Jason Wright

I have never lived in LA or NY, so Dodgers-Yankees does nothing for me.

That and the fact that they have both won so many times, so recently, and have such a high payroll makes that potential series basically dead last in my personal Calculus.

I strongly subscribe to King Kaufman‘s “Complicated Calculus of Teams I Root For” theory of sports fandom, and so for both personal and objective reasons I am thrilled at the distant prospect of a Mariners–Brewers World Series.

(If I weren’t from Seattle, I’d be rooting for the Tigers too).

On the other hand, I’m not quickly finding any actual measurements of aluminum in meteor trails, so perhaps it was a satellite?

Occurred nine days and a few thousand miles east from the Tiangong-1 reentry event.

(I asked physical plant and, sadly, they decided it was some sort of student prank, and that the sign will be removed.)

(They CLAIM it leads to the storage area behind the student bookstore in the student union.)

Apparently here at Penn State there is a second @pseticenter.bsky.social?

Actually, now we're realizing aluminum is also common in meteors, so probably don't need to implicate a reentry for this. nm!

Hey, @planet4589.bsky.social, we are seeing a mysterious emission line in some stellar spectra at the wavelength of a strong Al+ line. We wonder if we might be seeing emission from gaseous aluminum from a satellite reentry?

Any advice on how to pursue this idea?

It’s too bad the Nobel committee had already printed up all of this year‘s materials when he finally made it. Now he’ll have to wait a whole year for his trip to Stockholm.

Agree! When hired, I negotiated no more than 4 new class preps before tenure, and I continue to ask for the same 4 classes in my 2-year rotation.

Strongly depends on what you're starting from! If it's Astro 101 or something with a strong documented tradition, I'm never afraid to start with someone else's notes/slides/syllabus which helps a lot.

But yes, for a brand new course that sounds about right, if not low if you're writing fresh HWs.

Incessant gamer reaches fabled edge of Minecraft map after more than 14 years — has been walking towards mythical 'Far Lands' at the edge of the map since 2011, covering 12,500km in-game It's the journey, not the destination.

Kurtjmac reached the Farlands!

www.tomshardware.com/video-games/...

I think about its lessons constantly because I write every day—mostly emails, but also papers, proposals, blog posts…

I have also found that thinking about writing well forces me to organize my thoughts and the logic of my arguments and makes me a more careful and rigorous scientist.

The course from my undergraduate days that I use most often in my job by far is Intermediate Composition, where I learned to write essays. Obviously the physics and math (and astronomy) were foundational, but that course has proven the most useful.

Neat! Who is speaking in this video?

Processed version of the Perseverance Navcam image from Sol 1643 with all the noise removed. It shows a much larger area of sky than the infamous raw image because it was stitched from 16 individual tiles which are sent separately. It shows a dark sky with a couple of stars sprinkled around. The brightest is Arcturus at the top center, and the handle of the big dipper can be seen below. On the left is a bright streak with a halo, this is the moon Phobos.

Sreenshot from Stellarium showing the same Starfield with a red box indicating the FOV of Nacam (not considering the Fisheye nature of that lens). The stars match up perfectly with Navcam, especially Phobos can be clearly identified as such. Comet 3I/Atlas is marked in red and should be in the middle of the frame, but is so much darker than any stars in the actual Navcam image that it will be impossible to detect there.

I guess some proof can't hurt:
With proper processing of that image and don't just showing the raw version which is super noisy, you can see some familiar stars like Arcturus and the the big dipper.
And that streak is turns out to be exactly where Phobos was in the sky...

[I actually totally missed this because it seems he's dropped me from his mailing list!]

Wow, this is amazing. Apparently the pictures Avi posted on Medium of 3I/ATLAS from Mars with his amateur image analysis and astrometry are

a) Wrong and

b) Not even of 3I/ATLAS!

The effort put into understanding 3I/Atlas has been spectacular, imaginative, professional and well-organized. Planetary scientists don't need Avi Loeb put in charge of an international directorate to tell them how to do their jobs.

Just going to say that it is hurtful when a systematic study effort by the global small-body community, with many of the campaigns led by women, with results being pushed to free open-source arXiv & data repos for scicomm as quickly as possible, is described as lacking coordination/communication

I’m a loud voice in support of ISOs as technosignature targets. There’s no thought policing or gatekeeping going on. A tenured prof at the richest Uni in the world isn’t being silenced. THE headline here is: disrespect & arrogance of a loud voice, dominating over earnest work and community

I'll for global coordination for ISO follow-up, but it's telling that no one who's actually coordinating follow-up was actually asked to participate in this proposal or thought of to be even suggested as names on committees in this proposal

This is complete and utter pompous bullshit. It's telling that of the people proposing it wants to anoint themselves director general when every one of his claims of having discovered technosignature interstellar objects has been debunked by the planetary community. arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01405

Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

harpers.org/archive/1941...

I feel like AI is also improving?

The “overconfident and overeager kiss-up intern” model short circuits this in my mind. I am always willing to be impressed at its capabilities and what a great job it’s done, but I also understand that, without checking, I can’t tell the pure bullshit from the mistakes from the good work.

Fundamentally, our brains are wired to impute certain reasoning, motivations, and an inner mind to someone using confident (and flattering) language. This creates a huge failure mode in our interactions, exploited by conmen and causing us to overinterpret AI language models.

AI has gotten much better at a lot of things, but my mental model that it should only be used for tasks you would give an overeager and overconfident intern remains pretty solid.

I am often impressed by the work it does, but you have to double check everything yourself if it needs to be right.

I don’t know, but I will point out that there are very strong observational biases at play that make it very hard to figure out the size distribution of interstellar objects, even ignoring the fact that we only have three of them so far. LSST will help a lot.

I don't think planetary scientists are confused or puzzled by the size distribution of bound comets that reach the inner solar system.

His calculation is *very* rough and naive. It is only barely consistent with the HST data. It might be right but it needs to be checked more carefully.