Nick has moved to Mathstodon @internic@qoto.org

I don't really know why people study astronomy in such great detail - except that it's fun. I think it's important to understand how the universe as we know it began about 14 billion years ago, and understand how the Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and how evolution brought us here. My life fits into this frame. But is it important to know the various dramatic ways that stars can die?

I don't think so... but it's sure fun!

Here's a tiny white dwarf star called a 'polar' sucking hot gas from its much larger but lighter companion. It's called a 'polar' because its magnetic field is so strong that the gas falling in is forced to move along the field lines, rather than forming the usual pancake-shaped 'accretion disk' and slowly spiralling in.

This means the ionized gas falling onto this white dwarf lands only on its north and south magnetic poles. It's like how ions from the Sun hit our Earth near its poles, producing auroras there. But it's vastly more intense! The magnetic field of a 'polar' is about 100 million times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. And a lot more stuff is falling in. Now and then a *huge* amount.

So, polars are considered 'cataclysmic variable stars': now and then they blast out huge amounts of radiation, as a clump of infalling gas hits their surface. There are different kinds of cataclysmic variable stars. This is just one!

Now, why is it so fun to think about this... instead of, say, politics, or ecology? I guess the question answers itself. So now I'm wondering how much we can justify science based on escapism. Maybe a bit is okay. We need to have some fun, after all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_(star)

If you were chased here from Twitter, it's just possible that you won't be aware that a lot of people are now leaving Twitter (or X if you must) for BlueSky. I mention this because I personally very much valued having a thriving maths community on Twitter while still being part of the wider world, so to speak. My experience here, which may be as much my fault as Mastodon's, is that there are lots of interesting people but not quite the atmosphere that I liked on Twitter. It would be a bit cheeky of me to suggest deserting Mastodon, but perhaps you might like to consider trying out BlueSky -- I would be very happy if we could use it to recover what Musk stole from us.

saw someone describe LLMs as "an encyclopedia on steroids" and i think that's basically incorrect in every way, isn't it? i would have gone for something more like "a thesaurus on acid"

What does the income look like for a local newspaper?

The Halifax Examiner, a truly superb daily (@philmoscovitch writes for it) posted its tax return online here: https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/morning-file/heres-the-halifax-examiners-tax-return-2/

... along with a summary

Nearly all the money comes from subscribers

It's a tight, tight ship!

(I subscribe myself, because the online daily blog is *amazing*)

The lesson for us all: If you have the money free, subscribe to support your smaller, truly local media

we're the only ones keeping it going

While the number of scientific papers continues to grow exponentially, our knowledge of the world is only growing linearly.

According to this study: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08349

Mozilla has a survey open to the public about their future, and thoughts on tech. Who knows if responses will actually matter, but maybe add your own thoughts to balance out the inevitable flood of crypto and tech bros?

Remember, they just fired a giant chunk of their advocacy team, and they are abandoning the #fediverse. Their CEO's salary is $7MM. It was just over $2MM in 2018. Has Mozilla's value to you tripled in 6 years? Has YOUR salary tripled in that same time frame?

#Mozilla @mozilla https://mozillafoundation.tfaforms.net/101

Mastodon, it's really simple.

You want everyone to leave the dodgy car salesman's X-hole?

You want a future where social media is community-owned and decentralised, instead of a corporate surveillance sphere?

Well, those things won't happen until Black Twitter migrates here.

And Black Twitter won't touch this place until there's proper moderation in place.

The issues raised by Mekka, Timnit, Kim, Sam, and others are not a peripheral issue.

Fixing moderation is absolutely central, core work that is mission critical for the Fedi being successful.

And if you don't do it, then please don't complain when (not if) everyone leaves for BlueSky.

EDIT: In terms of the kind of moderation tools that are needed, take a look at this post by Mekka: https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/112860109548583248

Childhood mortality -- death before age 15 or so -- used to run at about 50%.

Every second child born, died before becoming an adult, all over the world, for as far back as we've been able to track.

We didn't turn the corner until about 1900, when science got us the germ theory. That sparked sanitation and vaccination.

A cabinet nominee (RFK Jr) who questions vaccines is frightening. A nominee who brags about not washing his hands (Hegseth) is terrifying.

"When writing about #Bluesky, I’ve seen folks mention that it’s either federated or decentralized. I’m here to tell you that it’s currently neither."

https://anderegg.ca/2024/11/15/maybe-bluesky-has-won

Half-Life 2 is currently free on Steam. They've added a big update to celebrate its 20th Anniversary with lots of bug fixes and new commentaries.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/

https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife2/20th

The Orange Box is also currently on sale for 90% off ($1.99)

https://store.steampowered.com/sub/469/

#GrapheneOS doesn't come with text-to-speech enabled or set up by default.

https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng is not compatible with the current Android versions and https://github.com/RHVoice/RHVoice doesn't have support for #German.

Any recommendation for me? FOSS preferred. 🤔

#Android #TTS #voice

Who wants some good news?

Last week I spoke to a middle school class about cybersecurity as a career, and AI came up. I asked if they had tried to use LLMs to do their schoolwork—they all had. But every student in the class said it didn't work. Why?

"ChatGPT is too stupid."

Kids are alright.

Vaccines are one of the most important inventions humans have ever made. Period.