Alex Howe

YouTube video by Science Meets Fiction Cosmolang: The Language of Sentient Universes | CCC4 Entry

Finally finished my Cursed #Conlang Circus entry for this year, inspired by Olaf Stapledon's "Star Maker":
Cosmolang: The Language of Sentient Universes
youtu.be/0bgMJWQTKX4?...

@aussiastronomer.bsky.social and the NASA Exoplanet Archive marked a great milestone when we discovered 6,000 confirmed #exoplanets. But we recently passed another important milestone.
There are now over 1,000 confirmed *multi-planet* systems in the Archive (1,008 to be precise).

NASA isn't directly mentioned in the bill. It's a clean CR, meaning it continues the current funding from FY25 (which itself is a full-year CR extending the funding from FY24).

Their website is talking about using it for energy generation, which immediately makes me question if it's even legit. I can't see how the numbers would work for that.

I suddenly realized the deep irony of YouTube being flooded with "Humanity F%*& Yeah!" stories that aren't written by humans. AI may have been a mistake.

I read the definitions. It's a clunky knockoff of the Torino Scale that looks like there was no thought given to building a technosignature scale that actually meets the needs of the field.

At the end of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," the really tall alien is canonically a different species than the others, and the ship was clearly not designed for them. They have to almost crawl out the door. Maybe we should tell the aliens about disability accommodations?

YouTube video by Science Meets Fiction The Exoplanet Orrery Part 3: Single-Planet Systems

It took a while, but I finally finished part 3. #exoplanets

The Exoplanet Orrery Part 3: Single-Planet Systems youtu.be/cz5ca80CjXY?...

YouTube video by Science Meets Fiction The Exoplanet Orrery: Two-Planet Systems

Part 2 of my Exoplanet Orrery is up. Part 3 still in the works. youtu.be/G86JjSnLfJI?...

YouTube video by Science Meets Fiction The Exoplanet Orrery: Solar Systems with Three or More Planets

My new video, inspired by the Kepler Orrery videos by Dan Fabrycky and Ethan Kruse.
The Exoplanet Orrery: Solar Systems with Three or More Planets youtu.be/-7xG5z219CA?...

With a bit of number crunching, you can find that this object should have about 6 times the speed of a circular orbit, or maybe 130 km/s or so given its location. That's some serious speed even by interstellar standards.

Exoplanet System

This is an uncomfortably accurate analysis of the state of #exoplanet science today: xkcd.com/3103/

It used to be that insects were the same as hexapods.
Then we discovered that some hexapods aren't "true" insects, so now insects are a subgroup of hexapods.
Except *we* define what the words mean! This feels like the entomology version of "Why don't you just make 10 louder?"

My computer has 1 Ctrl key and 2 Alt keys...but I never actually *use* the Alt key.
In fact, I'm not even sure what the Alt key *does*.
(Even if it's a shortcut sometimes, I can't remember seeing a use case that couldn't be done with Ctrl or Shift.)
Am I doing something wrong?

Hot take: we don't need a live-action #HTTYD for the same reason we didn't need a "live-action" Lion King. Even if it's as good as the original, it will be by copying the original, not adding to it.
(And I admit the new trailer looks good...but it's still copying.)

Has anyone consider using #AI to build more user-friendly company websites? Some days, I think it can't make them any worse than they are now.
(That, or I just don't think the way normal people do.)

If we ever meet aliens, they will probably be far ahead of us in math and science, but we just might be the only ones with a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem--because nobody ever told them (probably wrongly) that it was supposed to have an easy solution.

Passerines (perching birds) are the largest order of birds and are mostly small and look kind of alike.
Also, the common raven is the largest passerine.
Conclusion: ravens are the capybaras of birds!

YouTube video by Science Meets Fiction The Ultimate Google Translate Relay; or, Translating a Fable through 233 Languages in a Row

Have you ever seen the silly Google Translate compilations on YouTube? This is my contribution taking it to the extreme and also showing how it develops at every step along the way.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSCD...

It’s Official: Saturn Has 128 New Moons With a total now of 274 known moons, Saturn leads all of the planets by far.

128 new moons of #Saturn discovered.
I've said this before, but I'm even more certain now: we need to redefine irregular moons (tiny moons with long elliptical orbits) to just be captured asteroids. These numbers are getting out of hand.
skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-ne...

Planet Definitions xkcd.com/3063

The gas giant moon systems show a lot of similarities to peas-in-a-pod systems. People have even suggested similar formation mechanisms for them.

Titan is an outlier, but the Jupiter formation process would not produce something like it. It might not have a clear analog in the planet population.

The state of reading today is...complicated.
I've made an entire podcast about literature, and yet I think it has been 2.5 years since I read a paper-and-ink book cover-to-cover.
But in that time, I've read at least 27 books, either by audiobook or on a computer screen.

Computer problem number 285: despite USB being standard for everything, there are still 10 possible combinations of A-to-A, C-to-C, and A-to-C cables, and somehow, you need all of them.

And as far as I can tell, the speed of the elevator is NOT the limiting factor. The work is done inside the mine. The problem is that the federal rules for retirement are so byzantine that it takes months to process each case. 3/3

I went looking because this story seemed too outrageous to be true, but while Elon definitely spun it, he's...kinda mostly right.
But not quite. Any number of federal workers can retire at one time--but with 80% of their pensions, pending being fully processed. 2/

Sinkhole of bureaucracy There's an old mine in Pennsylvania where the U.S. processes federal retirements. By hand. On paper. In 2014.

A certain billionaire says there's a bottleneck in processing federal retirements because we do it on paper in a mineshaft.
The real story is that it's not truly limiting the number of retirements, but it's still a mess. 1/
From The Washington Post in 2014:
www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/...

My strategy for both sanity and (hopefully) security with cell phones: I don’t use my phone for anything I have to log in to.

Serious question: I know this particular point isn't really a priority for either side but...is it seriously "U-S-A-I-D" and not "U-S-Aid"? Why not?

There should be a Meta-Mandela Effect: the belief that "Mandela" used to be spelled with two L's.