Chris Walter

A sign with text in Italian that says: Museum of Papyrus International Institute of Papyrus

A room in the museum. Two statuary busts are in front of an open window framing a bright blue sea.

A courtyard with a well with two small papyrus plants in front.

@ryanfb and others who work with papyrus:

If you find yourself on the island of Ortigia in Syracuse in Sicily, there is a small interesting papyrus museum. It is not really about manuscripts, it is about papyrus itself, how it is made, its history etc […]

[Original post on fediscience.org]

RIP Tom Lehrer you will be missed.

Gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/arts/music/tom-lehrer-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Zk8.YR0c.BmzmY54i-uzY&smid=url-share

As a kid, I loved his songs when I found my parent's copy of one of his records.

Here is my small connection to one […]

@ElenLeFoll Interesting idea to have them do it together!

A nice article about my colleague @evevavagiakis.bsky.social 's physics books for children:

https://trinity.duke.edu/news/if-you-think-physics-just-grownups-think-again

#arXiv #GoodbyeTo The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon in the Standard Model: an update https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21476 "this update has resulted in a major upward shift of the total SM prediction. There is no tension between the SM and experiment at the […]

[Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

The view from outside a sushi restaurant. It is dark outside and we see a colorful scene through the window. A chef stands behind the counter next to a large fish tank and four diners are arrayed around him at the bar. The wooden walls are covered in descriptions of menu items.

Last night in Toyama Japan, as I left the sushi restaurant where I ate dinner, the scene reminded me of Edward Hopper's painting 'Nighthawks' .

A river with rocks causing the water to foam white makes its way through a steep lushly forested valley in the mountains of central Japan. It is misty and cloudy and the trees are bright green. Mozumi, Japan, near Kamioka Town and the site of the Super-Kamiokande particle physics detector.

#SilentSunday

How long will our universe last? Well, it looks like there is a definite end to the most robust pieces of our cosmos: Even the dead remnants of stars, i.e. black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs will eventually decay. This is based on the realization […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

Title: SOME GRAMMATICAL VOICES FOR USE IN SCIENTIFIC WRITING ACTIVE VOICE e.g. Our team collected samples and then we tested them. CLICKBAIT VOICE e.g. We collected some samples... You won't believe what happened next! PASSIVE VOICE e.g. Samples were collected and tested. HAIKU VOICE e.g. Quiet science lab. Workers arrive with samples. The testing begins. PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE VOICE e.g. We did all the collecting and testing. No need to thank us. Just doing our job. CONSPIRACY VOICE e.g. Mysterious "Samples" were harvested and covertly "tested" by so-called scientists.

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon

A quick skim through this year's astro 101 misinformation debunking final project topics:
-Faked moon landings
-Flat Earth
-Supermoons and tsunamis/earthquakes
-Nibiru
-Black holes "sucking"
-15 days of darkness
-Hollow moon
-Saturn's ring disappeared
-Moon phases caused by Earth's shadow
-The […]

@sundogplanets This sounds great! What did you ask them to do for the project?

There's an absolutely wild statement on wikipedia that a base-11 system was "briefly proposed during the French Revolution to settle a dispute between those proposing a shift to duodecimal and those who were content with decimal".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecimal

If anyone wants a horrible python program that will write integers in cuneiform sexegesimal (base sixty) using unicode so you can paste it all over the place in emails, documents and text messages I have just the thing. Use with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322

For maximum amusement. […]

@futurebird Awesome :)

@drjmo.bsky.social @evevavagiakis.bsky.social @simonsobservatory.org @astronomyontap.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy Great crowd!

Please share this with any #photographers and #photographic #artists who might be interested in turning their creative eye on a science lab that is 2km (6800ft) underground. Applications are welcome! Please mind the deadline […]

Inflation

Fun fact: Three out of the eight schools in the Elite Eight of the Women's March Madness are members of the Simons Observatory: Duke, USC, and UT Austin. 🏀 If you want your team to get good, consider convincing your institution to join us! (Of course, there is a relevant xkcd: xkcd.com/1365/)

FediScience Support (@admin@fediscience.org) 12 Posts, 0 Following, 5.68K Followers · Site support account operated by @FrankSonntag@fediscience.org

@ElectronMicrobeamAnalysis @admin Just to let you know I just followed it without a problem.

A really messy black and white image with an extremely bright, overexposed thing in the centre and bright vertical smudges bleeding up and down because all the pixels have filled with electrons and spilled over. This is a tiny part of a Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Megacam full camera field.

Amazingly talented fediverse astrophotographers: gorgeous, perfectly exposed and processed telescope images

Me, a professional astronomer: accidentally points a 4 meter telescope at Saturn for a series of 5 minute exposures

A graph illustrating the relationship between the lifetime (τ) in years and density (ρ) in grams per cubic centimeter. Key points represent various astronomical objects and phenomena, including dark matter, a human body, planets, and different types of stars, and a piece of chocolate.

The image features a theoretical background on an experiment regarding Rocher evaporation, discussing the Hawking and Schwinger effects in relation to particle production. Two images are presented: one shows a bowl of chocolate treats and the other contains handwritten notes about the experiment.

An image featuring text from a research paper discussing the results and conclusions related to "Rocher matter" and its decay over time, including future plans for experiments. References to theoretical background and publication details are also included.

My colleague Michael Wondrak has conducted an evaporation experiment of Ferrero-Rocher chocolate confection and compared it to our predictions for evaporation via a Hawking-like gravitational pair production, that we published recently […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

A drone view of the Atacama desert on a clear day with the SO site in the foreground.

We have a brand new website! simonsobservatory.org Go check it out for information on what we do, recent publications, and cool images. 🧪🔭

@hweimer That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while!

Getting down to the task

Getty Museum Getty Ms. 114; Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing; c.1530 CE; Flanders, Belgium; f.10r
BL Royal 18 E III, f. 24r

Inspiring the Next Generation: Stories of Women in Physics Discover the journeys and groundbreaking research of three remarkable female scientists.

Excited to have been featured by Bluefors for International Women’s Day! #WomenInSTEM

bluefors.com/stories/insp...

Two footnotes shown at the bottom of the page in a textbook: (From Computational Physics by Mark Newman). 7) What with Gaussian quadrature, Gaussian elimination, the Gauss—-Newton method, and now the fast Fourier transform, Gauss seems to have discovered most of computational physics more than a century before the computer was invented. 8) In much of the computational physics literature you will see the fast Fourier transform at- tributed not to Gauss but to the computer scientists James Cooley and John Tukey, who published a paper describing it in 1965 [Cooley, J. W. and Tukey, J. W., An algorithm for the machine calcu- lation of complex Fourier series, Mathematics of Computation 19, 297-301 (1965)]. Although Cooley and Tukey’s paper was influential in popularizing the method, however, it was, unbeknownst to its authors, not the first description of the FFT. Only later did they learn that they’d been scooped by Gauss 160 years earlier.

When you teach computational physics you quickly find out that Gauss basically invented all of it before we even had computers.

E.g. the FFT was discovered by Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1805, when he was 28 years old. (Footnotes 7,8).

Good night from the Seven Liberal Arts, may they watch over us and guide us.

BL Royal MS 6 E IX; Convenevole da Prato, Carmina regia; c.1335 CE; Italy (Tuscany); f.29r

Horizontal gradient map of the Bouguer gravity anomaly over the Chicxulub crater (North is up.). The coastline is shown as a white line. A striking series of concentric features reveals the location of the crater. This image was constructed from gravity measurements taken by Petróleos Méxicanos beginning in 1948 in the course of petroleum exploration augmented by recent work of researchers from the Geological Survey of Canada, Athabasca University, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán. These recently acquired data were taken to map out detailed crater structure. All data were gridded at 750 m intervals before the horizontal gradient was computed. Most of the concentric gradient features can be related to inferred structural elements of the buried crater, including the central uplift (note the radial features revealed in the uplift), the collapsed transient cavity edge, faults in the zone of slumping, and the edge of the topographic basin - the now buried crater. Credit: Geological Survey of Canada / Alan Hildebrand / Athabasca University / Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán https://web.archive.org/web/20130329045148/http://miac.uqac.ca/MIAC/chicxulub.htm

Gravity anomaly map of the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatán responsible for the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. Of the dinosaurs, only the avians (birds) survived this time period. The white dots are sinkhole locations which trace the crater's rim. #Science #Geology #PaleoSky #Dinosaurs 🧪🦕🦖

@davewordnerd @mackuba.eu It sounds like did the right steps. As said above, they haven’t opted in. If the DM doesn’t work, you might try sending them an email and asking them to follow the bridge to increase their reach.

@jkanev So! Elm was “ELectronic Mail”. Pine was “Pine Is Not Elm” (although some claim that is not true). Don’t know about the others :).