Winchell Chung @nyrath@qoto.org

Two weeks ago, Canadian #astronaut Dave Williams and I released our latest #book: "Why Am I Taller? What Happens to an Astronaut’s Body in Space."

It's a fun romp through #space and #spacemedicine with a literal space doctor (that would be Dave; I'm a space journalist.) I'd love to see our book appear in more #libraries, so do make a request at your local! Or, if you want a copy, do support your local bookstore. :)

https://ecwpress.com/products/why-am-i-taller-astronauts-body-in-space

#NASA #medicine #Mars #moon #ISS

By the time Gaia DR4 is released in 2025 I expect that my virtual starship will have a full range of tools for exploring and presenting the data as a WebXR immersive experience.

The galaxy orbits that we have computed and published in our "Action Dynamics of the Local Supercluster" paper are used in the amazing version 3 of the super popular "Star Size Comparison" video (the vortex version)... Another beautiful job by #morn1415 ! Check out also the featuring of Laniakea ;0)
video: https://youtu.be/KEHCCsFFIuY?t=393

research paper: https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/aa9525
press release by the University of Hawaii: http://www.hawaii.edu/news/article.php?aId=8967

#galaxies #universe #cosmology #astronomy #astrophysics

One thing I like about my new Instagram account is that you understand the subject at a glance.

I wish my Twitter (or Mastodon) homepage looked this nice.

https://www.instagram.com/thespaceshipper/

An interesting inclusion on the @RollsRoyce
stand was a graphic of their new gas cooled 1-5MWe microreactor, intended for land and marine applications, which is related to a BWXT-led prototype programme to deliver in 2024 1/2 https://bwxt.com/news/2022/06/09/BWXT-to-Build-First-Advanced-Microreactor-in-United-States

Okay let's talk about Lojban! No, this first post won't be in Lojban itself (but you gain enormous bonus points if you translate it).

Lojban is a natural, spoken language (like English, French, Swahili, Toki Pona, or Esperanto). It's also a constructed language or "conlang" (like Toki Pona or Esperanto). It's very easy to learn!

- la karda: a great tutorial: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda
- a lojban dictionary: https://la-lojban.github.io/sutysisku/en/index.html

Toki Pona is fairly popular on the fediverse because it's such a cute language, and is in many ways the polar opposite of Lojban. Where Toki Pona is a fuzzy conlang, Lojban is a very crisp one. While spoken, it's also:

- Syntactically unambiguous! The "roles" in a sentence are always clear and parse cleanly. There's no such thing as "Time flies like an arrow" where you aren't sure if it's about the movement of time resembling a fired arrow or these creatures called time flies, who really love arrows.
- A predicate language. You can translate it into something like a problem solver and easily do analysis on statements, Good Ol' Fashioned Artificial Intelligence style

What it *DOESN'T* give you, and this is frequently misunderstood by various community members, is meaning disambiguity. The language tries fairly hard to reduce confusion there, but there are certain problems in language which are *inescapable*... the world changes, vocabulary drifts, two agents have different conceptions of things based on their experiences.

I AM NOT GOOD AT LOJBAN! But I really like it. It takes me a long time to interact via Lojban.

@cadey is probably one of our more prolific Lojban speakers. Who else speaks it? Let's use Lojban as much as possible in this thread!

A fast rising tidal disruption event from a candidate intermediate mass black hole: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00018 -> Death of a star reveals midsize black hole lurking in a dwarf galaxy: https://news.ucsc.edu/2022/11/dwarf-galaxy-tde.html