tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

The only solution is to *shrink* the sphere, fighting against the tremendous pressure exerted by the gas of stars within. Once it's small enough - about the size of the dense of cluster of stars - you'll be back to equilibrium (or so it seems). But the temperature and pressure now is much higher than when you started!

Furthermore, even when the gas of stars seems to be in equilibrium, it's not. It's just a 'metastable state'. Eventually by chance a small dense cluster will form, and the gravo-thermal catastrophe will occur!

(2/n)

In our rapidly changing climate, clinging on to "1-in-100 year event" characterizations - based on statistics from the stable era - have been reduced to a description of how unusual the event was back in those days.

It's a what-used-to-be-1-in-100- year event now. No more.

#extremeweather #climate #ClimateChange

Good piece by @jon : may write a riff on it for scientists later (if I ever get time to write anything ever again..)

https://euroblog.jonworth.eu/european-commission-why-should-anyone-be-led-by-you-youre-not-really-leaders-if-youre-still-on-twitter-x/

La composition du gouvernement Barnier est encore susceptible d'évoluer: "Le Premier ministre affine", indique un proche de Macron à Libé. Les ministres seront-ils un peu plus ou un peu moins à droite, un peu moins ou un peu racistes et homophobes? Quel suspense... https://www.liberation.fr/politique/gouvernement-barnier-lelysee-evoque-des-ajustements-necessaires-avant-lofficialisation-de-la-liste-20240920_F3GT3HOKLBAC5HBJ4MHYOHCZ3E/

#Politique #Gouvernement #Barnier #Macron #Homophobie #Racisme #Retailleau #DirectAN

I never knew you, Kesaria Abramidze, but I miss you already. And I miss the #Georgia I knew. I was lucky enough to be in Tbilisi on the day the accession (to the #EU) agreement was signed. That was a day of celebration and coming together. Did you feel stronger that day? Somehow more protected by the emphasis on #humanrights? Did we let you down? What happened in Georgia? Where did we go wrong?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/19/georgia-trans-model-kesaria-abramidze-murdered-parliament-passes-anti-lgbtq-law

I've seen that starlink radiotelescope interference article going around and I'm now trying to find an old blog post someone made where they analysed the RF emissions of one of the satellites and demonstrated that they were just doing any old shit because there are no real EMC standards for space. it was really embarrassing shit like spewing noise from DC-DC switching converters. the kinda stuff most folks learn to do right in their first professional designs.

Is there anything more awkward than German and Americans emailing each other?:

Subject: 19 Sep 24 Round Table

Dear Robert (if I may),
graciously would you allow me to attend your meeting?
Yours in most sincerity,
Dr. Prof. Hans-Joseph Fritzberger

Re: Meeting

Hey Hans!
Great!
- Bill

alright, after like a year of halfheartedly trying on and off, #FetchAllReplies is pretty much finished - the problem of not being able to see all replies to a post is one of the largest complaints that people have with mastodon in particular but also the fedi in general. It is an especially potent problem for smaller servers, making them feel lonely, and making the whole fedi seem quiet. It is also a large contributor to the 'reply guy' problem where a moderately popular post will get the same replies over and over again and people won't even know they're doing it.

This patch recursively fetches replies using activitypub collections. it does it respectfully, only when someone is explicitly looking at a post (rather than fetching all replies for everything all the time) with some debounce, and spaces out the recursive calls to the other servers in deep threads.

the only thing left is to make the posts get inserted into the web client as they are received, currently you need to refresh to see them.

trying it locally now and it is a game changer.

i'm not "good at ruby" so if you ever wanna see this upstream, kindly spare a code review?

https://github.com/NeuromatchAcademy/mastodon/pull/44

#FediDev #MastoDev #UnFuckTheFedi #PubSubIsCoolButPresentsPrettySeriousUsabilityProblems #JustSmallInstanceThings

It's not like we (society) talked about this and decided we'd sacrifice ground-based astronomy in exchange for internet access in remote areas.

Musk and a few others did this unilaterally. It wasn't to help anyone. They did it to make a profit and consolidate control over critical infrastructure.

You might've seen some buzz and histrionics about Russians At War, which follows Russian soldiers to their death in eastern Ukraine.

I watched the film, interviewed its director, and tried to make sense of the competing criticism. https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/what-everybody-is-getting-wrong-about-the-years-most-controversial-film/article_4a9007ae-7531-11ef-9516-77047be32003.html

Study (N=280 companies) finds less commitment to DEI. 78% of employers said gender diversity was high priority vs 87% in 2019. Racial diversity=69% now vs 77% in 2019.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/09/17/dei-backlash-hits-women-workplace/75264686007/

I should have bought more solar panels, crap https://www.pv-tech.org/us-finalises-section-301-tariffs-proposes-50-duty-on-wafers-and-polysilicon/

LOOK!

These odd plots represent the first data from the SKA-low telescope working as an interferometer.

Data comes from two stations (each with 256 antennas) where the signal is correlated. That little kink is the radio galaxy Centaurus A.

SKA is starting to come online!

SKA-low features these odd-looking antennas that resemble Christmas trees. 256 of them sit in a ‘station’ which acts as a single unit. Once construction is complete (end of decade) there will be 512 stations separated by distance creating a large virtual telescope.

SKA-low is the Australian side of the project and will feature over 131,000 antennas to cover the low-frequency bands.

This will complement SKA-mid, located in South Africa which will have an interferometer made of dish antennas and cove a huge bandwidth up to 15 GHz.

📸 SKAO

#RadioAstronomy #Astrodon #SKAO #Observatories #Telescopes

#SimulatedUniverses : X-ray emission from growing and merging halos in a small simulated cosmic volume. It approximately shows the visible part of the cosmic web through X-ray emission, which only traces hot (>1e7K) gas.

Below: full evolving gas distribution

#astrodon #astronomy #science

“All of humanity could share a prosperous, equitable future but the space for development is rapidly shrinking under pressure from a wealthy minority of ultra-consumers, a groundbreaking study has shown.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/12/consumerism-and-the-climate-crisis-threaten-equitable-future-for-humanity-report-says

In college, a professor had the same name as me. I sometimes got calls. Once near the end of the term I got a sobby call at 5am from a student "please can I have an extension on my project". Sure, no problem.