🌸🌹2ck 🌱🐇 @2ck@qoto.org

Today's my last day at Google 🥲

I'm taking some time off to focus on my family, personal health, and to work on my bots.

If anyone knows of a role that'll fit me, I'll appreciate the intro! 😊

#funemployed

Filled Long Form Journal XLII (28 Dec 2021 to 11 May 2023) and prepared journal XLIII. It took me much longer than my usual 6-8 months to fill this one because I had weeks where I couldn’t write much, if at all.

Brain sticker by Laura Bundesen and vertebrae sticker by Birch & Beads.

datetime.utcnow and datetime.utcfromtimestamp will be deprecated in #python 3.12: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/103857

If you maintain a package, now is probably a good time to grep your source code for utcnow and utcfromtimestamp to get out ahead of the deprecation warnings. 📅🕐

Tabletop gaming at the 20th World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, 1962. Photo by Jay Kay Klein.

I don't recognize that game! Can anyone identify it?

#game #SpaceGame

Finally finished after having taken a long break from this book. I really enjoy Carroll's podcast and liked most of the book. I definitely perceive the lack of understanding that comes from not working with the equations more closely: the last couple of chapters didn't do much for me.

(comment on "Something Deeply Hidden")

Less birdy today in the Ramble but still pretty decent (38 species). I caught up with the Brewster's Warbler again at the end of the day and had a nice view of it chwing down on tint caterpillars, but I dipped on all my other targets that other people had reported--Wilson's, Blue-winged, and Worm-eating Warblers, Indigo Bunting, and in particular the Summer Tanager which was again seen all over the Ramble all day, just not by me.

(1/)

#birding

Did you know that many people working on NASA missions are also musicians? Staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute put their talents on display at a show last week in Baltimore!

Fast forward to 2020:

@andrasgaspar and collaborators re-imaged the Fomalhaut system with the Hubble Space Telescope

AND FOMALHAUT b was GONE!!!

https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.08736

https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2020/09/4627-Image

In light of the really impressive JWST observations of Fomalhaut that were released yesterday, I wanted to share my view of the Fomalhaut system. Story time!

Fomalhaut is a bright nearby star that has been known for decades to have a debris disk, a belt of dust caused by asteroids crashing into each other. Sounds very dramatic, but we see them all over the place! Our own Kuiper Belt and asteroid belt are extremely faint/low mass versions of debris disks we observe around other stars.

So, I have to say at this point that it's pretty freaking cool to get to have your theoretical prediction confirmed in your lifetime in astronomy. (And others also independently had this prediction, it's not just me). But yeah, that feels pretty good.

Here's a Sky & Telescope article (where I got to be very excited about the new images): https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/the-james-webb-space-telescope-reveals-fomalhauts-disk-in-unprecedented-detail/

I think I'm also quoted in Nat Geo (but paywalled so I'll wait until I get get it from my library): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/nasa-photo-of-planetary-debris-unlike-anything-seen-before

We're currently looking for a PyPI Safety & Security Engineer. If that sounds like something you'd like to do, we hope you'll send us your resume. #opensourcejob

https://www.python.org/jobs/7221/

Finally, a solution to the unfairness of authorship ordering in scientific papers! 😂

"Every Author as First Author"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.01393

I don't normally like being Mr. Grumpy old man, but it is currently 68° (20°C) and just about perfect outside, yet I hear a bunch of air conditioners running.

Consider opening yer dang windows, people!

Mass walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees (Elsevier)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/07/too-greedy-mass-walkout-at-global-science-journal-over-unethical-fees