Steuard Jensen

The America I want to live in is the one where we take all those soaring promises about equality and opportunity and freedom in our sacred texts and do the work to make them real and make them apply to fucking everyone, not just the rich white men who wrote them.

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Steuard Jensen

There is never any shame in using the library, and much benefit in doing so. They are the closest thing to an unmitigated social good that we have in these United States, which is why the hard right is gunning so fervently for them these days. A world without libraries and librarians is a poor one.

My book-buying budget is not what it once was, which is precisely why I’m using the library more. It also gives me the opportunity to read books that I’m not sure I want to add to the home library (not that there’s a lot of room to do that anyway).

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Steuard Jensen

Zeno's Prayeradox

whooaaaa we’re halfway there 🎵 whoOAAA we’re three fourths of the way thereeee🎵

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Steuard Jensen

Reply to

Celeste Pewter

Remember: here's the breaking news handbook. All of these are good rules to stand by at the moment.

NPR reports on a UN forecast that the world's population will peak in the 2080s and then begin to decrease, and then presents a bold new idea on how we might be able to address that situation. (Of course, I expect some people will keep complaining about "illegal aliens".) www.npr.org/2024/07/12/n...

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Steuard Jensen

Honestly impressed with the deranged persistence of Meta’s Science Experiment Sidekick bot

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Steuard Jensen

turns out my state is having a contest on "I Voted" sticker designs, and I would like to show you the most metal one by a middle schooler:

An observation at the #AAPT Summer Meeting: I'd say maybe 5% of folks are wearing masks (all (K)N95). But in the session I just left about the experiences of physicists with disabilities and accessible teaching, it was more like 65%.

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Steuard Jensen

Project 2025 is useful mostly in that a key problem Democratic campaigns have historically had is that when you tell people what Republicans actually want to do, they don’t believe you. The evil public list makes it a bit more concrete.

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Steuard Jensen

NYT: Sure Godzilla is headed for New York, but why would we cover it? Everybody already knows Godzilla is a monster.

I am loving the American Association of Physics Teachers summer meeting. Cool talks on course resources and making lab awesome, presenting my bivector work as a talk and a poster (sooo many good conversations), a great talk by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and dinner with a physics prof friend. Yay!

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Steuard Jensen

My kid has barely rolled out of bed before noon and is now descending upon leftover pizza. She’s been 13 less than a week but clearly has the hang of this teenager thing.

I've driven an hour, and now I'm on a bus that'll drive for an hour and a half, to take me to an airport, that will take me to a bus, that will take me to a physics conference. It's going to be a lot of fun! And I'm going to see surprisingly many friends in Boston while I'm there.

I watched for a couple of minutes, but Diana was lying still with her eyes closed to conserve energy (not asleep). She is smart and creative and cool, and long Covid is tragic and awful and still a thing you risk every time you're infected. These are the reasons I still mask most of the time.

Please excuse a non-nature post. This is happening now to bring awareness to Long Covid. I've been watching for half an hour and already learned a lot. Dianna Cowern is an incredible science Youtuber who's been in bed with Long Covid for almost two years. Hosted by Simone Giertz & others. 🧪

Physics Girl LIVE with long Covidwww.youtube.com Dianna is Live streaming a day in her life as someone suffering from long COVID and ME/CFS. The purpose of the Livestream is to raise money and awareness for...

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Steuard Jensen

Heartbreaking, yet practical signage at Sherman's Bookshop in Bar Harbor, Maine! #kidlit #barharbor #indiebookstore

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Steuard Jensen

A squire rushed in to the great hall. "Someone," he shouted, "has taken the sword from the stone!" The assembled knights halted their dinner. "At last, a king?" "Who?" "I don't know," the squire said. "The sword is gone!" Elsewhere: "This," Indy muttered, "belongs in a museum. #MicroFiction

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Steuard Jensen

Why do things look darker when they're wet? I talked to a (very patient) optics expert, so that now I can explain it to you! From sweat stains to wet footprints by the swimming pool, this is relevant summer science! Please check it out and pass it on. 🧪 news.ncsu.edu/2024/07/why-...

Why Do Things Look Darker When They’re Wet?news.ncsu.edu From rain-soaked sidewalks to sweat-stained dress shirts, you’ve probably noticed that most things look darker when they’re wet. Why?

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Steuard Jensen

Not to be corny but I do think the ongoing aspiration to make America a pluralist democracy of equals is righteous, beautiful, and worth honoring, even if it has more often been the struggle of minorities & dissenters than the policy of the government. 🇺🇸

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Steuard Jensen

As far as I'm concerned anyone telling people not to vote, in this election or any other, is doing for malign purposes, and the only correct response is "Well now I am going to vote EVEN HARDER."

see also the posts floating around pointing out that the author of that piece has voted in the last few elections according to voter records

I might want a to-do list app, not just to keep a list but also to help break down big goals into smaller, achievable pieces. Ideally, in my imagination, I'd like something that supports task dependencies (maybe even, e.g., one task blocking two others). Any suggestions? (Any decent free ones?)

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Steuard Jensen

Not the most terrifying thing but perhaps the most infuriating: every single thing we said about these fascist Republican fucks has been proved out and all the people who assured us that what is happening would never happen smoothly pivoted to yes it's happening but it will be fine.

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Steuard Jensen

Reply to

Peter Sagal

It is remarkable to me that when they ever deign to name a specific complaint that requires them to overthrow American society (ie, a “revolution”) it’s always something like faculty senates or website DEI statements or calorie counts on menus.

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Steuard Jensen

This is one of the most dystopian signs I've ever seen. Republicans are quickly turning this country into an unrecognizable freakshow.

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Steuard Jensen

How accurate is the weather forecast in your city? Niko Kommenda and I learned that NWS just began doing gridded assessments of forecast accuracy. We got the data and mapped of how many days into the future they get within 3°F of the observed high temp. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

I was just wondering this last night: was the question "What would this ruling have meant for Watergate?" ever discussed by the Justices during their deliberations? (And, I suppose, to what degree do the six conservative Justices believe that Watergate was a bad thing in the first place?)

Pretty goddamn wild for the Supreme Court to give the president the powers of a king just three days before July Fourth.

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Steuard Jensen

Yes, maybe there's some clever version of hardball Biden's team can come up with, something that doesn't involve ordering assassinations. But one thing he *should* be able to say is "I reject the idea that the president is above the law, and I vow never to use this illegitimate 'immunity' defense."