My favorite Sam Neil fact will always be that he designed a future Australian flag that replaces the union jack with the aboriginal flag for Event Horizon and insisted the film use it.

It feels ridiculous to be told my entire life the importance of reducing my energy usage and switching to stuff like LED bulbs and then read reports of energy prices spiking in many US communities due to data centers.

AI companies don't through ANYONE a lifeline. They offer them a mind-altering, addictive drug. The wide range of harms is now well known. buttondown.com/surekhadavie...

No matter how good the dataset, this remains: “If no actual human wrote it, no human edited it, no human signed off on it, then what right does it have to tell me, a human, anything about my and our collective human history, art or culture?” @nataliyakosmyna.bsky.social in Naomi Rea's piece. Gift.

There's a whole bunch of stuff in there that is along the lines of "we [the FCC] acknowledge that the community has concerns about XYZ, but find these concerns to be not risky. Also, it is out of our scope to rule on this" By this reasoning, the FCC will approve a sat with a nuclear bomb on it.

Reading the FCC response and it is very much infuriating! They've got a list of antenna stations globally, incl. in Australia (like Mingenew) and NZ (through the ATLAS network). The FCC restricts them to certain bands (good) but we now know that unintended emissions still harm #RadioAstronomy

I am fully supportive of the case made by astronomers that this will harm the night sky. However, I think we will have more success if we fold in the cases from experts in the fields of biodiversity, population planning, and Indigenous communities to fight this. Wider impacts = better case IMO.

Noooo! Not Sam Neill! (This was just posted to his Instagram a few minutes ago)

Jurassic Park is great, but if you've never seen 'The Dish' (2000) I highly recommend it. One of my fav movies (top 3) and really highlights the telescope I use for my research -- Murriyang, the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope (and its role in the 1969 Moon landing mission)

To be a historian is to speak ill of the dead and the rest of you should take more history classes and join us.

"Tributes Pour In for Senator Lindsey Graham", then a dramatic blank space on the landing page of NYT.

At the turning of the millennium there were 769 satellites in space, 2026 there are 14,500 satellites. I spent 7mins photographing the Milky Way rising above Poatiri Mt Charles Hoopers Inlet, on Muaupoko (Otago Peninsula) this evening. Ōtepoti Dunedin, NZ #Photography

Discover EXPLORE: a global STEAM initiative bringing analog astronaut missions to classrooms. Hear Mirsoltani’s story in the Astronomy Education in Practice – Primary Schools session of the 7th Shaw-IAU Workshop on Astronomy for Education 🔭 #astroedu www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckd9...

New on Space Age Archaeology! Who lives on the Moon? What we learn from Ambrose Bierce and The Devil's Dictionary 🔭

Love the way that ITV have hired a woman who knows exactly what she's talking about specifically for the purpose of being disregarded by two halfwit men

The dazzling light of tens of thousands of stars shine in this cluster. This is M69, a globular cluster, which is a group of tens of thousands of tightly packed stars that orbits around the Milky Way, rather than being a proper part of it. It's like a satellite for a galaxy. (1/3) #Astronomy ⚛️🧪🛰️

🔭 The Red Glow of the Cosmic Bat Nebula Image Credit & Copyright: Humbert Cédric Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II) ap260709

You're going to get left behind if you don't use Al." Leave me then. Leave me with my critical thinking skills, my ability to read and write long- form, and books without needing Al summaries.

If anyone's wondering, if you include the latest Microsoft layoffs, Game Industry Layoffs has now tracked approx. 46,700 known layoffs since 2022 publish.obsidian.md/vg-layoffs/A...

after extensive lifelong research I have narrowed gender down to four categories

For those outside academia who are curious: as someone who has taught for ~25 years, many of us now face an existential crisis in assessing student work. Anything you haven't viewed a student actually writing down with their own hand is basically suspect; it's a shitty feeling, to put it bluntly

"how were people writing 10 page papers before AI???" we were smarter than you. you could've been smart, too. but you sold your brain for nothing

📣 Astronomy funding update 📣 The RAS cautiously welcomes the decision by @ukri.org/STFC to largely protect UK astronomy from the catastrophic cuts previously under consideration. It follows months of campaigning amid fears UK astronomy would be hit by a budget reduction of around 30 per cent. ⤵️

Let me tell you about Love and Deepspace: aftermath.site/love-and-deeps...

I actually hope this doesn’t fall apart until 2029, because what this chart tells me is that Oracle is turbofucked and we need an administration in charge who won’t bail them out when the bill comes due

woof ≈80% of assignments this summer term have essentially been just raw chatgpt/claude output, including assignments that required designing stuff in illustrator/affinity/canva. The battle is lost for asynchronous online courses.

If students are simply uninterested in the core bargain of a class like this, it’s hard to know what to do. You teach the material because you think it’s important they know it; they don’t give a shit, but want the credential; and the university wants their money. Your main option is “pretend”.

Have I mentioned recently that you can join SatHub at the IAU Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky? We absolutely need your help: cps.iau.org (Regrettably not on BlueSky, but we are on LinkedIn, and the bad place, because, you know, guess where all the sat bros hang out) 🔭

Thanks, I *do* hate it www.pcmag.com/news/fcc-app...

I genuinely can’t believe this is really happening. We need the night. This is some of the most dystopian stuff I have ever seen in my entire life.

Round of applause for my husband (and CKD for their gamedev genius) who after 300 hours and going back to redo the ENTIRE game because he was so upset with his V's ending the first time round, has now finally finished his playthrough. Just in time for Witcher 3 expansion next year

there is a type of person who cruises through life without introspection or any real thought, defaulting to the path of most personal convenience and I want nothing more than for them to start facing even the mildest of possible consequences.

once data centers are outlawed and the stock collapses and ai companies start charging a hundred bucks a query the thing I'm personally looking forward to the most is watching the smug motherfuckers lose their shit over not being able to run their little planet destroying theft machines

Imagine writing about sport without having any sense of what makes sport precious. www.nytimes.com/athletic/742...

'She should have come forward sooner' is always the first response like no she was waiting to see if maybe society would do better and she wouldn't have to join the ranks of women who ruined their lives in the hope that their assailants wouldn't gain even more power.

A delightful thread for those of you at Universities that prize Nature articles above all other... #cosmology 🔭

On Sunday at 18:30 JST, Hayabusa2 will attempt flyby observations of asteroid Torifune on an Extended Mission after delivering the samples from asteroid Ryugu to Earth 🛰️. Hayabusa2 was designed for rendezvous observations, so must get pretty close to the asteroid for good data 🔭. Cross everything 🤞

I assumed everyone knew this was predicted to occur when they sacked 50% of the NOAA staff and started canceling weather balloons that collect data last year; but if not. 👇

🎵Baby, you’re a firework!🎆 #RadioImageoftheWeek Composite image of the Orion Molecular Cloud 1 (OMC-1), a dense + active star factory about 1,500 light-years from Earth. Roughly 500 years ago ... ⤵️ (1/3) 📸 Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), J. Bally; B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF); Gemini Observatory/AURA

The Hidden Galaxy (IC 342, C5) is a fairly close (7-11 Mly) galaxy dimmed and reddened by the dust of the Milky Way because it lies in the galactic plane. It's apparent size is: (1/2 to 2/3rds the Moon's diameter). Total exposure: 8.5 hours taken Spring 2026 #astronomy #astrophotography

My poster from #exoplanets6 #exo6 on alkali chemistry in hot Jupiter atmospheres and the implications for magnetic models. The PDF is linked. #exoplanets www.duncanchristie.net/s/exoplanets...

One of the biggest lies of the AI bubble is that Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta are "growing because of AI." In reality, they're using the continued growth of their other business units to cover the meager returns from AI, and the massive waste of their trillion+ in capex.

It’s astounding how much the functioning of universities depends on a significant fraction of faculty being workaholic people pleasers with poor boundaries and ADHD

Yes I know there are serious & important things happening in the world right now, but this is kind of great: just learned the Van Gogh Museum has made many of their publications, including collection catalogs, freely available on @archive.org. More museums should do this: archive.org/details/vang...

Everybody in the "climate space" (which means everyone on earth...) needs to understand these mind-blowing figures. Google's "total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025." In ONE year. The AI corporate arms race is eating the world.

The NSF Very Large Array in New Mexico is open daily for visitors to explore - but did you know that we also offer free guided tours on the weekends? Guided tours are offered every Saturday and Sunday. Info + Admission: http://VisitVLA.com 📸 Credit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO #RadioAstronomy #NewMexico

News You May Have Missed ⤵️ 3I/ATLAS Contains 30X More Semi-Heavy Water Than Comets In Our Solar System ALMA reveals interstellar comet’s home star system formed under far colder conditions than our own #RadioAstronomy #Astronomy #3iatlas #ALMA

Statement from VGHF director Frank Cifaldi on the discontinuation of physical PlayStation media, and the closure of the PS3 and PSP digital storefronts.

a grifting match made in heaven

"Better things aren't possible because Team Better Things is smaller than Team Status Quo," said no successful social movement ever.