I used to work for a non profit that did a lot of math. I am not so much a math person. I opened their mail.
My fave ever piece of mail was the letter that concluded that P = NP if N =1, but not if P=0. And asked us, on this basis, to send a million dollars. They gave us bank info.
Fab #sciam story on space junk and what to do if it falls on your land.
"SpaceX has provisional permission..to launch.. 42,000 Starlink satellites. Assuming each one.. lasts 5 years.. SpaceX will be [de-orbiting] burning up ~1 satellite per hour."😮 🔭🛰️🧪
📖: www.scientificamerican.com/article/spac...
Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born #OTD in 1943. As a Cambridge grad student in 1967, she discovered an entirely new type of celestial object: Pulsars!
In 1974 the Nobel was given to her advisor; she was left off. 🧪 👩🔬 🔭
Photo: National Science & Media Museum
You still have eyebrows? The ends of mine have been thinning over time, almost faster than the bald spots on top of my head are rushing towards each other...
Waarom is de router offline? En wat is dat gedruppel uit het toilet? Ach natuurlijk, de wasmachine is overstroomd en het water zit nu in de elektriciteitsbuizen!
Er is Een Mannetje onderweg, en de groepen voor keuken/koelkast doen het nog. Maar leuk is anders tijdens je vakantie.
The whole "do. not. dehumanize. people." sounds like a no-brainer. But sure, let's go down the entire tree of life just to make sure there's really no kind of animal name we can sling.
When an article says "some scientists think" then remember this: I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth. I could, it turns out, get it in there, but I hadn't given sufficient thought to the reverse operation.
This would have been tremendously useful to have last weekend, when my Delta Green players tried to restart a U-Boot stuck in an iceberg. I say 'tried', because they soon had to abondon the attempt and exit left, pursued by shoggoth.
Family knows just how to push our buttons, because they installed half of them to begin with. (Quote: someone on bluesky - sorry, I forget. You, maybe?)
It's so impressive how you're rising above all this and exhausting that it's necessary to.
This week in my "science graduate student skills for success" course we're talking about getting interviewed by journalists about your research.
Scientists and science communicators who have been interviewed a lot, what top tips do you have for beginners?
How do you prepare for an interview? 🧪
Prepare to talk about the context of your work, not just the specifics. Ask the journalist beforehand what role your comments will have in their coverage. Help the journalist understand how your work fits into what was done before and where you want to go, explain what the novelty is.
William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was born #OTD in 1824.
Kelvin is largely responsible for the modern formulation of thermodynamics. The absolute temperature scale, where thermal motion ceases at 0K, is named in his honor.
In awe at the scale of this lord. Absolute (temperature) unit. 🧪
Years into the digital era, a friend used a roll-on-roll transparency to draw a cartoon of her PhD work live during her defense. For pretty much every other use case, good riddance to ye olde slides.
