John Young @jsy1001@qoto.org

TOMORROW is the day... Rare Earth, BBC Radio 4's new climate and environment show, will start on 12-1pm on Friday January 19th, co-hosted by me and the ace Tom Heap. The first show is all about whether we can best help nature by just leaving it alone.

You can listen on the radio or on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vbsp

#science #climate #podcasts #Earth

The first 18 segments of the primary mirror of ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope have arrived safely to #Chile !

Our engineers at Paranal Observatory checked that they hadn't suffered any damage during their 10000 km trip from France.

The ELT's 39-m mirror will be comprised of 798 of these segments, working together as a gigantic eye on the sky.

https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann24001/

#astrodon #astronomy #space #engineering #technology

Astronomers measure the Universe's expansion rate and have found a discrepancy between the speed nearby versus the speed measured in the Cosmic Microwave Background. This is known as the Hubble Tension, and the search is on for anything that could explain it. One possible explanation is measurement error, which causes the Cepheid variables in galaxies to be too close together, obscuring results. New observations from JWST have removed this as an explanation.

http://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04773

Programming language clichés never die. That's perhaps why Jim Cownie had to debunk the "death" of Fortran:

https://cpufun.substack.com/p/is-fortran-a-dead-language

and the XYplorer developer constantly needs to justify using a "toy" language like Basic for production code:

https://www.xyplorer.com/faq-topic.php?id=VB6

Jim wrote:

"For reasons I cannot understand, “legacy” has become an insult, despite most of our knowledge being a legacy from previous generations."

#fortran #basic #development

Found a new author!

(new to me anyway lol)

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu.

This one's been on my to-read list for quite a while. I'm about halfway thru (switching back & forth btwn audiobook/library book bc I'm weird like that).

I'm really into it. The whole thing is fascinating - deep, complex, thought-provoking, mysterious, mind-bending. It's honestly like the epitome of really cool sci-fi.

Always such a thrill to find a book that just pulls you in, y'know?

#NowReading #Bookstodon #TheThreeBodyProblem #CixinLiu #SciFi

Dragon Aurora over Iceland https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240114.html #APOD

The IPCC should hire the BBC’s graphics team for AR7.

Well, the picture at the top isn't one I sent them and completely mis-represents the situation (it was constantly stormy and there was no sea ice!), but here's the piece I wrote for the Observer about the five weeks I just spent on a research ship in the Labrador Sea with 21 colleagues, measuring air-sea gas transfer and the mechanisms behind it:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/07/ocean-breathing-climate-crisis-carbon-oxygen-helen-czerski-blue-machine

#science #ocean #ship #OceanBreathing

"The board is set. The pieces are moving." 🧙‍♂️

Much like pawns on a giant #chess board, the Auxiliary Telescopes of ESO's VLT Interferometer can be moved around and arranged into different configurations.

They all point to the same target, and the light they gather is channeled into a lab where light beams interfere. This allows us to discern tiny details, as if we had a huge virtual telescope.

Here's how this works: https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/technology/interferometry/

#astrodon #astronomy #space #BlackAndWhite

So many astute observations about science, politics, & religion by Carl Sagan & still a beautiful film 🎥

Just watched “Contact” again after many years & for the first time with my son.

He loved it – a true chip off the old block 👴💁‍♂️

Time to lend him my copy of “The Demon Haunted World”, I think 🙂👍

#Astronomy #Astrodon #Science #ForCarl

#Meme printers

These two photographs are separated by only 66 years.

#pics #pictures #history #science #space #Technology

For this year's gingerbread I made... the VLA!

#gingerbread #astronomy #radioastronomy #space

This image of NGC 2264, also known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster,” shows the shape of a cosmic tree with the glow of stellar lights.

NGC 2264 is a cluster of young #stars — with ages between about one and five million years old — in our Milky Way about 2,500 light-years away from Earth.

The stars in NGC 2264 range from some with less than a tenth the mass of the Sun to others containing about seven solar masses.

#astronomy #astrophotography
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/telescopes-illuminate-christmas-tree-cluster/

The is the best attempt to write down some of the conventions of CLI design that I've seen. I particularly love the explanations and links to further reading https://clig.dev/ Turns out? Some of those unwritten rules are written after all! #linkTuesday

Achievement unlocked! The first 18 segments of the primary mirror of ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope are on their way to #Chile 🇨🇱

The huge 39.3 m mirror of the telescope will comprise 798 of these hexagonal segments, plus 133 spares, as we'll eventually have to remove a couple of them every day to recoat them with a reflective layer.

More details: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2319/

Video summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urHSJx_kwDM

#astronomy #astrodon #technology #engineering

There is no rational reason for Mastodon to limit posts to 500 characters by default.

If the limit was 100s of KB, people who still wanted to divide every thought up into a thread still could; nothing stopping them.

But if someone wanted to post a gigantic essay, they also could, and I'd see a little "More >>" link and I could ignore them faster.

We have decades of history proving that length limits do not make people concise: they just make people post threads.

i was going to wait to tell the “who called it ‘secret santa’ instead of ‘non-disclosure claus’?” joke until it was closer to christmas, but i figured i’d totally forget, so i’m telling it now.

I'm very much at that stage where I can't tell if LinkedIn (where else?) posts are a joke

Lol