Josh Hopkins

The Olympus Mons volcano, seen from orbit. Illumination is from the right. The white outline is the island of Ireland (showing the divide between Northern Ireland and the Republic).

Olympus Mons, seen from orbit by the Viking 1 spacecraft.

Largest recognised volcano in the Solar System.

The island of Ireland for scale.

I dabble in urban architecture sketching, especially when traveling. As the piece says, buildings are a lot easier to draw than people or landscapes, so good for newbies. It gets me to observe my surroundings more carefully, and sometimes local people stop to look and then chat.

Happy Valen's Time Day

Valen, Minbari not born of Minbari, who is the reason for the season.

Comic. [2x2 chart. Top left quadrant: seem like dinosaurs x are dinosaurs. Silhouettes of dinosaurs stegosaurus, triceratops, tyrannosaurus, velociraptor, and long-neck dinosaur. Top right quadrant: seem like dinosaurs x are not dinosaurs. Silhouettes of mosasaur, quetzalcoatlus, dimetrodon, plesiosaur, and pteranodon. Bottom left quadrant: don’t seem like dinosaurs x are dinosaurs. Silhouettes of penguin, egret, ostrich, pigeon, falcon. Bottom right: don’t seem like dinosaurs x are not dinosaurs. Silhouettes of squirrel, stapler, plant, person, and bicycle.]

Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs

xkcd.com/3204/

The fact that China is importing oil to increase its stockpiles and simultaneously transitioning rapidly to electric cars and busses that cut demand may be benign, or poor planning, but it also looks like strategic preparation to insulate itself from repercussions of invading Taiwan.

I was fortunate to work with Bruce late in his career. He was an outstanding, humble guy.

the magic of the Muppets is that there are two fourth walls. they constantly break the one that reminds the audience they are performers. they NEVER break the one that reminds the audience they are puppets. this dynamic is the key to their entire comedy style

An Ukrainian F-16 intercepting a Russian Shahed drone.

A postcard arrived: ‘If you’re reading this I’m dead, and I really liked you’ Don Glickman’s daughter sent his favorite people the postcard he designed before his death.

A student received a posthumous postcard from his former professor, Don Glickman, who was known for his humor. He instructed his daughter to send over 100 postcards.

The gesture went viral and reflected Glickman's unique approach to life and death.

I attended the last Space Shuttle launch at the press site. So did Elmo, with his entourage. It was a festive atmosphere but also a secure government facility staffed by very serious people. There probably wasn’t a child in a three mile radius. Still, every single adult talked to Elmo like a person.

The start of the inspirational Calum’s Road. The image shows a curving single track road climbing a hillside covered in small trees in sunshine. The ground slopes away to the right. There's a road sign in the left foreground saying in English and Gaelic that this is Calum's Road. The rusted remains of a wheelbarrow are on the ground at the foot of the roadsign.

The start of the inspirational Calum’s Road, built in ten years by one man across two miles of forbidding terrain to give access to the north end of the island of Raasay. More pics and info: www.undiscoveredscot...

#Scotland #Raasay #Island #CalumsRoad

Post-doc on properties of Solar system small bodies The small bodies of our Solar system (comets and asteroids) are the remnants of the building blocs that accreted to form the planets. The suite of events that occurred during planet formation left pri...

Are you looking for a postdoc position working on asteroids and comets? Would it help if it's in a beautiful place in southern France? If yes, then consider applying to the following position of my colleague Benoit Carry at the Observatory in Nice:
euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/402212

#planetSci

NASA’s predecessor, the NACA, was commonly treated as an abbreviation rather than an acronym, so people spelled out En Ay Cee Ay. I met one old timer who pronounced NASA like that. Weird, but hard to argue with.

CYRUS H McCORMICK INVENTOR OF THE REAPER WAD BORN ON THIS FARM. FЕВ. 15 1809 HERE HE COMPLETED THE FIRST PRACTICAL REAPER IN 1831.

Cyrus McCormick sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Cyrus McCormick reaping: This is just the best, I recommend it so highly!

A screenshot from Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give you up music video

A screenshot from Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give you up music video

A screenshot from Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give you up music video

A photograph of the seminary gym in knives out. It has the same window.

Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up.

I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

I need a heist and/or whodunnit movie about the motley team of top burglars in the New England specialty foods racket who pulled off the theft from Canada’s strategic maple syrup reserve and now the lobster shipment. They’ll hit cranberries next.

Remembering Arthur C. Clarke on the anniversary of his birthday: 16 December 1917. The father of the communications satellite and author of books such as “The Fountains of Paradise,” “Imperial Earth” and “Rendezvous with Rama,” and of course “2001: A Space Odyssey” co-written with Stanley Kubrick.

More info here, for Clarke fans. Or comsat fans. bsky.app/profile/spac...

A person born in China at the end of WWII saw China's power rise as its working age population tripled in their lifetime.

But now it has plateaued.

A person born today will see that growth reversed. China's working age population will drop by 1 million people per month for decades.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of his publication of the article describing the communications satellite. I had not realized until recently that he invented the comsat before going to college.

Good news. We have a dry dock to repair the submarine.

Bad news. It's in Crimea and contains the other submarine Ukraine destroyed.

Thank you for posting these data. I’ve been wondering how effective Ukraine’s kinetic sanctions on refineries have been. The answer seems to be “some, but not as much as they might appear.” Presumably infrastructure gets repaired.

I’d like to share this wonderful Yuletide site from 2003 with my Bluesky correspondents. A music critic reviews 50 Xmas songs in "Tris McCall's Christmas Abstract."

It's thought-provoking, it's funny, and I re-read it every year. Merry Christmas! web.archive.org/web/20080308...

“Potentially stable” is a delightfully optimistic way of describing a rocket propellant.

Reminds me of someone who wanted to make strained ring ozone as a more energetic oxidizer.

An image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope showing the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. The comet is a small white dot in the center of the image, with a light blue halo of light that takes up most of the image. Other stars are shown streaking across the image as diagonal blue-white lines.

Hubble reobserved interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on November 30. At the time, the comet was about 178 million miles (286 million kilometers) from Earth.

Hubble tracked the comet as it moved across the sky. As a result, background stars appear as streaks of light: https://go.nasa.gov/4iCU2lH 🔭 🧪

All chess is 4D chess that's why they have that time clock thingy.

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

Betty Boop
St. Thomas, ND

For the first time, all of the docking ports on the International Space Station are full.

Which means this old Sid Harris cartoon that's been stuck in my head for decades finally makes sense.

www.nasa.gov/blogs/spaces...

Recent news from the spacecraft photobombing my profile pic.

The work by Brian Sutter to find a trajectory to Apophis and the thermal engineers at Lockheed Martin to make a close perihelion possible and a host of mission operators to enable this is very cool and I look forward to pics in 2029.