Carl Rodriguez

The problem with teaching a dynamics course is it constantly makes me want to go on sidequests in my research.

By which I mean someone please stop me from working on tides!

This is a cool result, but also as a GC person I'm wondering how many GCs there are just lurking in these galaxies. Is it enough to significantly change the number density of GCs in the Universe (currently about 1/Mpc^3).

I do have a concern here: the original recording of a faculty member without their knowledge occured *before* there was any policy. If they've rescinded this policy, but not explicitly stated that they won't do that again, it seems like they can now record us *without* notification or consent.

#paperday! RR Lyrae stars are a common, dependable Population II distance indicator, and provide an independent tracer of early star formation. We test the feasability of RR Lyrae research with archival JWST data using nearby dwarf galaxy WLM! 🔭

On the arXiv now: arxiv.org/abs/2602.21205

I'm going to make these undergrads derive Kozai and none of you can stop me.

I also just enjoy saying "the disturbting function" way too much.

Starting off my lecture with "a little perturbation theory is good for the soul".

Great thread on Kishalay De's disappearing yellow supergiant in M31. It likely formed a stellar-mass black hole, but quietly!

Screen grab from the Astro Rumor Mill, where someone's being salty about the Institute for Advanced Studies

Twenty bucks says I know who wrote that.

Intrusive thought, but I would pay real money for a special episode of The Pitt where every character, except Noah Wyle, was played by a Muppet.

Lot of great astronomers on the list this year! Congrats @yymao.bsky.social, among others!

I think it's inevitable that some of the hype is going to turn out to be false, but figuring out which parts are going to be transformative long term, and which parts are going to go up in smoke like NFTs, is exceedingly difficult at this stage.

I've been wondering if it's similar to self-driving cars in that respect: the first 80-90% of accuracy is quite do-able, but getting that last 10% working for complete reliability is by far the hardest part.

I suspect they, like arXiv, are just being constantly scraped by people training LLMs.

Damn ADS is struggling....

Well given that our Board of Trustees is currently being sued for conducting state business over Signal and illegally using private sessions to discuss policy, I think the answer is pretty straight forward.

Bold of someone to send me a manuscript to review without actually asking me if I will review it, then getting annoyed when I haven't reviewed it yet.

Bad Bunny’s pan-Americanism has me once again pondering the Worldwide Latina belt.

The worldwide Latina belt remains undefeated.

Praise him

I recently heard someone say the key to recovering from deep burnout is becoming comfortable with being unremarkable, which I think is really good advice for former academics coming from spaces where the primary currency is individual accolades within an interminable productivity arms race.

This is crazy, you can apparently find whole email conversations between Krauss and the Arizona State dean and legal team in these files as he was forwarding them to Epstein (and Woody Allen?) for advice.

Yeah the couple I’ve found so far were definitely not surprising in retrospect.

Playing life on hard mode (giving a colloquium that doesn't mention LIGO).

I think it's a bit more subtle than this: our models are in some cases extraordinarily effective at quantifying aspects of the natural world, including things that aren't determinisitic. I just disagree that quantitative=objective (the latter of which is really a vague value statement).

But how we set up and interpret our models, and how we as a field come to consensus on which models, is a lot more fluid and sociologically-driven than that picture. And even when we decide on one, it's not like that model describes the "truth of the real world" (though I'm a bit of a Platonist).

Physics is objective in so far as that "under this model the numerical value of this quantity is X" is a statement most of us agree with in most cases. And the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics lets us do that to extraordinary precision in some cases.

Exactly, my real complaint with this was that the author was mistaking "quantatative" for "objective", the latter of which is a value statement so broad as to be essentially useless.

As an expert in theoretical physics I can assure you that is not the case.

I guess we’ll find out…