Hint of the northern lights visible low in the sky from the Twin Cities this evening.
I'm a retired middle school math teacher and cross country coach. Before teaching, I worked as a software engineer. I am interested in computers, math, science, history, and politics. I enjoy running, amateur astronomy, drone photography, and programming.
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Hint of the northern lights visible low in the sky from the Twin Cities this evening.
The Dumbbell Nebula. This is about 5 1/2 hours of imaging over three nights. Very clear all three nights. This is the result of a star that exploded about 10,000 years ago. It is about 1360 light years away and about 2 light years in diameter. #astronomy
A website that lets you select a country or state and move it around a Mercator projection map to yield better size comparisons. thetruesize.com, created by James Talmage and Damon Maneice
High school sports promise character development and leadership skills, but many coaches lack training to deliver these outcomes. 90% of coaches want leadership training, yet only 12% have received it, according to two researchers who study HS sports buff.ly/D0VHip2 #Edusky
It is made in China.
Seestar S50.
A huge amount of new generating capacity is expected in the US this year, and about half of that is solar, with a small fraction of natural gas (no coal). This would be the highest ever annual addition to US capacity (prev. peak before graph starts is mid-70s at ~40GW). www.eia.gov/todayinenerg...
I know of a criminal living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Does he me drivers license? Word salad.
"That doesn't make for a great headline though. 'The troubling decline in conscientiousness' is a lot more compelling than 'A very small decline in conscientiousness.'"
At least they were helping someone for a change.
That is looking really nice!
Walking is good! Especially if you do it around nature!
Everything from military radios to AI can be hacked. At the Defcon hacker conference, researchers showed how they hacked into these systems—not for gain—but to point out vulnerabilities. First, a student who found that vape detectors installed at his high school could be used for surveillance: 🧵
losing my mind at this. apoplectic. want to punch a wall, or a human being data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mother...
They had separate streams for the field events. Maybe they should have a separate stream for the 10,000 finals. And the steeple heats. The USATF streams are going to be for serious fans. Let us watch the entire race.
Especially in high school, the goal is for kids to participate and do activities they enjoy with their friends. These so-called concerns are truly antithetical to everything sports should be about at that level.
Reminds me of a 5 year old making up bigger and bigger nonsense numbers. I’ll bet you a bazillion dollars!
The Iris Nebula. This is from 12 1/2 hours of imaging over six nights. It takes a lot of time to really capture the dark nebula surrounding the brighter blue nebula lit up by the star in the center of the nebula. The Iris Nebula is 1300 light years away and about 6 light years across. #astronomy
Spot on. This is the clearest explanation I’ve seen. It ‘s relatable, and humanizes the issue in a way everyone can understand.
Wild how the Fed chair saying that *entire regions of the United States* won’t be able to get a mortgage in the next decade barely registered as a news event
This is so important it hurts. This is the tiny area of a massive sprawling city that Trump is attacking and the entire propaganda machine is churning to make us believe more is happening. Don’t fall for the lies.
In April, President Trump and Salvadoran President Bukele shook hands in the Oval Office to celebrate a deal to ship gang members to the notorious CECOT prison. But a new ProPublica investigation found there’s more to the story. 🧵👇
Really important story - army officials asked soldiers to identify themselves if they don't agree with Trump's politics that way he'd get only supportive soldiers in uniform during his political rally on base. Heavier soldiers were also barred from participating.
Looks like Angie Craig won’t be getting my vote in the Senate DFL primary next year.
I read it some time ago. A real eye opener. Thought provoking. Highly recommend!
Naomi Tutu, daughter of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu (and an Episcopal priest herself) fully addresses the lie at the heart of the claim of that white South Africans are “refugees.” Amplify her voice. www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb... www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...
“Look, here's burial sites all over the place. These are all white farmers that are being buried,” Donald Trump said during today’s White House meeting with South Africa’s president. The image he was holding up, however, is of the Democratic Republic of Congo. www.barrons.com/news/trump-d...
More than enough!
"The world of biomedical research actually has immense latent political power, albeit largely untapped. Researchers have a much stronger hand politically and the White House’s position, in terms of public opinion, is comparatively weak."
The reality of our government is that it's a sprawling and occasionally inefficient system because you can't deliver services to 330 million people without having to deal with edge cases, and to someone who doesn't know the edge cases, that looks like waste or fraud www.nextgov.com/digital-gove...
The Great Globular Cluster (Messier 13). This is about 5 hours of imaging over two nights with a nearly full moon. This globular cluster contains more than 300,000 stars. It is about 24,000 light years away and about 145 light years in diameter. #astronomy
The Croc's Eye Galaxy (Messier 94). This is an interesting and weird galaxy. It has two ring structures, the inner one is very bright, the outer one is much dimmer. It has some spiral structure, but not all of that is visible in visible light from earth. #astronomy
The Whirlpool Galaxy. This is about 6 hours and 40 minutes of imaging over three nights. The two galaxies are interacting as the smaller galaxy has pasted through the larger galaxy twice, causing the distortions in each galaxy. #astronomy
You're a mean one, Mr. Trump.
Sounds like he just merged direction correlation and inverse correlation into one thing. Which makes no sense since they are opposites. And also: Correlation does not imply causation, no matter which way it runs!
The conversations are on signal with some random person they added.
The Pinwheel Galaxy (Messier 101). This is from three nights of imaging totaling about 9 hours. The Pinwheel Galaxy is 21 million light years away and is about twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy. The distorted spiral is caused by gravity of other galaxies in its local group. #astronomy
A TPM Reader shared this graph with me which strongly suggests that border immigration surges recently, which spur so many conspiracy theories in this country, are driven by periods of acute labor shortages in the US. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/its-t...
International students are good for the US economy.
Last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined. wapo.st/4luJyph
“I hate to say it—I think they beat us at capitalism.” www.wired.com/story/tariff...
Bode's Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy. I've been trying to get this done for over a month, but lots of cloudy nights made it frustrating. I had about 8 hours of imaging on each of M81 and M82 and a few hours between them to get a good mosaic of the two galaxies together. #astronomy
Oops. "Trump’s latest tariffs are creating major headwinds for U.S. manufacturing, driving up construction costs and forcing companies to rethink or scrap factory plans, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday."
Best hope is that a court does a TRO or the Republicans in Congress grow a spine and put a quick end to this. Then the markets might surge (upward!) in relief. Keep your fingers crossed.
I've already had two federal grants terminated and face a 33% pay cut due to future terminations. It's painful, but not as painful as the conversations I'm having every day with brilliant trainees in graduate school and postdoctoral positions who see little future for themselves in US science.
Why tattoos are such an unreliable marker of gang membership
I had been reluctant to amplify the theory that Trump's "reciprocal tariff rate" for a given country was based on the dumb calculation: (bilateral trade deficit) divided by (imports from that country) But now USTR has confirmed it. Brief 🧵
Tariffs on uninhabited islands? Has someone been importing penguins?
Nobel Prizes by country and year. The dominance of Germany is striking every time. Before 1933, that is. And the utter dominance of America (and the UK) after 1945.
Totality during the lunar eclipse last night. This is a single photo taken with my Dwarf 3 smart telescope. A 2 second exposure with 60 gain. I did some noise reduction and a bit of sharpening.
“U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin is encouraging all U.S. citizens to join him this week in filing formal demands for access to their personal data obtained by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk.” DIRECTIONS AND LINK TO FORM HERE. jamieraskin.com/doge-privacy...
MUSK: A sophisticated cyberattack from Ukraine took out Twitter's servers REALITY: Twitter's servers were not secured properly and were publicly visible Great explainer here from @lhn.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/x-ddos...
The Horsehead Nebula. The bright star at the top center is the left most star in Orion's belt. This is from 252 images of 120 seconds each taken over four nights over the past two weeks or so (too many clouds!) for a total of about 8 1/2 hours of imaging time. #astronomy
After Google, Apple, and Bing caved in and renamed the Gulf of Mexico, I started playing with the Mapbox API to build my own map web app. You can try it out at www.gradekeeper.com/map/ Click the i button for the user's guide so you can see everything it can do and why I called it Blue Map.
Time to switch to libreoffice.org
I've read most of the analyses of the DOGE 2025 "receipts" site. This, from NPR, is the best I've read so far. Some of what they claim to have cut haven't been cut, other "cuts" will incur costs down the road. NPR says DOGE has made $2B of cuts, not $55B. www.npr.org/2025/02/19/n...
The Orion Nebula from three nights of imaging totaling 8 hours. The Orion Nebula is the middle "star" in Orion's sword below the three stars that make up his belt. You can see it with the naked eye, but it's really nice in a small telescope. #astronomy
I use Brave. I find it to be very fast.
Stop urging and file a lawsuit.
"But it’s also because the plaintiffs in this suit embody everything Trump claims he wants to do with DOGE. Elon Musk claims he’s hunting for waste, fraud, and corruption in government agencies he’s wildly unfamiliar with. These civil servants have been doing this, some of them, for four decades."
And Bing Maps has caved on the Gulf of America nonsense. Interestingly, DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps, but it still seems to show the Gulf of Mexico. I wonder how they did that.
And Apple Maps has sucked up to Trump and renamed the Gulf of Mexico. Deleting Apple Maps from my iPhone and iPad. So far Bing Maps is still calling it the Gulf of Mexico.
Google Maps went ahead and renamed the Gulf of Mexico. I did submit feedback complaining about this. If you would like to submit your own feedback, click the three horizontal lines at the top left in Google Maps, choose Edit the Map, then Your opinions about Maps.
I wrote about the importance of "prebunking," in light of rumors that Elon Musk may have purchased $40 million in Super Bowl ads to spread misinformation about the "fraud" and "corruption" in this vital agency. I hope you will read and share asharangappa.substack.com/p/prebunking...
Bama Senator Howls Like Stuck Pig After She Sees NIH Cuts Impact in State talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/bama-...
Whenever you hear someone sneer about scientific research that seems useless to them — “they’re studying the spit of lizards?!” — remind them that’s exactly how we got Ozempic. globalnews.ca/news/9793403...
“Why do I need NOAA? I’ve got a weather app.” Is equivalent to asking “Why do I need farms? I can go to the supermarket.” www.noaa.gov/about-our-ag...
Or can we come up with code words?
Or use a thesaurus.
So the word appears, it’s rejected? No grants for studying black holes, the barrier reef, anything involving a math inequality? Just a quick search, no context? What can you study?!
Does anyone know the old IP addresses from before they went dark? Maybe those still work. Be funny if all they did was change the DNS.
The Jellyfish Nebula. This is from 17 hours of imaging over 5 nights. The Jellyfish Nebula is a remnant of a supernova from 35,000 years ago. It is about 5000 light years away and 70 light years in diameter. #astronomy
Veritasium did a video about this youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA
In Google Maps on the web, click the 3 horizontal bars at the top left, which opens a side panel. I would try add a missing place or edit the map. It's not really intended for this, but we can try.
And if you still have an account on X, go to x.com/NewsFromGoog... and comment on this there. Make sure they know that common usage is the Gulf of Mexico.
Here is a quote from paragraph 8 in Google's policy on place names: "In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage."
Also, here is Google's policy on place names: publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2008/04/how-... ... paragraph 8 is eerily relevant here.
There is a process to report errors in Google Maps. Let's all report these as errors when they make the change.
My dad was tortured by the Gestapo for 4 days and thrown in a concentration camp for being in the Norwegian Resistance. Growing up, he would tell me things he learned in the Resistance. I thought, I'm never going to need this stuff. Here's some of those things #Thread
I’m telling everyone: Do not open the door or say a word unless you’re expecting someone and know exactly who it is. Know your rights. Pass these around…
I like the larger one on the right.
Too close to home?
ProPublica reporters are dedicated to investigating government agencies and federal policy. Concerned public servants are some of our most important sources. We appreciate the difficult situations people weigh as they decide whether to reach out. Here's how to securely get in touch.
Messier 52 (the Scorpion cluster). You may notice a bit of nebula on the lower right. That is the Bubble Nebula. So I did a mosaic with my Bubble Nebula image from September. #astronomy
I don't know how many of y'all are watching the migration of American TikTokers to RedNote, but it's the most fascinating thing I've EVER SEEN HAPPEN ONLINE. 🧵
Best game of the weekend by far!
That first drive was amazing!
The Pleiades star cluster from over 13 hours of imaging over 4 nights. The Pleiades are visible to the naked eye in reasonably dark skies. Follow the belt of Orion to the upper right, just past Jupiter. The cluster is moving through a dust cloud and its stars are lighting up the dust. #astronomy
A nice sun halo greeted me as I finished my run this morning.
It should be epic!
Please do not point lasers at "drones" tonight, unless you want coal in your stocking!
The White Rose Cluster from last night. This is from about 2 1/2 hours of imaging. This cluster includes about 1000 stars and is 7600 light years away and about 50 light years in diameter. It was discovered by Caroline Hersch in 1783, which is why it is also called Caroline's Rose. #astronomy
This is a mosaic of the California Nebula. This is two nights of imaging, with about 5 hours of imaging each night. I've been hoping to do some more imaging for this mosaic. But it's been frustrating with the clouds lately. Some sunny days, but with clouds moving in by sundown. #astronomy
When I was a kid, you’d pull on the loop and pull the tab off. But then there were sharp little metal tabs all over parks etc. I guess this was an improvement.
Definitely all of the above!
With the nearly full moon lighting up the sky, I imaged another open cluster this evening. This is the Sailboat Cluster. This is from about 2 1/2 hours of imaging. Some nice red and blue color to the stars in the cluster. There is also some blue nebula mixed in with the cluster. #astronomy
Full moon through thin clouds this evening. #photography #moon
