Alex Ji

I agree that's the issue; in principle ugrad QM is useful, in practice it depends on who teaches it. With enough effort available, pure astro classes (stars, radpro, galaxies, etc) would cover the relevant aspects more reliably, if they view teaching the physics as part of the class and not a prereq

I was thinking about things like zeeman effect, hyperfine splitting, forbidden transitions, and the general concept of perturbation theory; which I think are usually not covered in a modern physics class.

Remember that lovely aurora last week?

Well...um...this is what Euclid saw... 😱

🧵

I think it is pretty important to have at least some quantum for atomic physics and the hydrogen atom, which is a huge part of OIR spectroscopy (also statmech). The hard part is that depending on how quantum is organized, this can be anywhere from 1 quarter to 1 year.

Explore the Redesigned Learn.Astropy.org A New Way to Learn Astronomy with Python

Have you ever wanted @astropy.org tutorials on:
– spectroscopic data reduction from a raw FITS image,
– computing galactic orbits from Gaia measurements,
– cross-matching astronomical catalogs?

Check out the redesigned learn.astropy.org! Announcement from @numfocus.bsky.social below. 🧪🔭 #astrocode

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The Dark Energy Survey Supernova Program: A Reanalysis Of Cosmology Results And Evidence For Evolving Dark Energy With An Updated Type Ia Supernova Calibration We present improved cosmological constraints from a re-analysis of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) 5-year sample of Type Ia supernovae (DES-SN5YR). This re-analysis includes an improved photometric cross...

Two very interesting papers about dark energy on the arXiv today, both very relevant to the ongoing interest in possibly evolving DE as suggested by the DESI results 🔭🧪

Here's the first and potentially more explosive one: arxiv.org/abs/2511.07517

I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

THE RETURN OF GOOGLE READER PLEASE

30 people disappeared in this shaded area today.

Under Anti-DEI Pressure, Ohio State Limits Conference Funds The Education Department recently criticized Ohio State University’s involvement with a nonprofit that encourages people from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue doctorates. Now, OSU is rethinking ...

More coverage of OSU’s new restrictions on conference attendance:

“These conferences are open forums for us to present our work, network and collaborate. Telling us that they’re going to regulate whether or not we can participate feels very stifling, prohibitive,” said @ohdearz.bsky.social

Educational Program Coordinator II - East Lansing, Michigan, United States Position Summary The program coordinator will maintain the planetarium, present live shows, and create new planetarium visualizations. In addition, this position will assist customers, assist in educa...

If any of you fine folks are planetarians in (or want to be in) mid-Michigan, the Abrams Planetarium is hiring a full-time-staff position for the first time in 11 years!! Come work with the astro, scicomm, and informal ed folks at MSU!! 🔭 🧪 (reskeets welcome) careers.msu.edu/jobs/educati...

US Astronomy Graduate Admissions, AY 2025-2026

Are you someone who is interested in astronomy graduate school? This is a list of many/most departments and their expectations for admissions this year. Please feel free to spread it far and wide. If you are doing admissions and you'd like to update your entry, reach out as per the form!

MIT refuses to accept White House terms for funding, other schools still mulling Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth on Friday said she "cannot support" a memo that the White House sent to nine elite U.S. universities last week detailing policies they should follow to get preferential consideration for federal funding.

MIT refuses to accept White House terms for funding, other schools still mulling reut.rs/471tkNZ

I booked a photo session tonight bc I have very few pictures of my family together, but while I’m smiling & holding my children, I know I will hear this mother’s screams.

I don’t want my tax dollars supporting ICE agents dragging parents away from car line. And most moms in the US agree with me.

Don't Do a Ph.D. Now At least in the United States

I’ve been asked to advise undergrads on how to get into grad school and this is all I can think about musgrave.substack.com/p/dont-do-a-...

Fair, but I think this is still less qualitatively different than you think; eg having tutored O(100) CS101-type students, something like 20-30% of people their attitude was “if i remove all the red squiggles from my IDE that means I did it right” until they learned otherwise

I think there's something where "did something that works" goes too far beyond "understanding what's actually happening" that is the issue here? And part of this is that abstractions that were initially leaky became more solid (e.g. no one worries about transistors failing now)

Yes, but in this analogy this is like asking gcc to make a fancy figure for you; like technically it's able to do this, but you need to give it more guidance?

I agree (though I didn't do binary!) and think there's a similar gap going from high level languages like python to LLM-based coding; there's something missing for most users. But at the same time, it really broadens access in a way that I think is valuable.

Armed, masked thugs are kidnapping our neighbors and terrorizing our communities

This was in front of an elementary school in the West Loop in Chicago today. Sharing because everyone needs to see what is happening here daily

Originally posted by @erynfreepress on IG. Her story is in the alt text

I’m no expert, but we did go from coding in binary -> assembly -> FORTRAN/C -> Java/C++ -> Python/R. At each step we traded raw efficiency(/energy cost) for user convenience. It does take different thinking and teaching/learning for each step. LLM coding seems like it will be the next step..

I feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.

We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion. It started with federal agents, it will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops.

🫠🫠🫠

"There's artificial intelligence, and then there's actual intelligence."

For those frantically trying to submit their Gemini proposals tonight, it’s broken:
www.gemini.edu/news/science...

In discussion with a computer scientist from the University of Cambridge last night:

Me: "you've described some of the things that AI is good at. How would you describe the category of things it's not good at?

**pause**

Him: "Anything where it has to be right".

R.I.P. George F. Smoot (1945-2025) We will no doubt read many official obituaries in days to come, but all I can say is that he was a character, a very original thinker, a fine scientist, and a very nice man. Along with many others, I will miss him enormously.

R.I.P. George F. Smoot (1945-2025)

We will no doubt read many official obituaries in days to come, but all I can say is that he was a character, a very original thinker, a fine scientist, and a very nice man. Along with many others, I will miss him enormously.

😭