Alistair McConnell

I am always astonished when i visit the youtube or other socials of @greshamcollege.bsky.social by a) how amazing their content is and b) how relatively few followers they have. Really some of the best lectures out there in every topic imaginable! Cant recommend enough that you all dive in tbh.

The night of Electric Skies.

The most spectacular and longest lightning storm I have ever seen! From Sunset to 2:30 AM on September 5th, the skies around Las Vegas were a constant strobe of lightning.
Unusual and rare colors as well!
#xelartz #xelpics #lightning

In the near future when boffins have solved fusion power and we have abundant nearly-free energy, we’ll be able make anything we can imagine, but one of the few things that can’t be *created* by unlimited resources is biodiversity. We protect what we have or we lose it, we can’t buy it back.

More updates from the SAGES community!

@cupofteaching.com good opportunity for school kids!

udm14.com removes ai results from google search, (by appending &udm=24 to the search url, which we could just do ourselves too) - doesn’t solve the problem at all, but it does hide it for a bit!

Lightning over the Firth of Forth last night ⚡️ #lightning #weather #scotland

Hunting sky islands for genetic clues to climate resilience OPINION: Isolated mountaintops are hotbeds of evolutionary adaptation and great places to study how climate change affects ecosystems

#OPINION ✍️ Isolated mountaintops are hotbeds of evolutionary adaptation and great places to study how climate change affects ecosystems.

@cupofteaching.com 😄

Incredible number of remoras attached to this blue whale sighted off Baja California in March 2025

📷Michael Fishbach, Great Whale Conservancy

Modularity maximization considered harmful – Tiago P. Peixoto Inverse Complexity Lab

Periodic reminder that you should not be doing community detection using modularity maximization, if you're a serious person.

skewed.de/lab/posts/mo...

The Dolphin Head Nebula (Sh2-308) is a faint bubble of ionized gas around a dying Wolf-Rayet star, 5,200 light-years away in Canis Major. This deep image was captured by pointing a camera at the sky for 23 hours over several nights.

Credit: IG @EkantV (link below)

🔭 #Space #Astronomy

Great easily-readable article: more variables don't necessarily mean more insight. This paper nails the need to balance complexity and clarity.

The ‘sustainable’ cod in your shopping basket may be no such thing – new study reveals mislabelling Nearly a third of the cod we tested had a different origin than the one reported.

Nearly a third of the cod we tested had a different origin than the one reported.

🚨 New paper on ArXiv:

“Uncertainty quantification and posterior sampling for network reconstruction”

TL;DR; We present an efficient method to sample the entire ensemble of possible network reconstructions that are compatible with an indirect observation, e.g. a dynamics.

Short thread: 1/N

An engineer once explained to me that an efficient system always has need available when a resource becomes free, and an effective system always has a resource available when a need arises. Mind was blown.

Gorgeous kelp forest dive at Hopkins Marine Station yesterday! 🌊 Photos of giant kelp, a gorgeous iridescent red algae, and the seal that followed our dive! 🦭

Absolutely love the Primer video series simulating various populations of blobs, neatly explaining evolution, ecology, stats and life!

Word of the day is most definitely ‘hurkle-durkling’ (19th-century Scots): to linger in bed long after it’s time to get up.

Sounds similar to the Halo effect?

- Aldri sett lignende - VG Få med deg de siste oppdateringene fra VG og annet spennende innhold.

I've just learnt (thanks to Elias Daniel) about this June 2024 case from Norway of a White-tailed eagle trying to kill (unsuccessfully) a Harbour porpoise vg.no/stories/297834 Eagles vs cetaceans, wow!! #animals #eagles #whales #marinemammals

A mind blowing excerpt about the asteroid that probably wiped out the dinosaurs from The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen 🦖🤯

Here is a regular reminder of my deconstructR package, which offers self-destructing plots in R (gravity plot, black hole plot, ...). You'll find the sources here: github.com/brandmaier/d... No need to thank me. And here is a gravity plot attached.
#rstats

#academicsky

#phdsky

Purple and red aurora rays

Hullo Bsky. Here’s a cool aurora pic from the other night.