jwuphysics

Yeah, STScI is very legitimate (I work there as an astronomer) and it has an excellent Office of Public Outreach team.

The graphic does specify that it is an illustration, but I agree that it could explicitly mention that it's an artist's rendition of the (authors' physical interpretation) of the astronomical observations.

I don't have a good answer for you, but the best advice I'd say is to read Feynman's book "QED: the Strange Theory of Light and Matter" (it's really just a four part lecture series).

This biggest caveat is mentioned in the ApJL paper [0] introduction:

> Because SMBH growth via accretion is expected to be insignificant in red-sequence ellipticals, and because galaxy–galaxy mergers should not on average increase SMBH mass relative to stellar mass, this preferential increase in SMBH mass is challenging to explain via standard galaxy assembly pathways (Farrah et al. 2023, Section 5).

I think there are several observational effects that may obfuscate the interpretation -- but I also haven't read these papers in great detail.

First, there is a known age-metallicity-dust degeneracy that can make dusty star forming galaxies look more like red elliptical galaxies. This can bias estimates of the star formation and mass accretion history -- e.g. perhaps supermassive black holes have had more recent growth. Second, galaxies in more overdense regions may harbor faster growing supermassive black holes, and also be more predisposed to later merging and forming an elliptical galaxy. This seems likely true around cosmic noon (z~1-2), when star formation and supermassive black hole accretion activity were at their highest throughout cosmic history.

[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acb704

As someone who is unaware of any relevant literature on the subject, I'd love to hone my intuitions a bit. Could you say more about your line of reasoning?

Is there any way to change the keyboard shortcuts on the Multi Account Containers? Cmd+Alt+. is the default shortcut for 1Password on Linux.

Agreed, thanks for saying this. I'm also another astronomer by trade and I'm very surprised that Quanta ran with this title. I like the work that Xin Wang has done, and I'm usually a fan of Quanta Magazine reporting and Simons Foundation work -- I'm currently organizing a conference at the Flatiron Center for Computational Astrophysics -- but this is really lowering the bar for science journalism.!

I found it really useful when I got started in numerical computing and machine learning. Now I use the Jax/Numpy stack and Pytorch, but octave still has a special place in my heart due to Andrew Ng's canonical intro to ML Coursera course.

Agreed. I just purchased a Maingear Vector Pro 2 with a mobile 3080 Ti (16 GB, ~165W power) for $1700. It's the biggest purchase I've made but I can quickly prototype ML models and it make research projects so much snappier.

That first one is pretty good.

Thanks for compiling this list, and for what it's worth, I don't think this comment was shadow-banned despite what you mentioned in your other reply.

Congratulations to the whole team! I know this celebrates the achievements by select Northrop Grumman employees, but the JWST success deserves to be shared among all the teams: NASA, ESA CSA, U Arizona, Ball Aerospace, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

I work at the latter institution and I believe two individuals here were also awarded this honor.

It's possible through deconvolution with a model of the "point spread function" aka PSF. There are techniques from radio astronomy (where interferometry necessitates some kind of Fourier basis model and deconvolution/imaging procedure) which has been extended to the optical domain.

See for example: https://twitter.com/NGC3314/status/1582442367482634242?t=Eaa...

Nice book, I really like this approach. I also think Townsend's A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics is a wonderful book. It's similar to Sakurai but a bit more intelligible for undergrads.

This is definitely an interesting object, but based on the recent literature[0] it seems most astronomers attribute the odd signatures to interactions with its circumstellar material. The Wikipedia article focuses a bit too much on the initial Nature paper authored by Arcavi et al...

[0] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/fq=%7B!type%3Daqp%20v%3...

I hadn't heard of this organization but their headline certainly didn't pass the sniff test.

From their Wikipedia page: > In 2017, FIRE was listed as one of the sponsors of the conservative campus group Turning Point USA's Student Action Summit, according to tax records.

Thanks for sharing. Can you say a little bit more about what prompted you to make this?

> Consider this question - look outside at a tree. Where did all the carbon in the tree come from?

I assume that you are referencing the famous 1983 interview with Feynman, in which he playfully says that "trees come out of the air!" For anyone who hasn't heard the interview, it's definitely worth a listen: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/09/25/161753383/t...

I have two recommendations you might find useful. The first is QED, a series of lectures by Richard Feynman. This text covers the qualitative nature of the perturbation theory used for quantum electrodynamics. The second is Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur by Lancaster and Blundell. It's nicely written and accessible at the advanced undergrad level, building up QFT from the basics.

Caveat-- I work in astronomy but have a PhD in physics and have taken graduate QFT.

I agree that Americans love Trader Joe's, but I would by no means consider it to be a cheap grocery store.

I've been seeing a lot more about MosaicML on my Twitter feed. Just wanted to ask -- how are your priorities different than, say, Fastai?

They've certainly given this some thought:

> We are but one very small company in a universe of many hundreds of companies using AI software for drug discovery and de novo design. How many of them have even considered repurposing, or misuse, possibilities? Most will work on small molecules, and many of the companies are very well funded and likely using the global chemistry network to make their AI-designed molecules. How many people have the know-how to find the pockets of chemical space that can be filled with molecules predicted to be orders of magnitude more toxic than VX?

Astronomers have developed an indexing strategy using Hierarchical, Equal Area, and iso-Latitude Pixelisation (HEALPix): https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9905275

Agreed, although with the caveat that Nature is not regarded particularly well in my discipline. In fact, most for-profit astronomy/astrophysics journals carry some stigma.

Thanks for the more up-to-date insight! I remember receiving requests to submit and review papers to their astronomy journal when I was a PhD student, and had decidedly avoided them since then.

I was already on high alert when I saw that this was written in Frontiers, a potentially predatory journal publisher that makes it notoriously difficult to adequately review (and reject) bad papers. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiers_Media#Editorial_conc....

I noticed you posted trimread on another post (from CNN) so I wanted to mention two things: (1) on this site the images and captions have vanished, and (2) on the other post, several links have [Trim] appended, which made it slightly harder to read.

I'm sorry to hear about your experiences and it sounds like you learned a lot from firsthand knowledge. But, respectfully asking, what does inflammatory foods or poor eating habits have to do with GMO foods?

Although not fully related, this reminds me of another paper I recently found on astro-ph: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08997

My best guess is that those are near very bright foreground stars, which cause artifacts in the corresponding imaging survey. DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys is used to pre-select targets for spectroscopic observations. If you go to legacysurvey.org/viewer you can see some of the bright stars and the kinds of issues they can cause.

I also want to say that I'm not necessarily arguing against MOND here. I really like the work done by Stacy McGaugh et al. But from a more cosmological point of view, I see a lot of support for CDM. (And more than just TV cosmologists agree with that.)