Jason Wright

Has any team called out its fans so much in its Super Bowl post game celebration?

Seattle has made its fandom and its city so much a part of its formula, I love it!
bsky.app/profile/astr...

You might be thinking about the dark energy, which makes up about 30% of the total mass-energy budget of the universe. About 63% of the rest is dark matter, and the remainder is ordinary matter and energy.

Dark matter is about 90% of the total mass in the universe. If some of that interacts with itself the way normal matter does, “dark“ astronomers might be aware of all of the dark matter, but be puzzled by the remaining 10% that is baryonic (us).

OK, I think I'm starting to see why.

The combined area of 2 black holes is M1^2+M2^2. The merger product must have at least that much area. Post-merger its final area can therefore be between (M1+M2)^2 and M1^2+M2^2, leaving sqrt(2M1M2) of mass available for GW's.

Is that roughly right?

Right, but in principle this is a finite resource limited only by the angular momentum of the black hole, right? You can extract energy via the Penrose process until all of the angular momentum is gone and it's a Schwarzchild BH with M=M_irr?

I thought that was basically the Penrose process? Reducing the angular momentum and extracting that part of the "mass" as energy?

OK, so this theorem doesn’t apply to mergers for some complicated reason, I suppose.

Thanks for the answer!

Interestingly, they could in principle communicate with our sector of physics via gravity.

Rana Adhikari has worked out how vast numbers of spinning dumbbells could serve as a phased array to send communicative GW signals. We could detect these in principle, and maybe even respond!

If they are spacefaring and can find one of those stars it could make an amazing telescope (bad spherical aberration, though).

Might their studies of Sgr A* and other black holes be able to tell them about accretion disks through the BH's spins?

What else could they know about our astrophysics?

It makes "dark" (to them) stars that sometimes seem to randomly turn into black holes.

Through microlensing surveys and their version of LISA, they might be able to deduce so much about our stars' evolution and structure!

So, if the dark sector has interactions that lets some of the dark matter form stars, planets, and astrophysicists, their cosmology is pretty interesting!

What they call "dark matter" is 10% of the universe, dissipative, and creates dynamical friction for supermassive black holes. 🔭🧪

Yes, I think what I’m asking Is whether a flyby if it’s close enough could produce a very small amount of “ringing“ similar to post-merger ring down.

If so, even if it’s a small amount, I think this means black holes can lose mass in principle?

OK, so that suggests that in principle a close enough flyby *would* extract a bit of mass? I know it’s not astrophysically important, but is it in principle possible to evaporate a BH into GWs with enough flybys?

GW BlueSky:

When black holes merge, a lot of their mass is lost as GWs. M12<M1+M2

Is this also true when a non-BH merges with a BH? Like a neutron star? Or an asteroid?

Is a merger *required* for this to happen? Could a close flyby rob a BH of some (tiny part) of its mass?

🔭🧪

I remember trying to check out D&D books at the library and discovering *none* of them was on the shelf, having been "lost". I recall being told that it was a general phenomenon that such books would invariably "grow legs and walk away." So I had to rely on Christmas and birthdays to get them.

Seattle Thunderbirds - Wikipedia

*I misremembered: it was from a mask, not totem poles! Totem pole iconography is varied across the PNW but the birds there generally look different.

I was actually thinking of the old Seattle Thunderbirds, whom I saw play as a kid:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunder...

Original Seahawks' logo

Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial eagle mask

Original 1976 logo and purported inspiration from a Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial eagle mask:

The NFL Logo Embraced by the Indigenous People Who Inspired It In a sports world fraught with controversial mascots, the Seattle Seahawks logo isn't just accepted -- it's beloved.

reasonstobecheerful.world/the-nfl-logo...

AFAIK the Seahawks have a great and genuinely positive relationship with the Native communities of the PNW.

A good counterpoint to the reactionary claims that the controversial Washington Atlanta Cleveland Kansas City etc. team logos of past and present are actually "respectful."

I'll point out that the Seahawks logo—especially the original logo—is a nod to a style of bird iconography on totem poles in PNW indigenous traditions.

In contrast to other sports teams' controversial appropriation of Native imagery, the Seahawks' logo seems to me to be respectful and appreciated.

"The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself…this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity."

—George Orwell, presaging the dangers of LLMs.

"one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy…A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine." 2/3

"…the concrete melts into the abstract…prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and ore and more phrases tacked together like sections of a prefabricated hen-house." 1/3

Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

More. This speaks so much to not just LLM slop, but our current political climate:

qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.

His complaint here about what constitutes quintessentially bad political language reads almost exactly like LLM output:

It's really instructive to re-read this essay today.

If it hasn't already been written, there's a whole thesis to be had on how this essay basically predicted how the rise of LLMs and fascism would go hand in hand.

Politics and the English Language | The Orwell Foundation "Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Orwell would have hated LLMs *so much*.

In his classic essay Politics and the English Language he laid out his philosophy of writing and its intersection with political extremism, including fascism, and blamed mindless writing for much of its spread. 🧵

www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-f...

If it matches your out-of-pocket expenses I agree it's an error. If it's a flat fee to cover your expenses then, yeah, you need to talk to your tax accountant.

Featuring Cyrielle Opitom, who's been leading our 3I/ATLAS observing campaign with several instruments on the mighty VLT

Taught A (11) Tom Swifty jokes and he’s on a tear writing his own (I think?).

Best one so far:

“I’m enjoying my job as a carpenter for a kitchen renovation company,“ Tom said counterproductively.