Michael Zingale

just looked in my history -- it was @jeremymberg.bsky.social who made the NSF plots.

also, someone posted some plots showing the NSF awards (number vs time for the past several years) and for this year, the number of awards is really low.

If this holds, then next year's job market will be even worse.

Astronomers/physicists: is the postdoc job market this year ultra difficult? I know seven people with no job offers right now, and I feel like they would have had many offers in previous years. In my career, I have never seen this lack of jobs at the postdoc level before. 🔭

yes. it definitely seems that way.

Who we rooting for in the big game today? Team Ruff or Team Fluff?

#puppybowl

please consult the chart

Sixteen Claude AI agents working together created a new C compiler The $20,000 experiment compiled a Linux kernel but needed deep human management.

this was an interesting read
arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/s...

Seek shelter in a tauntaun, it's cold out there

Agreed. Her appearance in Bad Batch was also good.

Hugh Laurie, but in character as Dr. House

and unfortunately, the UK just canceled their contribution to the electron-ion collider

UK ‘could lose generation of scientists’ with cuts to projects and research facilities UK’s research funding body says best scientists are taking posts overseas due to lack of job stability at home

The mood music is very bleak for UK astronomy funding at the moment.
www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

this lady is the reason I can go anywhere w/out getting lost 🙌

still wish they had her be able to helicopter fly with the lightsaber like the Inquisitors did in Rebels.

also, they should give stickers afterwards, like they do with voting. But instead of "I voted", maybe "I scoped!", and instead of the flag, well....

one of my fears with the looming accessibility deadline is that people will remove their online open educational resources. That's why I am learning as much as I can now to get my class notes fixed-up (almost there, I think).

Some of my colleagues are reverting to paper printouts of slides :(

Also be sure to watch Jim Gaffigan's routine on colonoscopy while your prep

couldn't figure out why I had 40+ notifications in slack. Then I remembers I have SLURM dm me when my jobs start at NERSC.

This is enough for me for now to get my course notes in shape.

Hopefully in the near future, there will be a better standard (I like the idea of an "alt" metadata in the cell).

#accessibility #jupyter #matplotlib

It is very crude, but I can do:

```
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x, np.sin(x))
# alt-text: a sample figure of a sine
```

in a Jupyter notebook cell, and then after converting to HTML (either Sphinx+nbsphinx or jupyter-book 1.x), it removes the comment and adds the alt-text to the <img> tag.

GitHub - zingale/matplotlib_accessible: experiments with alt text in matplotlib experiments with alt text in matplotlib. Contribute to zingale/matplotlib_accessible development by creating an account on GitHub.

More fun with accessibility: how to add alt-text for a matplotlib figure in a Jupyter notebook when it is converted to HTML.

Lots of github issues about this when you google, but no firm standard. Wound up with a hackish postprocessing script that does the job:
github.com/zingale/matp...

The Landscape of Undergraduate Astronomy and Astrophysics Degree Requirements In this document we summarize the results of a survey of undergraduate degree-granting programs conducted by the 2024-2025 American Astronomical Society Education Committee's Subcommittee on UndeRgrad...

Interesting paper on requirements for undergraduate astronomy degrees and how non-uniform they are, and how this impacts students with these degrees: arxiv.org/abs/2602.03959

yeah, the wave.webaim.org checker is really good with spotting these, and its interface is very nice.

also just learned about the `sphinx-rtd-theme-ext-color-contrast` package to fix color-contrast accessibility issues in the popular Sphinx Read The Docs theme.

So far, the pydata-sphinx-theme seems to be the most accessibile (that I've tested).

#accessibility

Convention to support `alt` text I’ve tried using jupyter-book and quarto to produce html/book output from a series of notebooks and was wondering how to add alt text for output cells with figures. nbconvert supports generating alt t...

oh, and apparently some tools can use an "alt" metadata tag in a cell:
discourse.jupyter.org/t/convention...

Improve the accessibility of figures shown with `_repr_html_` · Issue #15971 · matplotlib/matplotlib I was running into some accessibility audit errors with Jupyter Book, and it made me realize that the _repr_html_ method of Figures doesn't output img elements that have alt tags (something that sc...

this matplotlib issue also seems relevant:
github.com/matplotlib/m...

MatplotAlt: A Python Library for Adding Alt Text to Matplotlib Figures in Computational Notebooks We present MatplotAlt, an open-source Python package for easily adding alternative text to Matplotlib figures. MatplotAlt equips Jupyter notebook authors to automatically generate and surface chart de...

alt-text for matplotlib figures!
arxiv.org/abs/2503.20089

gotta add this to my course notes.

#matplotlib #accessibility

Truss No One

when did the job of being an astronomer become just reading and responding to emails... ?