the more I think about academia, the more I think that a career track that basically starts at 21 does people a disservice

Okay well glad to see Australia has won the World Cup that matters!! www.espncricinfo.com/series/icc-w...

I’m sympathetic to the intent but LLMs and the tech hype cycle are not “the greatest innovations in STEM.” That plays into a divisive (and reductive) STEM-versus-the-humanities narrative. Most of us are on the same side here.

How can an extremely simple equation open the door to virtually infinite complexity? Fifty years ago, Bob May’s classic paper in @nature.com on chaos showed how deterministic rules can generate unpredictability, with deep implications for ecology, physics & beyond. mym.iimas.unam.mx/ramon/docs/M...

So proud of our amazing, talented #Socceroos who represent the very best of our beautiful, Multicultural Australia. They are young and filled with boundless talent and will only be stronger and better from this tough loss today at the next World Cup in 2030!

Super proud of @gradientrider.bsky.social winning the @astrosocaus.bsky.social ECR Software Prize for his optics code dLux!

financial times also has one of the coolest i've seen so far.

Very nearly sent an email sign-off Apologise, Ben ------ changes the tone a bit eh

While UKRI ponders our fate it was deeply disappointing to see the 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Royal Observatory MP responding to our concerns with "funding for STFC has not been cut". True, but flat-cash to cover rising UK facility electricity costs and inflation = cuts to physics and astronomy. #AnswerTheQuestion 😡🔭🧪

cutting pure science to prioritize applications is fundamentally like asking farmers not to waste time producing grain, cheese, and tomatoes and focus on making pizzas

At today's UKRI board meeting, the fate of UK particle physics and astronomy will likely be decided. Have we done enough to convince the powers-that-be to halt the proposed funding cuts? 🤞 Read Prof. Hiranya Peiris in Nature today eloquently explaining why these cuts are wrong.🧪🔭⚛️ 📖: rdcu.be/friwM

"Machine learning", like "data science" and "artificial intelligence", has always been ambiguous language, appropriatable to whatever the current zeitgeist becomes, and whatever the most powerful people are trying to market. Scientists who live by the sword, risk dying by the sword.

Come work with our department! 🔭

Would unironically love to know any lit about the lived experiences of scientists/engineers working on previous charismatic technologies to better understand how to interact with the AI bubble as an non-LLM-ML person

I’m finding this to be a problem when talking to students and the public about our work - anything ML is now thought of as Super ChatGPT instead of stats/physics/signal processing like it actually is

I assumed that the media coverage was getting it wrong, and it's really doing a disservice to the public to give them the impression that it was an LLM guessing and not sophisticated image processing to detect what's actually on the scrolls without trying to open them.

There is a coffee stand *inside* the baggage claim at Schiphol. The coffee is pretty good. Why has nobody done this in Australia

We don't agree with this defeatist attitude. You need to start somewhere, even if you're in the minority. The smoking bans of the early 2000s seems inconceivable in the 1960s and 1970s. Sensible regulation of killer vehicles will take time, but it's not impossible.

I don’t get why we would cut features from the next Metro line when the M1 is so widely beloved as a massive success story. Western Sydney deserves equal quality

I hate that this — urgent pleas to save prestigious departments from drastic cuts — is becoming a regular occurrence. A program like this takes decades to build and a few strokes of a pen to destroy.

And it’s another reminder that there’s no place for American researchers to go en masse if science in the US is further degraded. There’s no replacement at scale.

I’ve owned an e-bike for about 3 months. I used a conventional bike to commute & run errands before I bought the e-bike, and I’ve been amazed at just how good the e-bike is at displacing single-person car trips of 5 miles or less. It’s almost always flat out easier to take the bike than the car.

The only serious follow-up question to 99% of Hanson's utterances is 'isn't that super racist?', yet the fact it is all played completely straight reflects how happy they are to have someone saying these things that all boil down to 'too much brown/black/yellow'

You just gotta let scientists be weird little nerds in their weird little niche interest areas and accept that the benefits to the wider community, and thus to The Economy, will flow naturally from that

The small army of goalkeepers got me

The Australian Academy of Science is running a letter-writing campaign to MPs to support science funding in Australia. I just sent mine off and you can too!

Advertising international Masters and PhD scholarships in astronomy at Macquarie, one of Australia's leading institutes! Submit an Expression of Interest by 12 July to start your studies in January 2027. We have projects on offer on stars, planets, and galaxies; and instrumentation and data.

Sydney area stars & planets people - we're hosting the fifth sprigs.au meeting this 25 September at Macquarie! Looking forward to seeing all the great astronomy people are doing and building our community!

Skimming the new Universities Accord bill Opening the Doors of Opportunity: seems good to have sustained university funding growth. What do we think?

I don’t know if “Community Strong” is really it

SciAm layoffs announcements are rolling in so many incredibly talented science journalists booted from the once prestigious publication science journalism is on its last legs y'all and it's one of our most IMPORTANT forms of journalism. These are the educators and the myth busters. it's sickening

the Transition Research Fund, which replaces New Zealand's storied Marsden Fund, allocates just $6.2 million for science research relating to 'healthy people and a thriving society' that's less than my one single lab has spent in the last few years, but for all NZ basic science about humans #nzpol

Whoa! Simultaneous papers announcing the discovery of a new directly imaged planet - beta Pictoris d!!! arxiv.org/pdf/2606.23801 arxiv.org/pdf/2606.23789 It's just so BIG. I can't believe it's just so ROUND, it's like OUT THERE. 🪐 (Courtesy of my kids who have just discovered Sir Mix-A-Lot)

Today's arXiv Day: two papers reporting the discovery of Beta Pictoris d. arxiv.org/abs/2606.23789 arxiv.org/abs/2606.23801 #arXiv #arXivDay #exoplanet

opened up Facebook, the brain rot site, and immediately served several One Nation candidates' promoted posts. can't imagine where the boomers are getting their sudden turn to the hard right or whose iron ore money might be paying for it

“I carry with me a photo of a Muslim child who, during my visit to Lebanon, was standing there holding a sign that said ‘Welcome, Pope Leo,’ and in this latest phase of the war, he was killed. “As a Church, I say again: as a pastor, I cannot be in favor of war.” — Pope Leo XIV

all the evidence is that there aren't really any actual practical harms caused by immigration and in fact there are a lot of benefits, its a political problem that would be completely solved by people just being chill, but if you say that you're "dismissing reasonable concerns"

Not sure if I have this right, but as an outsider looking in, it seems that in Keir Starmer, England's richest and most misshapen op-ed writers basically got their custom designed policy portfolio and it's been an unmitigated disaster. Surely they are taking some time to meaningfully reflect on this

I think a lot of people basically do politics by deciding a) do I have an oppositional stance to the status quo, and then b) do I hate gay people? If the answer to (a) is "yes" and (b) is "no" then they self-understand as radical left even if their actual opinions are reactionary or libertarian.

Australia this tells you everything you should know & need to know .

Would be really good if we could reorient Australian industry around something that is actually growing and also doesn’t destroy our climate

the 'heh, look at these cringes voting' shit is just more evidence for my thesis that pretty much everyone would be happier if a lot of folks putatively into politics just got really into like avant-garde art/music scenes or something, where you can exclude lames to your heart's content

Relevant for the astrosci feed ☄️ Tl;dr: you need to disclose AI use if it's anything beyond basic language improvements, search, or coding when submitting to @aanda-journal.bsky.social

everyone doing the Roko's Basilisk with Farage & Hanson is the only reason they have any momentum at all

LET’S GOOOOOOOOOO.

There's even chatter of having the International Pulsar Timing Array conference here that year too .... so there is gonna be a whole lotta scientists in Sydney! (watch this space, I am working on something in the background ....)

Must go to this!

Looking forward to having everyone here for Cool Stars in July 2028 - when a total solar eclipse will pass directly over the city centre!

Really why do journos & influencers keep selling the story that cosmopolitan places like Sydney, New York, or London are scary & declining. Like I know they can get paid to say it but don’t they have eyes and self-respect? Multicultural urban life is the good future of our civilisation!

This is absolutely correct. The worst consequence of the endless negative propaganda is obviously the morally repugnant idiots supporting the ginger Nazi, but an underrated additional point is the people who aren't stupid or evil enough for that but still believe and amplify the terrible vibes