Sierk van Terwisga

Loeb: we must stick to the facts, not judge things based on public opinion.

Also Loeb: Look at how many likes and messages my ideas get! I must be doing it right.

Nederlandse Omroep Stichting NOS.nl - Nieuws, Sport en Evenementen op Radio, TV en Internet

Good news, a few days later: there is now a message on their corrections page: nos.nl/herstel . Openness is essential here, so I am happy they did the right thing.

"He may talk rubbish but he has an eye for beauty" sounds like exactly the kind of thing 30s intellectuals said of the fascists of their time.

Also, Trump, an eye for beauty? Has he seen how Trump dresses, how he decorates his buildings, any of it?

The bigger problem is that LLMs are prone to hallucinations, and everyone by now knows this, and even if you do not feel - as I do - that it makes them unfit for journalism by definition, it clearly requires high editorial care. That has failed here. What else has slips through?

So a lovely opportunity to accurately inform the public of some interesting history is missed, the hard work of everyone who didn't put AI slop into this production is wasted, and it's not communicated about to the public at all. This is a problem.

Blatantly AI-generated images of Anne of Brittany in a @sport.nos.nl discussion of today's Tour Femmes stage, which have now vanished into nothingness (sadly, before I could archive them). Modern French flags in quasi-historical illustrations kind of gave it away (as did the art style).

Photo of Tom Lehrer

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

The way the ELT's primary mirror casually dwarfs the crane parked next to it... It really is extremely large, isn't it!? Great pictures!

WeTransfer just changed their TOS giving themselves permission to train AI on any content you transfer and produce derivative works based on content you transfer that they are allowed to monetize and you are not allowed payment for.

Stop using WeTransfer.

A young gas giant and hidden substructures in a protoplanetary disk - Nature Astronomy ALMA and Gaia data combine to reveal a young gas giant in the protoplanetary disk around MP Mus. Previously unseen substructures, visible only at longer wavelengths, suggest that more planets may hide...

Really cool paper from Alvaro Ribas, @mvioque.bsky.social et al. on MP Mus, where Gaia astrometry and ALMA imaging at 3mm both point to a young Jupiter-mass planet embedded in the disk at ~1-3 au 🔭

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Spotted quite a bit of your JWST jewelry at the EAS this year, and it looked great!

Chart showing brightness of different mega constellation satellites

The major large satellite constellations are still too bright, reports a new paper.

arxiv.org/abs/2507.00107

Almost all Starlink, BlueBird, Qianfan, Guowang, and OneWeb satellites impact astronomy, and most are above the limit where they are visible to the naked eye too.

I was just about to ask - isn't this in Master and Commander? It is, indeed, a fantastic passage.

Blutspendeaktion in Messendorf Blut spenden, Leben retten – der SK Sturm Graz lädt zur Blutspendeaktion ins Trainingszentrum Messendorf.

Ich bin zutiefst berindruckt von der Solidarität der Menschen hier in Graz. SK Sturm organisiert Blutspenden: sksturm.at/n/blutspende...

Gestern war schon eine Blutspendeaktion. Umliegende Restaurants haben die Helfer und Angehörige vor Ort versorgt...

Menschlich sein in schlimmen Zeiten.

Gewone mensen die zomaar andere mensen van de weg halen en uit hun auto trekken. Heel "begrijpelijk".

Astronomers double down on claim of strongest evidence for alien life Are there aliens living on the exoplanet K2-18b? Some astronomers believe they have evidence for molecules on the planet that must have a biological origin, but others disagree

Ready for the latest K2-18b drama?

Madhusudhan is claiming *even stronger* evidence of DMS after analysing both near-infrared and mid-infrared JWST data. But another study finds no evidence at all.

Read on for a quick update on everyone's f̶a̶v̶o̶u̶r̶i̶t̶e most newsworthy exoplanet. 🧵

#exoplanets 🔭

Laat je het knetteren? Of sluit je de poorten en knuppel je studenten neer? De academici van WOinActie zijn een stelletje softies, maar toch vindt de universiteit het nodig ze aan te merken als potentieel extremistische dreiging. 'We hebben een grote mond en zijn niet bang, m...

Deze geweldloze sukkel heeft een column geschreven. www.mareonline.nl/opinie/laat-...

I vote we just let these companies set up some AI universities, with AI students, staffed by AI profs, assessed by AI? And let the rest of us get on with actual human pursuits of scholarship and learning?

Is it everyone's favorite LLM again? Blegh.

Wow! Where are all those new publications coming from? Is it an expansion of the graduate student pool, or something else?

Hello everyone! I’d like to advertise a recent paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.04699.

Led by Lavinia Delfini, we use the Gaia XP spectra to derive accretion rates for 145 975 candidate YSO Hα emitters all-sky within 500 pc. We find a percentage of accretors of 70% at 2 Myr and 2.8% at 10 Myr.

About The UK & Ireland Discs Meeting 2025

We are hosting the 2025 UK & Ireland Discs meeting at the University of Hertfordshire (8-10 September). Topics include discs of all sorts, but especially protoplanetary discs and white dwarf debris discs.

Abstract submission deadline is 15 May:
ukidiscs.github.io/discs2025/
🔭🧪⚛️☄️

Where is the long-term vision? This should have been a chance for Von der Leyen to do more than quote a big-sounding number. What major projects will we pick up, if the US can't? What should our universities be like, our research institutes? Instead, we get a press moment and self-satisfied neglect.

For instance, the Dutch plans - I have seen no further details - would 'attract' US (presumably) scientists by taking budget from the existing research funding. This kind of blatant zero-sum thinking is honestly offensive; and the money isn't even enough, or structural. Thanks Eppo.

The European attack on universities is just a slow stifling of research careers on a mass scale. Budgets continuously shrink, policy is vague or nonexistent, and all these press moments by Von der Leyen and fellows (Eppo Bruins comes to mind) do nothing for early- or mid-career researchers.

Trump family's net worth has increased by $2.9 billion thanks to crypto investments, new report says As the Trump family's crypto ventures increase their wealth, the president's administration pauses a dozen federal crypto probes.

Since Trump took office, his family has made $2.9 billion in crypto.

Again, this is a level of corruption so cartoonish, so obvious & on the surface, that it seems to have stunned everyone to silence.

Je doet nu alsof er geen enkele alternatieve reactie mogelijk is voor de Israëlische regering, maar dat is natuurlijk onzin. (Ik vraag me ook af waarom het nu opeens niet meer over Hamas maar over 'de palestijnen' gaat, trouwens.)

Maar je hoeft niet te kiezen hè.

Beautiful to see this. Makes me glad to have lived there!

Fifteen protoplanetary disks observed with the exoALMA large program

Happy #exoALMA day!

www.exoalma.com