Orion🌈&sm9eb

I used to live in her dorm in college! 😁♥️

BOOOO, I'm so sorry. But that 6 years more of being free of all the risks, not a small thing. May ut pass easily and never return. 🧿🧿🧿🧿

I don't have any insurance right now and was considering joining a clinical trial so that I can get my shot. Not sure what to do.

The antidote to loneliness might be recognizing how much others care Young adults consistently underestimate how empathetic their peers are, a new study finds. But there’s a simple and scalable fix.

I love this study 🧪, because I really think people are in general more empathic than we give them credit for!
news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

A black rectangular button that says, "Official Florida Presidential Ballot. Follow the arrow and Punch the appropriate dot." Beneath is BUSH with a straight arrow to the right and beneath him Buchanon, Gore, and Nader whose arrows tangle up in a complicated ball before failing to reach circles in different staggered locations. This is a reference to the controversial "dangling chad" vote recount that handed the election to Bush even though Gore won the popular vote.

Total coincidence--I'm home in the DC burbs with my family and look what I found in my room after writing this comment about the pivotal Bush:Gore hanging chad election.

A black rectangular button that says, "Official Florida Presidential Ballot. Follow the arrow and Punch the appropriate dot." Beneath is BUSH with a straight arrow to the right and beneath him Buchanon, Gore, and Nader whose arrows tangle up in a complicated ball before failing to reach circles in different staggered locations. This is a reference to the controversial "dangling chad" vote recount that handed the election to Bush even though Gore won the popular vote.

Total coincidence--I'm home in the DC burbs with my family and look what I found in my room after writing this comment about the pivotal Bush:Gore hanging chad election.

OK maybe not today. Come on, weather, cooperate with me.

What

It has honestly been a long time since I sat in on the training, and I would love to be retrained in using them. There's so much you can do.

Sunset in Rockville.

Seconded, with a bracing walk and tea to reset.

Job Opportunity at the University of Kent: Postdoctoral Research Associate Are you passionate about early medieval Britain?  Do you have advanced knowledge of Old English and proficiency in Medieval Latin?  If yes, then you may be interested in this fixed term full time post...

The ad for the second postdoctoral position on our @leverhulme.ac.uk Britain’s Early Medieval Letters project is now live. We’re looking for an Old English specialist (who also works with Latin). 32-month FT post. Deadline for apps is 16 Jan 🙂 jobs.kent.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

Uuuhh...any idea how we fight this?

By a lot at the worst possible time.

fry from futurama wearing 3d glasses and saying " we 'll be all like pew pew pew " ALT: fry from futurama wearing 3d glasses and saying " we 'll be all like pew pew pew "

I hope you do this out loud every time.

a cartoon of tinkerbell flying with the words pew pew pew ALT: a cartoon of tinkerbell flying with the words pew pew pew

Me, in my head, but for science:

'Let There Be Light' at PVCC 12/12 - C-VILLE Weekly Glowing sculptures, video projections, and luminous artworks transform the PVCC campus into a lustrous landscape of color and delight at “Let There Be Light,” the annual outdoor illuminated art exhibi...

c-ville.com/let-there-be...

Cville folks, Let There Be Light is tonight! Our Charlottesville Homeschool Art Club will be leading a mystical beings parade at 7 and 8 pm! This is a participatory performance so wear some lights and come join us! This is such a beautiful event every year and is not to be missed!

Spider munching on a dragonfly

Shelob likes them moist and wriggling

Side note: whenever I talk about hand-held pXRF "guns" (not a gun, but TV sci-fi laser gun-shaped) in archaeological lab methods, I emphasize the importance of making the satisfying "pew pew pew" sound out loud, since it doesn't do anything. 😉

XMM-Newton observed Comet 3I/ATLAS with its European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC)-pn camera, its most sensitive X-ray camera. This image shows the comet glowing in low-energy X-rays: blue marks empty space with very few X-rays, while red highlights the comet’s X-ray glow. Astronomers expected to see this glow because when gas molecules streaming from the comet collide with the solar wind, they produce X-rays.

And now an x-ray view of Comet 3I/ATLAS from the XMM-Newton space observatory.

The x-ray emission happens where molecules from the comet collide energetically with the solar wind. (You can add your own "pew pew pew" sound.) 🧪🔭

www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...

Comet 3I/ATLAS streaks across stars and galaxies in this image captured by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on Gemini North on Maunakea in Hawai‘i, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF NOIRLab. This image is composed of exposures taken through four filters — blue, green, orange, and red. As exposures are taken, the comet remains fixed in the center of the telescope’s field of view. However, the positions of the background stars change relative to the comet, causing them to appear as colorful streaks in the final image.

New images of interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS are coming in!

This one, from the Gemini North observatory, was taken a couple weeks ago but just released today. The green glow is probably due to emission from diatomic carbon. 🧪🔭

noirlab.edu/public/news/...

Vote like your life depends on it.
Because it does.

Is there a reason that central Virginia electricity bills are going way up?

Thinking about going down there for the holiday market by the Portrait Gallery and might swing down there to see what can be seen of the horror.

In addition to all its other roles, the White House is a historic house museum, and I can't stop thinking about the archaeology they just wrecked there.

Stefanie is one of my very favorite people, and I encourage you to tune in for this! 🔭 🧪

"What Do You Do With Your Stories?" A report from the end of the term, including some thoughts on teaching students to send work out as well as what magazines are even for.

"Writing is a social act": a terrific essay on how and why to send work out into the world from my colleague @alexanderchee.bsky.social: querent.substack.com/p/what-do-yo...

"In dealing with the theme of good people standing up to the evils of fascism..."
There you go.

Fun Minke Whale facts (and I have smelled a whale, oooph) #2026MMM See 🧵

Multiple moonlet mergers as the origin of the Dinkinesh-Selam system - Nature Communications Space missions imaging small asteroid moons revealed the variety in shapes. Here, the authors show that repeated low-speed collisions can explain the shape of Selam, which is the smaller component in ...

New paper out 🥳
Using data from #NASA #Lucy mission and a series of numerical simulations, we show that #Selam, the moon of #Dinkinesh, likely formed through a series of at least four low-velocity collisions between similarly sized moonlets. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I feel such a profound sense of loss and anger over this moment. Imagine if Gore had won 25 years ago, where we might be with climate change today. Imagine how unlikely it would be that all those lives in Iraq would have been lost. No No Child Left Behind. No Patriot Act. Our future died.