i think fundamentally the Revolt of the Bosses that we're living through comes down "how dare you think that my position in society has strings attached"
Australian astronomer he/him Sydney/Gadi
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i think fundamentally the Revolt of the Bosses that we're living through comes down "how dare you think that my position in society has strings attached"
Politicians hate the idea of no-strings-attached funding because they themselves cannot imagine actually delivering useful outcomes without a huge bloody stick attached
In the case in the quoted post the guy got obliterated in court for doing totally unspeakable things and it was on the front page of the Herald for months. How petty do you have to be to intervene in a book award? Surely you canât think it will change peopleâs minds and youâre achieving some outcome
Like imagining for a second I thought war crimes are good, Iâm not sure Iâd take time out of my day to intervene in such low stakes stuff. It only makes sense if thereâs a real psychodrama going on and they donât really think itâs all above board
In the nicest possible way, how does it really matter in the grand scheme of geopolitics if the good burghers of Bendigo hear a novelist express some opinions, or a book wins a prize I would never otherwise have heard of, or a musician dedicates a piece to current affairs?
Can it really be the main purpose of every institutional board in Australia, whatever their formal responsibilities, to express public support for war crimes in the Middle East?
Has Australia always had institutions so committed to elite impunity or is it worse now
What do you think about Australia "associating with" Horizon Europe? It's not me asking, but the Department of Industry, Science and Resources. If you're interested, make a submission to their "request for information": âśď¸ consult.industry.gov.au/association-...
My periodic reminder for #astrosci #astrodon #exoplanets Early Career Researchers to please, please, please have a simple web site with your current email address on it - rationale here: kenworthy.space/advice/
The combination of bloodless corporate managerialism by uni execs and a do-nothing Albanese govt is killing Australiaâs university sector.
Strong advice from Senator Gallagher to the interim VC. For the good of the university, I hope she listens.
Itâs insane how much better Paris gets every time I go back. More street trees, bike lanes everywhere, lower pollution.
On the Shinkansen to Tokyo after a great meeting about differentiable astronomy hosted by @hajimekawahara.bsky.social. Interesting that in nearly every case differentiable = Jax! Super excited about all the work being done - I want to click these packages together like Lego to do end to end science.
He came into power at a time when Australia was moving in a direction to become more of what we *could* be as a nation. Howard deliberately changed that direction to make Australia become a country that only did things he wasn't scared of. He was a man scared of many, many things.
gonna be a bit Woke here but a lot of my work at the moment is about Fisher information in various contexts and I'm not super keen on the eugenics connection. Have people in other fields settled on good alternatives for this? Asymptotic precision?
Not sure I understand the reasoning behind doing fairly minor extensions of the metro (eg Tallawong to Schofields, a few km) by *2039* www.smh.com.au/national/nsw...
apropos of nothing www.vice.com/en/article/w...
cannot imagine just proudly confessing to war crimes like this
Bent Books on Boundary St is good, Brisbane has a criminal undersupply of good bookshops though
It would be absolutely awesome if Australia formally joined Horizon Europe. I am sure we would get more back than we put in based on the calibre of scientists in the country.
Nice if the victimsâ families got the same
New studies used JWST to probe TRAPPIST-1e, the most accessible potential Earth-like exoplanet. Data reveals the atmosphere is 1) Not hydrogen dominated (unsurprising)đ 2) Unlikely to be Venus-likeđ§ 3) Compatible with N2-richđ arxiv.org/abs/2509.05407 arxiv.org/abs/2509.05414
hey im putting something together for my boss for his birthday. yeah can you write a letter or better yet an insane poem or horrifying drawing about the unspeakable crimes you all have committed together
it keeps getting worse!
Oh dear
That's why I keep saying: fascism, the ultimate end of reactionary politics, is not an alternative ideology or set of principles. It is their absence. It's a permission structure, license to slough off the voice of conscience, join a thought-deafening mob, and indulge your basest instincts.
Some good news... "Victoria to become first Australian state to formally table treaty legislation in parliament" www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09...
If you were to create a guy in a lab to destroy everything that works about the US and is the basis for its wealth and power, then Trump would be even better at the gig than that guy
If Melbourne University Publishing doesnât want to keep publishing Meanjin, they should hand over the journal to someone worthy of the responsibility. Me in The Conversation theconversation.com/the-decision...
Totally cooked
Jesus Christ
Wrote a bit more about how the *process of making software* is a social activity before it is a technical activity, and AI tools alienating us from that social activity directly undermine our ability to make software.
In other news, the petition to the House to better support PhD students who had to go part-time by making their stipend tax-exempt, too, has already received 60+ signatures; and this makes me hopeful we *can* improve things, one little step at a time. www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/...
Australian universities are in a governance crisis. VC pay blowouts, scandals, mission drift â these arenât random, theyâre structural. This new working paper with @marijataflaga.bsky.social & Keith Dowding digs into why the system is broken, and how to fix it. doi.org/10.25911/MWW... A thread:
Immigrants are a social good, anti-immigrant propaganda is basically all lies, and any approach to the "problem" that doesn't start form those two points is worthless
the real glory of world war two was that it involved a warrior cult being ground down and beaten to a pulp by people who would rather have been doing something else.
"One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are âstillâ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical." Walter's got it
robot, @ you: hey, are you too stupid to comprehend complicated ideas like the distinction between "danger" and "serious danger"?? you will be soon!
I know Wikipedia is usually wonderful, but for many mathematical notions, it, if I dare say so, sucks greatly. Take bra ket notation. Nowhere in the page is the (intuitive) defn for finite-dim vectors, or the basic rules to manipulate them. Instead, abstract complex vector spaces and linear forms.
This is NOT A DRILL! Itâs time to vote for THE BEST MINERAL⌠CALCITE!!! Thanks to its birefringence, under the name Icelandic spar, it made a critical contribution to our understanding of the wave nature of light! It even appears in the title of Christiaan Huygens âTreatise on Lightâ. âď¸ #MinCup25
Melbourne Uni is killing the literary journal Meanjin. It's cultural vandalism. Australian universities are now deeply anti-intellectual places www.crikey.com.au/2025/09/04/m...
â85th year of a distinguished history⌠The two part-time staffâŚ.â 𤯠Is anyone involved in this vandalism going to speak up??? #meanjin
Meanwhile, per the linked article, there are 15 executives at University of Melbourne making more than double what they provide(d) to Meanjin each year. I think we all know where the real value for money is (or was) www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
Australian universities are no longer trustworthy guardians of any aspect of Australian culture
As the only university covered by federal law, why canât we see a similar intervention at ANU? I hear constantly from staff about the huge toll on from the almost year long shambolic process of cuts at the ANU. We need an immediate pause to forced redundancies. www.afr.com/companies/en...
is anyone else sick of the term âtechâ and âengineeringâ primarily referring to Silicon Valley startup culture when so much more interesting technology development happens elsewhere, without the hype and usually with much sociopathy
So you arrest them if they enter US waters, and try them before a court, and then sentence them.
If youâre interested in #exoplanets and all things planetary climate, as well as other snippets of the colourful life of Professor Pierrehumbert, make sure to follow @climatebook.bsky.social if you havenât already! đŞđđ§ŞâŹď¸
My money is on bare rock for both planets - this simple explanation fits the data well, no fine-tuning needed. This may disappoint some folks, but I think it's amazing that we can measure this at all!! if atmospheres are rare on rocky planets orbiting M-dwarfs, that is a profound thing to know.
Update on the atmosphere vs no atmosphere debate for TRAPPIST-1 b and c -- here's a nice and (IMO) conclusive result from Gillon and Ducrot et al.: no thick atmosphere on either planet. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02128
Ready for Aunty Donna
The very short book Discourses on Colonialism by AimĂŠ CĂŠsaire is extremely good on this: files.libcom.org/files/zz_aim...
Needless to say this is not the only reason to oppose these war crimes. But we have to see this as a turning point where we can either reject this happening to anyone, anywhere, or accept that civilians can be murdered by machines and be complicit in that
The imperial boomerang in todayâs form is that the more we tolerate the murder of people in Palestine with drones, the closer we all come to being murdered by drones anywhere in the world
I reckon youâre not supposed to extrajudicially murder people. Just my opinion
Look at this shit Iâve gone off about it before, but a bad actor controlling a major LLM is a much bigger issue than hallucination
tbh Iâm *slightly* less cynical. I think putting mental energy into systematically thinking about morality can be clarifying and probably makes it a higher status consideration in your brain, making you marginally more thoughtful, esp about less obvious ethical problems. empirical question tho
Ethics classes can teach the content of various theories, and thereby impart knowledge and skills which are useful to ethical cognition. But they can't make someone care, they can't make someone good. It's a fundamental mistake re what university education can or should do to hope they'll do that.
Famously unable to recall a single book, film, or song that he likes, so I can well believe he sits silently in front of a flag most evenings with a bottle of claret in one hand
It's me, I'm the special boy journalist who can solve fascism once and for all by platforming so many fascists and letting them say so many fascist things that people will finally decide not to fascism after all
A quick brief analysis of the ongoing arrangement to send people to Nauru, co-written with @lisa-vantoor.bsky.social theconversation.com/by-sending-n...
I dunno, feels like if you scream "Islamists are evil, they'd kill everybody if they had the chance, that's why we have to sniper children in the head", you probably don't also have the right to say "hey, you'll probably be fine, the Taliban have absolutely assured us they won't hurt you"
Congratulations to OzGrav's Deputy Director, Professor Tamara Davis AM, recipient of the 2025 Moyal Medal awarded by Macquarie University for her outstanding contributions to astrophysics and cosmology. Read more here: lighthouse.mq.edu.au/media-releas...
This is truly dangerous. After what happened in Porepunkah last week, the media should not be downplaying the threat of violent far right men in this country.
what if the UK had a major political party that appealed to people who didn't love pogroms
White Australians referring to immigration as an "invasion" is ludicrous like, oh, and how did you get there, dude??
Concerned that we are losing the necessary ratio. 15% of teachers/faculty should be irretrievably strange eccentrics. Every learning experience should have some element where in later life you can reflect with former classmates about how bizarre at least one (1) class per year was.
What gets me about this is that it is the opposite of the truth. Democracy is a collaborative effort, and part of that effort is trusting the judgment of experts regarding their fields of study. It is a dictatorship where the expertsâ opinions are subservient to the will of the dictator.
The number of people nationally with student loans of more than $100,000 has grown by 800 per cent in the past decade. The government needs to stop cherry-picking which parts of the Universities Accord it acts on, and get on with real reform to fix this broken system.
The really gross and blatantly obvious thing about all of this stuff is that most of the time, the people who are creating and using these bots or avatars are always making them of women, women in lingerie, women being used as a commodity. You barely seeing them do that to men. Think about that.
This might seem hypocritical but there is actually a logic for the rich tech guys: 1/1000 chance that one day we get SkyNet, which would affect me - this is the gravest risk to humanity Ordinary people doing suicide by coo and murders because AI told the - đ alas thatâs the cost of doing business
having a little Queenslander wince whenever Drew makes the international posts
My job now is to go school to school, university to university trying to help them sort through the challenge of teaching in a world with AI and the first thing I recommend to improve the teaching of writing is cut the number of students per instructor in half. No one is going to do that, though.
Why destroy the greatest (by a long margin) assets of a country like the UK?
time you get your first tenure track job you're all worn out. But (leaving aside the current US attacks on academia) I do think the big problem worldwide isn't the format of doctoral education, but rather the increasing casualisation of academic labour, and paucity of tenure-track equivalent jobs.
One of the main benefits of doing a US PhD is the extra time you get, that's one of the big reasons I advised my students to apply for US programmes. We offer a four year degree here, there'd be no advantage over us. The US is euthanising its massive advantage in research for no good reason.
"Tao is one of the most prominent mathematicians and academics to publicly oppose the administrationâs actions, calling them an âexistential threatâ to his field, and academic science, more broadly. He said public advocacy is a priority over his research, for now." www.nbcnews.com/science/scie...
why is áż ĚĚβĎÎšĎ transliterated in English as hubris with a u and not hybris
It turns out - simply from reading the article - that the authorities have a good and sensible plan for dealing with this, and the "concerns" are spurious. Unsurprisingly, this is not reflected in the comments!
Again, I have some mild concerns about universities paying for unrestricted access to this technology to every single undergraduate on campus!
if LLM products cannot be safely used by the general public, they cannot be offered unrestricted to the general public
just so embarrassing to jump the gun like this
imo materialism implies machines can in principle feel and suffer, sure, but at the moment there's just no way LLMs have anything like sentience or personhood
Very sorry to hear this. Rai Weiss was a genius experimental physicist.
was there ever a plan / an easy facility for AGNSW/Woolloomooloo?
First persona non grata declaration under the VCDR in Australia since WWII www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
The cost of kicking real reform down the road. For more than three years Iâve been calling for reform of the failed JRG program alongside colleagues on the crossbench. If govt wants to fix intergenerational inequity this is a great place to start. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
INDO-EUROPEAN #1: *hâey, *knhâck *knhâck INDO-EUROPEAN #2: *kʡo's *thhâre? IE 1: *Larry IE 2: *Larry *kʡo? IE 1: Laryngeal! đ IE 2: ... IE 1: *ghâddit? 𤣠IE 2: that was so bad I think we need to all get in our chariots and head out in all directions just to get as far away as we can from you
the ABC is world class. imagine another organisation running a program to develop young talent and reach new viewers, giving feedback and notes over the course of a year, then reviewing the final docs, saying 'this doesn't appeal enough to an older audience' and picking up zero projects
Given the availability of open source crowd counting tools, why do we endlessly have articles about âpolice sayâ vs âorganisers sayâ protest numbers
NEW: In 40 cities across Australia, an estimated one million people have been on the streets calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza. These were the scenes in Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth.
already the quality & quantity of teaching and learning, as well as the experiential quality of classroom learning (eg small to medium sized tutes with genuine student-student-academic interative discourse) has certainly declined since I was an undergrad. driven by uni budget cuts & student poverty
it's official: modern university learning is just overpriced moocs with an assessment service. "staff were informed last September that traditional lectures would no longer form a part of courses." www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
Australians turn out in their tens of thousands to condemn the genocide of the Palestinian people: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...
my most right wing opinion is that all consumerism is a bit infantalizing (you want what you want when you want it) and these people have nothing but imagined consumer identity as a group so: all babies
New regulations are needed to protect #RadioAstronomy from satellite mega-constellations. We deliberately build our telescopes in the outback to avoid radio frequency interference (e.g. from TVs, microwaves, phones) but now unintentional transmissions from satellites are affecting images. âď¸đđ§Ş
There have been a spate of papers that are superficially appropriately structured, in which the "findings" are just a series of true but trivial, or vague and unsupported, statements about science topics. These are occurring at an increasing volume such that moderation will be hard
How in the world can they do governance for this? Given the likely footprint of the illuminated area, what if there are some people there (and not just astronomers) who want a dark night? Note this is actually geoengineering in reverse -- by increasing solar radiation hitting Earth, it would have