The bank app is telling me to "tap & pay like a bossš" and "rally my crew". I am 37 years old and you are the bank. Don't talk to me this way.
Cosmologist, pilot, author, connoisseur of cosmic catastrophes. TEDFellow, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar. Domain verified through my personal astrokatie.com website. She/her. Dr. Personal account; not speaking for employer or anyone else.
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The bank app is telling me to "tap & pay like a bossš" and "rally my crew". I am 37 years old and you are the bank. Don't talk to me this way.
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Americans Astronomers watching watching US politics Betelgeuse š¤ āIt could happen at any timeā
It wasnāt me but that sounds like a fun thing to see!
DHC-1 Chipmunk
I wear a kind of skull cap to hold my hair down and my headset on, and I wear sunglasses. No scarf though.
I wonder if heās toning it down intentionally there because heās a serious grown-up politician now ā he is documented to have had some skill when he was younger!
This plane is such a joy to fly #aviation #flying #warbirds
Take care and rest up! š
In that picture he looks like if Joe Biden but melty
I hope you fully recover (and test negative) soon!
9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nationās public health system "should alarm every American." It "is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
At this point Iām glad when I see anyone testing at all
Ah! Much less weird. Thanks!
Definitely something really weird going on with the back of that hat
Sounds true and also tasty to me
E.g., Mary Robinette Kowalās āGlamourist Historiesā series I think
This is just the coolest thing
Lovely shot!
Like how Elon Musk bought into Tesla years after it started and required himself to be designated a āco-founderā
Hey Betelgeuse ā¦ LFG, you coward! šš§Ŗ
Who?
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Sort of appropriate because in both cases thereās no actual agreed-upon definition that can be used consistently but certain very self-confident people insist that the distinction really matters and constantly misuse it
Alas.
No, it turns out there have been multiple notable Piet Heins in history
There have been multiple notable Piet Heins in history. The one I quoted was a Danish mathematician; perhaps the biography you refer to is of the Dutch pirate?
Enjoy!!
We Have AI Now www.youtube.com/shorts/8-lgJ...
What a cursed sentence (gift link) āThe A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.ā
Donāt trust the expertsā? Thatās not democracy, thatās recklessness. On a plane, I want a pilot. In a hospital, I want doctors and scientists who understand the evidence. Expertise isnāt religion or authoritarianism ā itās training, accountability, and data. Ignore it and we all pay the price.
I see and I hear and I speak no evil; I carry no malice within my breast; yet quite without wishing a man to the Devil one may be permitted to hope for the best. -āAn Ethical Grookā by Piet Hein
I hadnāt heard of it! Sounds neat though!
Also very good
The Gilded Rage
It fills me with rage that we could've spent the last 5yrs overhauling indoor ventilation and just...didn't. Like, it's good for capitalism! Even if that's allll you care about, healthy people are more productive workers! And people don't have to take as much time off work if their kids are healthy!
Right???
These arenāt even hard solutions! I get why some rich people are resistant to a lot of the changes we need to solve climate change, but for this? Itās easy and almost certainly an overall positive economic investment!
Itās baffling to me that so much of the U.S. (and the world) has decided that letting their kids get sick at school all the time (and spread illness to their parents and everyone else) is preferable to just ā¦ adequately cleaning indoor air
The maddening thing is that we know EXACTLY how to prevent this. Yes, kids should get vaccinated, test, stay home when sick, mask as much as possible. But even without any of that: Better ventilation and filtration in schools can MASSIVELY reduce viral spread, for all sorts of respiratory diseases.
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Wavefunction Collapse xkcd.com/3134/
![4-panel Comic. (1) STUDENT: If the wavefunction only collapses when I observe it, does that mean my consciousness affects the universe? (2) [Bad:] PROFESSOR: Yes, quantum entanglement proves that we all have souls. (3) [Good:] PROFESSOR: No, consciousness plays no role here. Itās just physical measurement. (4) [Chaotic:] PROFESSOR: No. The wavefunction collapses when *I* look at it because Iām a full professor. It wonāt collapse for an undergraduate.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreic2mhmdvsftki6qe275hycolgt22msekbwzdyqoujt56qzpcbm3hm@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Gift link www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/h...
Thank you so much!
My review of āThe End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)ā by @astrokatie.com damienkanerigden.com/blog/f/the-e... Read this book! #booksky
Oh I didnāt catch that part about removing people who remarried. That probably makes a huge difference!
āwhen high-quality evidence clearly supports one course of action, as with COVID-19 vaccination in pregnancy, failing to make a strong recommendation under the guise of neutrality represents a dereliction of professional duty.ā
This is a hell of a letter. āThe intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccinesā¦will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will sufferā¦.Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generatedā¦ā
āF you, make meā should always be the response to fascist demands
Honestly, the thing that gets me about it is that instead of asking, āhow are the health and social policies in those countries different from ours?ā, heās decided to pretend vaccines and seed oils are somehow damaging Americans (while, bizarrely, sparing everyone else)
dan jernigan is one of the most knowledgeable experts in the world on outbreak investigations and epidemiology
āI am not able to serve in this role any longer because of the ongoing weaponization of public health,ā wrote Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
the folks resigning are dedicated public servants who would not do this unless they felt that a) they could no longer do their jobs and b) they had no other choice. many of them worked at CDC for decades + helped build the modern agency that trump, musk, & rfk. jr have wrecked in a matter of months.
This thing where people BREAK NEWS in all caps but don't include a single source has got to stop.
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Seriously wtf
Very nice result, and I'd also like to highlight Ryan Foley's excellent quote at the end - "Foley said the funding situation and outlook for continued support is very uncertain, forcing the collaboration to take fewer risks, resulting in decreased science output overall. "
I mean he literally doesnāt believe in germs, so thereās that. Mostly I think itās that regulations that constrain corporations to protect consumers are upsetting to the right wing in general. I think he just figures the strong will survive and humanity will be better off (ācause heās a eugenicist)
an appropriate response to your product killing a child after months of psychological manipulation and torture is to take the product off the market before it kills again and the fact that this isnāt universally accepted right now is incredibly frightening
If ingesting contaminated food resulting in the acquisition of a brain worm is good enough for the Secretary of HHS then clearly itās good enough for the rest of us too.
Maybe we shouldnāt let someone who doesnāt believe in germs and who thinks itās okay to eat roadkill and swim in contaminated ponds be in charge of our national food safety.
They do say "the President" not "a President" but sure you could try it
Government of one person, by one person, for one person
I posit that a government consisting of one guy with unlimited power is larger in total government volume than a government comprising a large number of people with a little bit of power each. I don't know what the formula looks like exactly but the first one has an infinity in it.
Bleak.
Like, no one in the legit medical community would take any of RFKJ's statements as reasonable input that should be "defied" or not
It irks me a bit that this is being pitched as medical groups "defying" RFKJ. They're just doing their job and putting out reasonable recommendations, declining to lie about their work just because there is some absolute crackpottery in the federal office.
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This is of course brought to you by the same folks who had a full-on panic about some universities asking for diversity statements when hiring professors to teach diverse student populations. Because that was āideologicalā but of course supporting Trump EOs is just ā¦ weather ?
National Weather Service meteorologist applicants are now being asked to pledge their support for Trumpās executive orders. (Image reposted with alt-text)
This image of a young planet clearing its orbit in the protoplanetary disk around a distant star (the star itself is obscured) is stunning. Of course itās beautiful, but itās also a remarkable technical achievement for the study authors, the observatory, and the instrument scientists. Well done!
Among all the other things, "The President has screwed things up so badly that the world's other rich countries won't deliver mail to us anymore" really should end it immediately.
Short answer: no
Congratulations!! š
Agreed. The only term I know of that could apply to this is human trafficking.
It's absurd to call it a crime crackdown, but it is definitely a crime.
This is one of those brief snippets where a straight transcript should be enough to immediately trigger the 25th amendment and one even lightly annotated by anyone capable of organized thought should sink the administration entirely.
"You can't do this because it might make angry violent people angry and violent" would effectively outlaw any kind of existence for some people. Which is not an argument that this administration won't try it, just an obvious consequence if this argument is allowed to be made.
This is the essence of it to me. If the price of groceries is a kitchen table issue, then being too afraid of masked men -- who demand to see your identification while showing none of their own -- kidnapping you or your neighbors on the grocery store surely is a kitchen table issue too
Itās the absolute worst. ā¹ļø I hope it all clears up soon! (FWIW I think the average duration of positivity for a first infection is something like 10 days.)
Do it please!!
Her and Rufus Sewell š«
Yes
This is obscene.
I find it funny when peopleāand Iāve seen comments like this ā say we need to build fusion reactors instead of wasting time on solar. Itās like, honey, thereās a big fusion reactor in the sky that is always sending us power and we just need to collect it.
I guess I donāt fill out that many forms. I never really encounter any that take more than a few minutes
I donāt know what kind of form I might be filling out that I would trust it not to screw up in some weird way
Maybe I would be more tempted to use LLMs if I didn't really like writing and thinking, but, well,
Ugh. Itās all so demoralizing. Such a cynical view of education
we used to build household shrines to Going On The Computer and it's no coincidence that as we abandoned these we started straying further from god's light
We've known for a while that satellite mega-constellations like SpaceX's Starlink are a problem for optical astronomy. Now, a new survey shows they're also adversely affecting radio astronomy ā including at wavelengths supposedly protected by international regs. šāļøš§Ŗ physicsworld.com/a/starlink-s...
Can I ask what specifically "this part" was? (No worries if you're omitting that for privacy reasons; I'm just curious.) Heartbreaking story in any case!
Good lord. I still remember back in the day when people would get mad at anyone online who questioned Musk's motives by saying that he was saving the planet by inventing [sic] electric cars š
WOW! Io is a moon of Jupiter, and ridiculously volcanic. This image is from 46 years ago, BTW.
this pretty much sums it up www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
so, to understand this story there are a few things you need to know - my cat, Gus, believes he is a trained support animal - he is not (he has relatives who are, but he is not) - he believes he is a seizure-detecting dog - he is not a dog - I do not get seizures
Man you canāt get my hopes up like that
Itās genuinely baffling to me how the GOP has managed to maintain a reputation in basically all media as the ālaw and orderā party and the party of āfiscal responsibilityā in contradiction to all readily available facts