Paul Duffell

Looks like the same status as TCAN, which is not reassuring.

Yeah Purdue generally has a very international grad student population, with a ton of amazing students from China. But I'd prefer not to talk over social media about what I've personally witnessed, so I'll leave it at that.

Hmmm, interesting article.

www.jconline.com/story/news/l...

Dr. Kaitlin Kratter, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona.

Logo of the astrophysics podcast, with a big bright supernova about to smack into the title.

December's episode of the #astrophysics #podcast is here! This month, I interview Dr. Kaitlin Kratter of the University of Arizona. We talk about how she figures out how the planets form by putting a solar system on the computer! 🔭🧪

At least that helps you narrow down the list!

Every now and then, you check into a hotel from a certain era and it's like you're spending the night inside a Denny's.

My daughter's current frustration: she wants to have her book and eat it too.

Well-deserved! You made very strong science cases from what I saw!

My neurotic self always assumes that's what people say when I call or email them.

In their defense, they do need to send a reminder to me every day or I will forget.

10

lol it's going to write an awful letter full of vague platitudes

I think 90% of colloquium speakers don't know what the word "colloquium" means.

Honestly somebody should lose their job over that. The scoring system demonstrates it's more than a typo. There's someone out there writing AP test questions that should not be.

Another fun exercise is to check that your error falls off like 1/sqrt(N)

Wow that's incredible detail! I didn't realize you could get this good an image of the crab with a smaller telescope.

ignore

Conference fliers for Rise_Time 2026: QR code leads to https://www.physics.purdue.edu/duffell/rise_time2026.html

We just got our conference fliers printed out for Rise_Time 2026! Hope to hand out plenty of these at the HEAD meeting next week!

Yes, absolutely!

Prospective PhD students should know how much their emails to professors look like they were auto-generated. Also our inboxes are overcrowded with so much administrative BS I am often looking for excuses to ignore emails.

I bet this is exactly the issue! The easiest way to build the original circuit makes it very hard to measure I1; I'm guessing there's a strong tendency to avoid re-building after they built it once. You need to build the circuit with the measurement in mind. But that makes it a good assignment.

I'm sure the calculation has been done before as to how close a planet needs to get before that happens. We've seen very massive exoplanets (bigger than Jupiter) at very small orbits (smaller than Mercury's) so they presumably can keep their gaseous atmosphere at least sometimes.

Thank you, I very much appreciate the kind words!

I think our current understanding of the gas giants is that they have cores about ten times the Earth's mass. But it's not crazy to think that the outer gaseous material could get stripped away if they migrate too close to the sun.

How did you know?

Logo for the astrophysics podcast, depicting a computer simulation of a supernova (calculation originally performed by Dr. Soham Mandal).

Photo of Dr. Merel van 't Hoff, professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University.

🔭🧪
Haven't posted here much lately, but I figured @sciencesocks.bsky.social would have words for me if I didn't promote Merel's episode of the #astrophysics #podcast!

Dr. Merel van 't Hoff tells us all about the environments that new solar systems are born in! Check it out!

rss.com/podcasts/ast...

Hopefully this generates enough press to effectively become an advertisement for the conference.

Some authors actively disregard the requests of the referee. If you think an author is doing that, just send them a report saying the changes you requested are not optional. If they don't like that they can find another referee. It sounds like you're not being mean, but they might be dismissive.

Can't wait til half of these students stop coming to class so I can get a decent parking spot again.

Whoa, I am jealous!

lol it's really misleading of them to call it a "retreat". I distinctly remember the realization setting in that this was just stretching out our usual painful 1-hour meeting into a full day.