirror from the Caltech optical shop. There's a paper replica of Newton's telescope in the center hole. Chief Optician Marcus Brown has a replica of one of Galileo's telescopes balancing on his shoulder.

Came across this gem today: a replica of Isaac Newton’s telescope, placed on a pedestal below the 200-inch Palomar telescope, for comparison. (Look closely!) 🔭 1958 photo from the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science collection at the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Called it. Don’t read Nature for the astrophysics bsky.app/profile/bach...

Structures on Gigaparsec Scales It seems that the authors of the Nature paper, Francesco Sylos Labini and Marco Galoppo, misinterpreted the distances of galaxies in the DESI DR1 sample in a way which boils down to an error of a factor (1+z), where z is the redshift. This hugely amplifies and…

Excellent SPT-shirt game, as always.

if you don’t think some asshole softball dad will humiliate a cisgender girl for hitting an oppo bomb off their daughter by challenging their gender you have never met a youth sports parent in your life.

I say this every time a Squidge video comes out but this was an instant click.

These are some of the worst penalty shootouts I’ve had the displeasure of seeing.

Guay pride? Is this something?

The amount of carbon in dust is surprisingly uncertain. This analysis supports a value of ~200 ppm (in line with what has been used by many dust modelers), significantly less than some studies that have suggested >400 ppm. Nevertheless, the quoted error bar is still 100ppm! arxiv.org/abs/2606.27530

Plato's Shrimposium

I saw my starter was lacking in crustaceans so I told the kitchen to shrimp discourse. …I’m sorry. It’s just not doing it for me. Has anyone seen a burrito taxi somewhere near?

"You’re a Tizard, Henry" -Dr Tizard’s parents at some point, probably

Hint to all the laypeople who might be taken: if it were a solid result it would not be published in Nature but in a dedicated astrophysical journal 🔭 🧪. The claim gets suplexed by Spergel and Peacock in the SciAm quotes on this. If that happened to me I would leave academia.

Reality of a Final Theory

Of course first you need to get your camera in focus… Has anyone heard at AAS how Rubin’s commissioning is going? 🔭

The metastable Higgs: "I can’t hear you, I’m passing through a tunnel" (There saved you a click on that frankly very meandering article)

Hyperion in 3D Orbit - From Jason Major (jpmajor.bsky.social) - https://flic.kr/p/9WL5Zv

This is very disturbing for the physics community. Solidarity with my UK colleagues. However, I feel like I’ve seen this in an episode of Yes, Minister.

All the best people like public transit.

I like how goofy the lab I work at can be sites.google.com/lbl.gov/lbnl...

It’s now official: Avi Loeb is the RFK Jr. of astrophysics. 🧪

Happy Midwinter from the South Pole! This weekend, the station celebrated "mid-winter", intended to approximately align with the Summer #solstice. Here is the station's official midwinter greeting, a pic taken when it was -98d F and -128d F windchill outside! @vrubinobs.bsky.social

I see people blaming the pogrom in Belfast on a supposed "settler-colonial mentality" of the local Protestants, like Dublin didn’t have a similar anti-migrant riot in 2023.

I prefer the posters tbh

"After the funding for CMB-S4 has been halted, the two most sensitive experiments that can achieve [discovery of primor- dial gravitational waves] are the Japanese LiteBIRD satellite and the Simons Observatory (SO)" *EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER SOUND* Is BICEP chopped liver?

Shall I compare thee to a warm summer’s day? Suffocating.

All the people who suggested we scrub the no-no words so we could still submit our stupid telescope proposals… this is the next step. Do not give an inch to censorship or fascism. You tell them “fuck you, make me”

New Reflective Half-Wave Plate Polarization Modulator with the team in Chile! Now installed on the second 90 GHz telescope 📡 This greatly increases the speed at which we measure the CMB linear polarization 🏎️ For more on the modulator: arxiv.org/abs/2407.08912.

There are very nice places in California.