sojournTime @sojournTime@qoto.org

Wow – didn’t think I’d be in tears today, but this message sent home from Gaia as it was shut down forever today hits hard

What you’re seeing is a map of the 106 CCD detectors that Gaia used to measure the positions of billions of stars in the Milky Way for the past 11 years

They were turned off in a special sequence …

#SpaceScience #Astronomy #Science

Yeah, it can happen to pilots too!

ABC7 Los Angeles: "United Airlines flight from LAX bound for China turns around after pilot forgets passport"
https://abc7.com/post/united-airlines-flight-bound-china-turns-around-pilot-forgets-passport/16077746/

Friendly reminder.

#Aprilfools #Aprilscherz #aprilfoolsday

Happy to be a supporter of the ever-innovative @ProPublica

https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/03/propublica-wanted-to-find-more-sources-in-the-federal-government-so-it-brought-a-truck/

About a year ago, my parents made the switch to Linux on their home machines because they really hated Win 10... Today I got a call from my mother to help her out with something, but I did not expect that "something" will be figuring out a sed pattern for a shell script she wrote to bulk rename files.

When I asked her why she didn't use some GUI program she said "I was an accountant in the DOS era, this makes more sense to me than a ribbon menu in Excel".

So, science friends.

When in the 1930s would you have decided “no, I’m not going to go to that conference in Germany”?

Because the question now needs to be posed looking westwards across the Atlantic.

If your phone can be taken on arrival & searched for messages critical of the government & then you can be denied entry (or perhaps worse in the future), why would you even think of going in the first place?

Absolutely horrifying slide into totalitarianism.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-french-scientist-detained

Doonsbury compares Al Gore to DOGE. www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2...

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau fo...

@LovesTha @molly0xfff the old 32-bit Excel limit was 64k, right? Maybe they are stuck on Office 2005. Which is funny in so many ways in my Head. Starting from 'Excel?' to my new head canon that they rejected to upgrade because they hated the ribbon layout.

@LovesTha @molly0xfff whoa whoa whoa, how do your spreadsheets go beyond 65536 rows? /s

(The quoted number is suspiciously close to this)

On January 21, the Trump gang took down the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) website. Later they put it back up, but with a lot removed. Information about vaccines, HIV, abortion, trans issues, gender issues... all gone.

Some good news: thanks to a lot of hard work by good people, you can now see the restored CDC website here:

https://restoredcdc.org/www.cdc.gov/

It has 46,000 web pages! A bunch of the links are broken, and the videos don't work yet, but they're fixing things, and each page has a button where you can report problems.

The team doing this good work is called RestoredCDC, and they write:

.....

This is a volunteer-based, unfunded project. The team consists of public health professionals, experienced web developers, experienced Python coders, and others.

Do you have a passion for accurate and transparent science communication? We could use you on our team! We are looking for people with the following special skills:

Python programming
Project management
Marketing and communication
Web development

Connect with us on Discord: https://discord.gg/XAvvp8Y4N4

.....

For more info about the RestoredCDC project, go here:

https://aboutus.restoredcdc.org/

Elon Musk's favorite supposed data expert, who he's retweeted at least a dozen times, claims she can only process 60,000 rows of data before her "hard drive overheats".

Perhaps someone should rescue her from where she's apparently stuck twenty years in the past, which is the only possible explanation for those hardware limitations and the apparent lack of access to cloud compute.

Unless, of course, she's just completely making shit up.

#USpol #USpolitics

Putting your heart into anything—your work, your politics, your activism, your art, your writing, your life—makes you vulnerable to the smug assholes in the back row who’ve never risked a goddamn thing.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-embracing-cringe/

Time to cause DOGE some pain!

Rep. Jamie Raskin has announced a campaign encouraging Americans to FOIA their personal data held by DOGE.

Recent court rulings mandate DOGE must comply.

PDF form letter: https://archive.ph/JYXXA

My Typst template: https://tangled.sh/did:plc:hgyzg2hn6zxpqokmp5c2xrdo/47-watch/blob/batman/supplementary-files/raskin-doge-privacy-request.typ

We see something happen once, twice, three times, and suddenly we stop questioning it. We start believing it’s the natural order. We mistake habit for destiny. We accept that this is just how the world works.

But history isn’t a loop. It’s a series of choices.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/pattern-recognition-vs-pattern-lock-in/

Where we are: US permanent resident detained without charges, stripped of green cards status, detained at unknown location, wife and lawyer unable to communicate or even locate. Because he said things the president doesn't like.

https://apnews.com/article/columbia-university-mahmoud-khalil-ice-15014bcbb921f21a9f704d5acdcae7a8

Resistance to autocrats has often come from university students. That's why in 2022 Curtis Yarvin said that if an authoritarian president were to take office in January 2025, he couldn't allow Harvard to exist after the start of April. And that's why Trump has suddenly and illegally tried to cancel $400 million of government contracts with Columbia University... and threatened to do the same with

Harvard
George Washington University
Johns Hopkins University
New York University
Northwestern University
UC Los Angeles
UC Berkeley
University of Minnesota
University of Southern California

The pretext is that these universities allowed "illegal protests" of Israel's invasion of Gaza and didn't do enough to stop anti-Semitism. However you feel about those issues, I don't believe that's the point of what's happening now. Trump is always self-serving: for him "anti-Semitism" only matters if he can use it as a cudgel against his enemies. I see other motives:

• He's trying to scare university administrators into not allowing protests against *his* forthcoming activities. By listing universities that will be looked into, he seeks preemptive compliance. There will be more congressional hearings where university presidents are pressured to suppress demonstrations, etc.

• He wants to attack elite universities because his right-wing base will applaud this. Academics, students and educated people tend to not go along with the xenophobic, racist and sexist "othering" which provides the emotional fuel for the fires of fascism. So they, too, are "others".

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/08/us/columbia-trump-colleges-antisemitism.html

You can read this NY Times article for free here:

https://archive.is/fatxF

(1/2)

It's sad how universities set themselves up for Trump's attack by:

• letting themselves become ruled by administrators rather than faculty
• becoming so reliant on national government funds.

More than a quarter of Columbia’s $6.6 billion in annual operating revenue comes from the US government. The National Institutes of Health gives the most federal research money to Columbia, providing $747 million in 2023. An additional $206 million came from other Health and Human Services programs.

Because grants span multiple years, Columbia now holds more than $5 billion in federal grant commitments. All this now serves as an enormous weapon Trump can wield.

We're belatedly learning how crucial it is to "denationalize" science and especially scientific databases, making them less reliant on governments which can go fascist and destroy things. So, IN ADDITION to resisting Trump tooth and nail by all possible means, we should move toward more robust systems, international in scope and not so subject to top-down control.

I'll say more about how people are doing that - but for now, read this:

https://www.thetransmitter.org/policy/science-must-step-away-from-nationally-managed-infrastructure/

(2/2)

White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent
"It would be nothing short of an extinction-level event for space science."
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/white-house-may-seek-to-slash-nasas-science-budget-by-50-percent/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social