There should be literally no circumstances, ever, where citizenship is can be revoked. If you literally sign up to fight for an opposing army in a war, then we should prosecute you for treason not revoke citizenship

Stories from #SpaceAustralia in 2025: Checking out the God of Chaos — Apep — using JWST and the VLT. This unique triple stellar system is wild! Some nice work on one of the papers here led by fellow Macquarie University student Ryan White! 🔭

In Australia the beer glass situation is somehow even worse, with different names in every state. A pint is 568 mL ... except in South Australia where it's smaller (425 mL?). A schooner is 425 mL (except in SA). Half a pint may be called a half, a pot, a middy or a schooner depending on location

I generally think @maiamindel.bsky.social is a very good commentator and her take on the Are White Male Millennials Oppressed? discourse is good too. someunpleasant.substack.com/p/whose-lost...

What on earth is happening in Melbourne? (evergreen sentiment focused temporarily on cricket)

I think people today don't understand just how dramatically the night sky has changed - it looked like it does in super remote areas *everywhere* before the invention of electric lighting, and light pollution that obscures the sky has gotten dramatically worse in the last 25 years.

amazing that we have invested trillions of dollars collectively in LLMs and predictive text / autocorrect on my phone is still this bad

My latest article addresses this point comprehensively.

My only and best higher ed idea is that Britain needs to find a way to offer university courses to retirees

people are going to be mad at him for this but it’s true. It’s a book constantly telling you how left wing and rooted in place in Oxford is and then the actual story is neither of those things

look at least the Sixers got more runs today than England

Ticketmaster making me 2-factor authenticate and each of my friends to create an account in order to go to the cricket. Needs a royal commission

They should invent a form of cricket that goes for five days

Happy beginning to Hot Cross Bun season.

Ok, look, planetary scientist here. The likelihood that college grads will be “exploring the solar system” in 10 years is 100% dependent upon what happens to the budgets ar NASA, NSF, amd other science agencies today, and even in the very best cases they’ll be doing it while here on Earth.

bit eyebrow-raising to have an ABC article about the billion-dollar sale of Hamilton Island to Blackstone without at any point mentioning traditional owners

Merry Christmas!

How good would it be if we fixed up the Alexandra Canal in Sydney

Excellent op ed from national treasure Anne Twomey on the arguments that will be raised against the NSW protest law

for my 2c Homer is basically no more adaptable to film or television than a Bach cello suite would be. fundamental category error to see Greek oral epic as having the same set of modern literary structures that are intelligible in the world of novel or film. but the Aeneid does! Do Vergil instead!

big Telemachus energy from Tom Holland, good choice there. not sure about literally any of the rest of it www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzw2...

becoming a cascara guy

Remember, Ley & news.corp et al aren't talking to you, or even about you. They're screaming at each other & mistaking the echo as a response. Most Australians want to honour the victims, have stronger gun laws and to get on with their holidays in peace free of unhinged ranting (relatives excepted).

This makes me so angry. I'm disgusted that the premier is claiming that the 300,000 empathetic people who marched over the bridge because they were sick of babies being bombed (with our help!) are in any way responsible for the terrorist attack in Bondi.

Who is a scientist friend or colleague of yours doing truly excellent work that more people should know about?🧪

The only examples of the inevitable return of colonial violence to the metropole I truly appreciate are Ashes tests

Fake references should lead to academic sanctions for the researchers involved, from both industry as well as from institutions. It needs to happen now, before every norm of academic integrity ends up sacrificed on the altar of production.

the cool thing about the prompt theft discourse is the way that tech *fans* have lost an open source ethos even while all of this is built on open source

Tonight at 6:47pm, one week on from the terrorist attack at Bondi, we will pause for a minute’s silence and light a candle to remember the victims.

You know we keep having these scandals of famous people being sexual predators and harassers. I think we should remember that this is business as usual under the patriarchy. All women have to be kept in their place. It's not unusual. It's everyday behaviour.

Shocking to blame Gaza protesters (which include his own MPs), but even more disturbing is the rationale for protest repression. It isn’t about risk at the event. It’s that expressing contentious political views might vaguely undermine community harmony. The problem is political expression itself.

tbh I wonder when the first universities will pivot to doing this and make a fortune doing so

There is no gun "debate". There are not two equal sides. It is almost everyone vs almost no one. 70% of Australians wanted tougher gun laws *before* Bondi. More below, full results here: australiainstitute.org.au/report/polli...

Linking the march across the bridge to the massacre is disgusting and everyone doing so should be deeply ashamed of their giving tacit support for genocide www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Have you got a PhD in Statistics (or related field) and experience in Statistical Consulting? A continuing position at the Australian National University is now open 🇦🇺🦘🐨. Would love to get an #rstats person if possible ☺️ Apply by 18 Jan 👉 jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/course-... #statssky #statsky

I'm very much talking my book here, but one way in which you get less crab in bucket bitterness over who gets things like academic jobs is simply by having more of them.

Hey #exoplaneteers - we are hiring a new software developer on the NASA Exoplanet Archive and ExoFOP, to backfill someone who left this year. We've had good success hiring exoplanet folks with strong software skillsets into these positions! phf.tbe.taleo.net/phf03/ats/ca...

The real "end of history" is when Francis Fukuyama succumbs to AI-induced psychosis

Jewish Australians deserve to feel safe! We should focus on the security problems that threaten their safety, and it's not the fucking Australian Research Council Act. This is so vacant.

Cannot believe how concussed the discussion is in Australia. We have a major security problem - two extremists training with (?) ISIS overseas and had easy access to guns – and Sussan Ley is releasing an Action Plan that is like "We will amend the Australian Research Council Act"

Yes! This is a HUGE issue in SETI where many social scientists and other non-physicists have contributed influential ideas in the astrophysics, and astrophysicists have contributed many influential ideas in the social sciences. The results are decidedly mixed. Get co-authors in fields new to you!

insane that the debate about responding to this atrocity by terrorists with no university affiliation is about more culture war at universities. why do universities live so large in the minds of the right wing press

Not only was the "look how fast Australia reacts to gun violence" stuff presumptious, the specific guy who enacted those 1990s gun laws has gone full on racist maniac, decrying gun control and turning the Bondi attacks into a xenophobic hate-fest (journalists euphemise this as a "culture war")

Here is Australia's Gun Safety Alliance 10 point plan for serious gun control reform. This is the template against which talk about "serious reform" needs to be calibrated. www.gunsafetyalliance.org.au/updates/gun-...

Are you a bachelor or master student anywhere in the world, and would like to come to us to work full-time on a supervised research project? Applications for the 2026 MPIA Summer Internship are open now!

Not one person involved in any of this should be let near any other cultural institution ever again

It's hard to understand the place to which the right wing of the Australian political class has taken themselves. They've got themselves an entirely curable case of Trumpism. It's so easy to fix it. Stop. Does this need to be said. Does this need to be said now? Does it ever need to be said?

evergreen

Unless the Australian political class wants to do the work to get a constitutional right to free speech before a referendum (which would absolutely piss it in), it will always be attacked by bad faith actors trying to exploit "Events, dear boy, events". Every. Single. Time

In my case, this painstaking labor in the process through which the science gets done. Science isn't measuring stuff in a lab. It's thinking deeply, extracting the heart of idea from the soup of thoughts running through my mind, molding it, and finding a way to communicate that idea to others.