QOTD: What car do you want most, but know would be an absolutely miserable experience to own?

SPARCS and Pandora launched together!!! Two small sats I’m very excited about, and thrilled for my friends and colleagues who have worked on them! 🔭

“Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible: it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. The physicist who led that transformation says the same playbook could work anywhere—if governments have the courage to change the rules.”

Column in Dutch newspaper: send European troops to Greenland. The Atlantic alliance has certainly changed a bit since the USAF patrolled over my house.

Meat-heavy diets, promoted by RFKJ’s new upside-down food pyramid, “have repeatedly been linked to worse outcomes. “The new food pyramid is simply bananas,” Michael Greger, a physician and founder of NutritionFacts.org, told me. “If nutrition guidelines were medicine, this would be malpractice.”

Happy recovery day. #AAS247

Do not reveal parental duties. Just say you have a medical appointment without giving detail.

Afternoon session on dust #AAS247 Brain almost full.

the Dutch parliament has been recalled to debate Venezuela. The US is threatening to invade Denmark. In the Netherlands snowstorms have brought trains, schools, businesses to a standstill. And where’s Geert (weather allowing)? He has the same commitment to helping his voters as Farage does

Hearing about supernova H0PE, a lensed supernova for H0 measurement. Include the magnification and H0 increases!

Rocking up at the session just in time for the talk on the last day of #AAS247

Kailash is an outstanding scientist and wonderful person. Well deserved.

Makes the mistake of looking at the news. Dunno man, seems bad.

Wow #AAS247. Hailey presents the GalaxyZoo JWST ongoing effort. 1.2M classifications already!!

Going to be at the AAS meeting in Phoenix next week? Find me (or visit my poster on Monday) to pick up an AstroSky Ecosystem sticker! Send your friends too.

Adam Leroy’s plenary talk on PHANGS and the VLA Local Group L-band Survey getting underway at #AAS247.

#AAS247 plenary by Adam Leroy is excellent. Awesome PHANGS work. Also NGC 4321 is the “password galaxy”.

Interesting rocks!

"I might need to haul something big one day", says the person with the pristine truck bed and an $850/month vehicle loan.

Following the excellent plenary of Adam Burgasser, I find myself learning more about brown dwarfs for science reasons in session 245 I’ll get back to galaxies momentarily

The moment I decided to cancel Grammarly.

You are in a maze of rooms all alike. In the distance rumbling. You forage for sustenance. You are at the Phoenix AAS.

NASA town hall. The SMD director is threading a needle and generally lands on a positive note. Also: A timeseries of Roman construction is fun.

Oh right.

Alright off to #AAS247! All the undergraduates are flying out tomorrow. Who is also already in Phoenix?

If he carries on like this it's going to make the FIFA Peace Prize look ridiculous

Trump’s fun new war is adjacent to 🇳🇱 territory in the Caribbean. In a normal competent world you’d assume the Dutch pm was notified in advance, evacuation plans in place, extra military assets deployed etc. but we do not have a normal sane government- either in the US or NL bsky.app/profile/domo...

Not to brag but I’ve run a 5k every day of the year.

Somehow not @theonion.com

Smol. Okay then.

Happy New Year, everyone! This is a @theguardian.com books cartoon from a few years ago.

Just making sure that 2025 is definitely over

Sad

My old pal @eniiler.bsky.social with a killer story. What we save defines us as a culture—the archive is our memory and our future. And we’re throwing it away? Madness. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/c...

Scheduling stuff in October of next year already. Meanwhile my Yuletide void brain…

Hubble image of Arp 282, also known as NGC 169 and NGC 169A. Interactions between the two galaxies create delicate streams that visibly link the pair. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, DOE, FNAL/DECam, CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, SDSS, J. Schmidt Source

Spouse and I had a discussion when I got her to try these while visiting the Netherlands. “These are donuts!” “Noooo! Well…no? Maybe okay yes they are donuts.”

If we lived in a just media landscape, this would now be a trilogy.

Anyone else notice that Vecna’s stronghold looks like the FIFA Peace prize? #strangerthings

Reading this now. So much better. Must tell @saavikford.bsky.social about it too! Palette cleanser after that last one.

I’m trying to read “Against the machine” by Paul Kingsnorth because of a Cal Newport podcast about it but I may have to do that rare thing and stop reading a book. It’s the worst book I’ve read this year (and I’ve read some AI related ones that are close). apple.news/A1T1nUErGTYG...

I hope I can score a new AAS publishing notebook in Phoenix. That’ll fix 2026 for sure.

This is literally shit Douglas Adams and Red Dwarf both predicted and mocked without mercy.

Funny thread about dealing with Rich[tm] folks. My personal pet theory is that there those who inherit are more likely to act like this and those who made their own fortune less so.

This is an important point. Putting solar on your roof has no impact on the amount of energy you consume. It does however make you more conscious of your energy consumption and could lead you to take conservation measures. And from the *grid’s perspective* your demand goes down dramatically.

I just read “Here comes the Sun”. It is excellent. A tonic for these days.

Apparently this is a famous ex-footballer and not a bad guy in an ‘80 action movie.

No one will be able to accurately gauge my distance or speed! Wait as a cyclist that is probably a bad thing.