Gaythia Weis @Gaythia@qoto.org

Want to know what my research is about? Follow this thread 🧵 based on a 10min talk I've drawn for a meeting.

The talk was aimed at non-specialist space science colleagues (not the general public!). The slides were built up step by step, but I'm omitting this here & showing only the final graphs, less this becomes a 34-part thread. 11 is plenty enough!

So: "Understanding Winds of Massive Stars Using High Mass X-ray Binaries"

#astrodon #XraysAreTheBestRays #SciArt #scicomm #VicisAstro
1/11

@futurebird I hope students realize that “took the illegal black history course” is the kind of thing many college admissions committees will consider favorably.

Several schools in Arkansas are defiantly teaching AP African American history. The state has warned them that the students will earn no credits.

Republicans continue to describe Black history as "indoctrination" and "teaching children to hate America" -- showing that they might benefit from the course themselves.

Start your weekend with an amazing video. This scuba diving fly lives in a lake 3X saltier than the ocean! https://www.kqed.org/science/1983796/this-daring-fly-swims-in-a-shimmering-bubble-shield

If you or I went into a state park and incinerated 4 acres and killed a pile of protected wildlife, we would face all sorts of fines, or even prison.

But Elon Musk gets to kill whatever he wants, with no consequence.

#Biodiversity #Texas #Musk #SpaceX

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-08-25/elon-musk-s-spacex-explosion-left-major-debris-after-starship-rocket-launch#xj4y7vzkg

My latest: Public Pushes Back On #CDC’s Plan To Weaken Infection Control via
@forbes
Recap of the #HICPAC meeting
https://www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/2023/08/25/public-pushes-back-on-cdcs-plan-to-weaken-infection-control/?sh=2f292ef57179
#Covid #CovidIsAirborne #LongCovid #disabilities #ADA #aerosol #ventilation

I try to be patient that are misinformed. I really do. But for around the 25th time in the past two years, I've had someone tell me how Sweden was a #COVID19 success story despite having no restrictions. It is just an idiotic claim. Sweden had a MUCH higher death rate than comparable Nordic nations. It was a failure, not a success. (Also, the fact Sweden had no national mandates didn't mean people didn't choose to mask or isolate.)

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&uniformYAxis=0&country=DEU~SWE~FIN~DNK~NOR&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=total_deaths_per_million&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false

Australians urged to prepare for most significant bushfire season since black summer https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/23/australian-bushfire-season-how-to-prepare #climate #heatwave #bushfire

Not only are the Saudis mass murdering Ethiopians, but the Ethiopian regime, not content with committing genocide against Tigrayans, is denying that the Saudis are mass murdering Ethiopians. Both KSA and Ethiopia are invited to join the so-called BRICS while the Saudis are literally shooting Ethiopians for sport. Read this.

https://journa.host/@zekuzelalem/110945121388013106

Less than a quarter of Americans know they don't have meaningful privacy protections on the internet. The first step to changing this fact might be to change this number. #Democracy https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/25/just-23-of-americans-know-the-u-s-has-failed-to-pass-an-internet-era-privacy-law/?utm_source=werd.io&utm_campaign=mastodon&utm_channel=mastodon

Important read from @austiejfish on #EnvironmentalJustice #racism #airpollution

They all oppose the air quality regulation that is meant to prevent and mitigate the effects of things like the Atkore United Poly Systems fire.

https://sourcenm.com/2023/08/17/albuquerque-plastic-fire-gives-air-regulators-this-moment-in-history-to-make-the-right-decision/

This summed up my thoughts in a pithy format.

Terrible news from a study out today on emperor penguins in the Antarctic (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00927-x):

"Of the five breeding sites in the region all but one experienced total breeding failure after sea ice break-up before the start of the fledging period of the 2022 breeding season. This is the first recorded incident of a widespread breeding failure of emperor penguins that is clearly linked with large-scale contractions in sea ice extent."

More here: https://www.bas.ac.uk/media-post/loss-of-sea-ice-causes-catastrophic-breeding-failure-for-emperor-penguins/

After decades of fighting for our right to love and live freely, the LGBTQ+ community should be long past discrimination. And yet, the scapegoating of our community continues. As a Japanese American who experienced forced relocation and internment as a child, this déjà vu is both alarming and heartbreaking. We must remember the past, demand change, and act to safeguard our future. https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/takei-scapegoating-lgbtq-japanese-internment

All these red states are now boasting about how they are withdrawing from the American Library Association. They aren’t just satisfied with banning books, they want to get rid of the places that keep and lend them, too. The Christian Right is on the march.

Carl Sagan once warned us of the “dumbing down” of America. He warned of a time when our “critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...”

That time is upon us. We must do all we can to prevent that darkness from taking hold.

The NYT team here might read the paper's own editorial from this morning, which points out that Trump was indicted not for what he said, but what he did, and lays out those charges. Instead, this piece frames the indictments as prosecution of the former president for lying. This is not accurate and is in fact misleading. Hard to figure. Also still missing: historical context (which editorial offered). https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/us/politics/trump-indictment-lies-vs-free-speech.html?unlocked_article_code=7wkIKoHBqxzjFiwcYahfDykINWiKVWnm6d6Js-Z6LO6iTmJrkb0B6pO70Avpz0z0yv-uFa-ewCGfgSxJ5WMGCRIIrw-5RtJbxhi6mPVYfIqMXM1KXRCJWdIyxwJJXgH3y2HzzDbawhVjSLjm7zq7JCQbI0E8-psFPcMcQCyHToXhZnFdrpYEn3jRcqdn7AGUUMD0BwiETWxwsYH2NuOoR1EvILZodSw5EBVK2fE6h0dRCApf4eaFrbZJfbObo-oDV15J_iAU085NIYOtrkf40ivqVTD35PP097uGh9uD8grsScS4BmdnUsJr3cjrPCDFbI-y6dqRGPs-OuCZmOfNSgajitLaRaX8EcGj9Y5_8VL6uw&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The great thing about being the self-appointed "paper of record" is that you get to write your own revisionist history that completely ignores the role your editors and reporters played in minimizing the threat of COVID— time, and time, and time, and time again

I have that book for my daughter. It’s fantastic. If anything, the book teaches children to be unashamedly themselves.

Telling someone they can't be who they are is wrong. The fact that we are in such shortage of teachers and she was fired for it is ridiculously short sighted.

Being open to acceptance, understanding, empathy, and inclusion benefits everyone.

A Georgia school board fires a teacher for reading a book to students about gender identity |
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-teacher-fired-reading-book-gender-identity-64f8428af86ed47bea093fba5167506a

#Introduction I'm a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, studying government performance and people's experiences of government #AdministrativeBurden.

Also blog at https://donmoynihan.substack.com/