tomr_stargazer

The scientific journals of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), which include the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ) and the Astronomical Journal (AJ) among others, have published new guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including large language models, in preparing and reviewing manuscripts submitted to the AAS journals.

Note, however, that the solar cycle [0] is so named due to its minimum and maximum: the most severe events will be clustered around the maximum, rather than spread out over the whole cycle (as your comment suggested) - so the "nine G4 events on average per year" is mathematically true but not so helpful.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle

I got lucky in a different spot:

"Manual hy-

phenation was not advised, either."

Bret (the author) does discuss the discipline of conscripted troops in another post, here:

https://acoup.blog/2022/06/17/collections-total-generalship-...

In particular, the concept of 'drill' gets a lot of attention:

"Fundamentally the principle behind using drill to build synchronized discipline is that the way to get a whole lot of humans to act effectively in concert together is to force them to practice doing exactly the things they’ll be asked to do on the battlefield a lot until the motions are practically second nature. Indeed, the ideal in developing this kind of drill was often to ingrain the actions the soldiers were to perform so deeply that in the midst of the terror of battle when they couldn’t even really think straight those soldiers would fall back on simply mechanically performing the actions they were trained to perform. That in turn creates an important element of predictability: an individual soldier does not need to be checking their action or position against the others around them as much because they’ve done this very maneuver with these very fellows and so already know where everyone is going to be.... The context that drill tends to emerge in (this is an idea invented more than once) tends to give it a highly regimented, fairly brutal character. For instance in early modern Europe, the structure of drill for gunpowder armies was conditioned by elite snobbery: European officer-aristocrats (in many cases the direct continuation of the medieval aristocracy) had an extremely poor view of their common soldiers (drawn from the peasantry). Assuming they lacked any natural valor, harsh drill was settled upon as a solution to make the actions of battle merely mechanical, to reduce the man to a machine."

I think this may be a subtle reference to what is usually called "relativistic beaming" or "Doppler beaming" [0], though I normally associate this effect with matter that is moving quite close to the speed of light.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_beaming

I’m sure there’s plenty of unintended consequences that could arise (and I’m sure other commenters will point those out), but as a Harvard alum I am frankly in favor of this in principle. Though I’d also like to see other tax streams set up to support higher education, rather than making it a zero-sum game.

Yes! Radio astronomy at most frequencies is totally feasible 24 hours a day, as long as you’re not pointing too close to the Sun. Source: I’m a radio astronomer.

I found a lot to think about in Ostadan's take on RoP: https://www.theonering.net/torwp/2022/09/26/115304-from-the-...

I thought that the PRIMA developer’s comment in this thread was really mature and thoughtful. Reproduced below (minus some formatting):

> My goal is to make Professor Powell 12’s solvers as accessible as possible to scientists, engineers, and algorithm researchers. I am not particularly in favor of or against any language. I hope that everyone can easily use Powell’s solvers in her/his favorite languages.

> The first implementation of PRIMA is in modern Fortran simply because Powell’s implementation was in Fortran 77. Using Fortran, I can systematically verify the bit-to-bit faithfulness of the modernized implementation (not only “faithful up to an epsilon”). In addition, the intrinsic support for matrix-vector calculations is a strong advantage when developing reference implementations (or templates) of numerical solvers — most numerical algorithms are combinations of such calculations anyway.

> The major motivation for developing the modern Fortran version is to provide a reference for the implementation in other languages, namely Python, MATLAB, C++, Julia, and R. A reference implementation must be structured, modularized, readable, understandable, and extendable. The original Fortran 77 code is a true masterpiece, but it is not proper at all for being used as a reference implementation. You do not want to use a spaghetti-style codebase with 244 GOTOs as a reference, or your implementation will be of the same style.

> Putting it more straightforwardly, I implemented the modern-Fortran version of PRIMA in order to develop versions that are entirely Fortran-free 3.

> Coming back to the point, I fully understand why the SciPy community has “little appetite for taking on more Fortran code”. The reputation of Fortran has been damaged over the years. I do not agree with the damaged reputation, and I feel sorry for those who do not have a chance to know (or refuse to know) modern Fortran due to this false reputation, but I do not blame them. It is the responsibility of the Fortran community to re-establish the reputation. I do not regard it as a bully to request non-Fortran implementations. It is not a question of surrendering or not.

> I do consider myself a member of the Fortran community. Taking my share of the aforementioned responsibilty, I will try to promote the usage of modern Fortran via the PRIMA project. There is nothing more convincing than a successful real-life project.

> For the inclusion of PRIMA in SciPy, I will keep communicating with both the SciPy and the Fortran community (e.g., those on this discourse), trying to find the best route. As pointed out by others, f2c is not an option due to its incapability of handling modern Fortran. Official C++ and Python implementations are being planned, but they will not be delivered in the near future. The most probable and practical solution, as suggested here and under the other thread, is to wrap the modern Fortran implementation of PRIMA using iso_c_bindings + ctypes or similar facilities. I hope the SciPy maintainers will accept this solution.

thanks for the tip - just added myself!

I'm a CODA. For me it's a big deal to see a film like this win this recognition.

Thank you for the further explanation - this has convinced me that it's plausible, though my mind is slow and I still need to think about it to be fully convinced.

I'm having a difficult time understanding this. I trust that you're knowledgeable about the topic given your comment history, but --

You've argued that the Sun's rate of motion across the sky should have a constant magnitude (under the assumption of an Earth analog with a perfectly circular orbit but still 23.5 degree obliquity). It's not clear to me why this should be the case; on the celestial sphere, I would have an easier time accepting that the Sun should have a constant "horizontal" (i.e., in the sense of right ascension) motion due to the Earth's constant orbital speed, and that the Sun's "vertical" (i.e. declination) motion should be purely sinusoidal: greatest at the equinoxes, zero at the solstices. Have I misunderstood something here?

As an extreme case, imagine a tidally locked planet on a circular orbit of 1 AU with 23.5 degree obliquity. An observer sitting on the equator would see the sun moving on a line overhead, crossing the zenith back and forth, with no figure 8 -- right?

It would be purely up-and-down (due to the Earth's 23 degree orbital tilt) if the Earth was on a perfectly circular orbit. But because the orbit is slightly elliptical, and because its orbital speed thus varies throughout its orbit[0], the alignment of the Sun on the sky at "noon" drifts back and forth according to when the Earth's orbit "outpaces" its daily rotation or when the daily rotation outpaces the orbital motion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_laws_of_planetary_mot...

There are a few observational biases at play here:

* objects closer to the Sun are intrinsically brighter (as they are simply reflecting sunlight; their intrinsic brightness follows an inverse-square law[0])

* objects closer to the Earth are easier to see (for a similar reason: the amount of light that reaches us depends on those objects' distance from our telescopes; the combined effects of the above two points means that the observed brightness of asteroids approximately follows an inverse-fourth-power law far from the Earth)

* objects interior to the Earth's orbit are hard to see because the Sun is in the way (it's usually daytime when these objects are "up").

So, even if there was a uniform distribution of asteroids as a function of orbital separation from the Sun, an observed overdensity of objects should be apparent just outside the Earth's orbit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law

See also sibling comment from jcims noting the logarithmic scaling, which would compress large separations and expand small separations.

Thank you for this amazing comment. It has helped me reorganize my understanding of the relationship between computer science and software engineering.

The primary deliverable isn't the satellite; it's the scientific data (and associated breakthroughs) the satellite will deliver.

Wow. I’m an astronomer and somehow I never learned this! Thank you for the link!

Of course a solar powered satellite can’t be parked in the shade. Can’t believe I never thought about that.

In interferometry [0], you need your telescope components to be collecting data simultaneously so that you can interfere their collected light together - so the maximum possible separation is about the diameter of the Earth. (The VLBA [1] and the EHT [2] make use of most of this potential.)

There have been proposals to extend this maximum baseline by having space-borne interferometers (perhaps orbiting the Sun), but practically, they are a few decades away at best. [3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Long_Baseline_Array

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope

[3] https://www.noao.edu/meetings/interferometry/workshop-files/...

It works! Thanks Spencer!!

My device is an iPhone 6S Plus. I’m on iOS 14.4.2. I see “white on white” text in my first text entry box to create a new checklist, and also when viewing the items inside a checklist. The items in a checklist become visible as white text upon gray background only after I mark those items “completed” (ie strikethrough).

Thanks again!

I’m excited to try this! First feedback after installing: I don’t think the app integrates properly with iOS “dark mode” theme; I am finding some text entry boxes show a white text on white background, so I can’t effectively use the app yet.

I really like the book "How to Break Up With Your Phone" by Catherine Price [0,1]. It has a 30-day step by step plan to restructure your habits around technology, and I've found it more effective than anything else. I especially like that it is gradual, gentle, and promotes mindfulness rather than trying to force an all-or-nothing approach ("cold turkey").

[0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Break-Up-Your-Phone/dp/039958112X [1] https://www.powells.com/book/how-to-break-up-with-your-phone...

My father was a world-class competitive swimmer and is a Deaf man. His stories about needing to rely on a visual cue when his hearing competitors benefited from the pistol sound were always fun -- as is the joy on his face when he narrates that he always beat them anyways.

Right now, all searches return this text for me:

"I've taken Runnaroo down due to the ever increasing number of bots scraping the site.

Not sure if it will be back.

Thank you to all of those who have used Runnaroo over the last year!

I'm going for a run.

-Chris"

I had to look at the paper itself to figure this out, but - in this paper, they designate the binary (star + stellar remnant) together as M51-ULS-1, and the planet actually orbits the two members together (a so-called circumbinary planet [0]). The logic of the nomenclature system actually breaks down in such cases - here's a quote from the Wikipedia article on naming conventions [1] stating as much:

'According to Hessman et al., the implicit system for exoplanet names "utterly failed with the discovery of circumbinary planets", and they state that it is unhelpful. '

So, yeah, take that for what you will.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumbinary_planet

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet_naming_convention#Ci...

That's the naming convention for exoplanets. It descends from the naming conventions for multiple star systems defined by the International Astronomical Union [0], in which the brightest (and usually gravitationally dominant) member of a multiple system receives designation "A", the second-brightest gets "B", and so on. Note the capitals. Planets, being considered a lower-mass extension of stars, get lower-case letters accordingly; so the first planet gets "b", the next planet gets "c" and so on. There is no lowercase "a" in a star-planet system. (I guess you might have that if you found binary planets without a star system; that would be very unusual).

Source: my PhD in astrophysics, and: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet_naming_convention

This image was shocking. Thank you for sharing. I feel like Treebeard, from the Lord of the Rings, coming across Saruman’s destruction of Isengard.

The Teknika Molodezi prediction came true! Not a single Soviet housewife in 2000 lacked a nuclear reactor. ;)

Thank you for these detailed instructions! I've been a longtime fan of grayscale screen, but often end up lapsing after a few days when I want to look at a photograph. Now I don't have that failure mode anymore!