Dr. Alex Parker
@alexparker.bsky.social
Exploration scientist, engineer, artist. Building things for space inspired by things in the sea, and things for the sea inspired by space. Discovered a few moons along the way.
Perhaps, for reasons, you would like to make text you write more expensive for any LLM to ingest. May I introduce adversarial tokenmaxxing: alex-parker.github.io/tokenmaxxer/ Increase the tokens needed to represent any text by 3-6 times. It seems that l33t may have been ahead of its time.
“We’d like to thank some local organizations that helped sponsor this event tonight, including the City of Bellingham…” [applause] “… Village Books …” [applause] “… and the Bellingham Public Librar—“ [whooping, thunderous ovation]
More than 100 children in flood-hit communities received gifts and bags full of stocking stuffers on Christmas Eve as part of the nonprofit Whatcom Strong’s efforts to help families recover from the disaster.
Generosity flows through Sumas on Christmas Eve | Cascadia Daily News
Toy giveaway, community dinner organized at local church
cascadiadaily.com
Presented at a shellfish growers conference today — a first for me. Showed our results of mapping the 3D dissolved oxygen distribution around a working oyster farm with one of our little robot boats, seen here at work with wildfire smoke and White Rock BC in the background.
New paper day! In 'Near-future rocket launches could slow ozone recovery', we show that scaling up use of launch vehicles 🚀 has a point where the healing of the ozone layer is affected 🧪🛰️ Open access, free to read & share
Near-future rocket launches could slow ozone recovery
npj Climate and Atmospheric Science - Near-future rocket launches could slow ozone recovery
rdcu.be
I’ve been so excited by this news since the first time I heard it being circulated internally. Oh to be regarded by a whale.
SETI Institute@setiinstitute.bsky.social · last yr.PRESS RELEASE: A team of scientists from the SETI Institute and the University of California at Davis documented, for the first time, humpback whales producing large bubble rings, like a human smoker blowing smoke rings, during friendly interactions with humans. 🧪
Listen, folks, we can usually give advice to prepare you ahead of time for emergencies. But no one could have predicted 250 MILLION BEES would be loose on a road. So, stay away. Just…. Don’t go anywhere near them.
Cascadia Daily News@cascadiadaily.com · last yr.Millions of pollinating bees are swarming in Whatcom County after a commercial vehicle rolled over Friday morning near Lynden, according to the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Department.
Cool, just now learning that the abstract that I published in 2020 on a low-cost tactile interface to enable sidewalk astronomy experiences for the blind and low vision was removed from the archive to preempt concerns about appearing too DEI.
It's paper day! Led by grad students Rosemary Dorsey and Matthew Hopkins, we bring you a beautifully detailed study of how interstellar objects will be visible to @vrubinobs.bsky.social 🔭🧪
The visibility of the Ōtautahi-Oxford interstellar object population model in LSST
With a new probabilistic technique for sampling interstellar object (ISO) orbits with high efficiency, we assess the observability of ISOs under a realistic cadence for the upcoming Vera Rubin Observa...
arxiv.org
The Washington State Climate Office (WASCO) is now on Bluesky! Follow to be among the first to learn about WASCO announcements, research, newsletters, and general Washington climate and weather tidbits.
I once built robots designed to do this to asteroids.
Small Robots@smolrobots.bsky.social · 2y agoLiterally anything but a starfish eating how starfish do.
Last Friday, the coast guard brought our little Indigenous community 2 humans who had been adrift on a damaged sailboat for nearly 3 weeks before they were rescued. They arrived in Bella Bella with the clothes on their backs.
Well… Do ring particles count as micrometeoroids? 😅 science.nasa.gov/resource/shi...
Shields Up - NASA Science
Before settling into orbit around Saturn in 2004, the Cassini spacecraft faced a white-knuckle ride through the plane of the planet’s rings. The spacecraft was bombarded with about 100,000 impacts fro...
science.nasa.gov
One of my trail cams regularly triggers around 8:45 in the morning with nothing obvious in the frame. Given that I evidently live on the forest moon of Endor I can only assume it’s a stealthy Ewok.
I found my first iPod in an old moving box — 20 years old now. I plugged it in and it booted right up and still has 3000 songs on it.
Broke 1000 followers tonight. I should probably post more!
In non-election news, I won my first pitch contest this weekend. www.geekwire.com/2024/uber-fo...
‘Uber for ocean intelligence’ startup wins Bellingham Angel Investors pitch competition
Astraeus Ocean Systems founder Alex Parker (left) receives an oversized $6,000 check for first place from event emcee and BAI member Jason Cohenour.
geekwire.com
If you’re willing to stretch the definition of “hot,” we may have just discovered a hot spring in the outer solar system on the dwarf planet Makemake. Preprint of the accepted paper: arxiv.org/abs/2410.22544
Prominent mid-infrared excess of the dwarf planet (136472) Makemake discovered by JWST/MIRI indicates ongoing activity
We report on the discovery of a very prominent mid-infrared (18-25 μm) excess associated with the trans-Neptunian dwarf planet (136472) Makemake. The excess, detected by the MIRI instrument of the Jam...
arxiv.org
I’m in Miami this weekend pitching my ocean observing startup. So far, two dozen lizards on the airbnb patio have heard the good news.
We have a telescope!🤩 Last week, summit staff installed Rubin's primary/tertiary mirror. 🧪🔭 With all three mirrors & the commissioning camera in place, we officially—for the first time in 15 years of construction—have a complete telescope!🥳 Watch the time-lapse: https://youtu.be/6EWUpZG1pAM
I maintain that these are the worst-branded LiPo batteries on the market.
Cleaning the robot boat today and discovered that the main payload locker had been transformed into the very cozy home of a very large spider. Autonomous but not uncrewed, I guess.
Me: Why is my phone always running out of storage space Also me:
I don’t know how many of you have been following the recent ridiculousness in the Washington State gubernatorial race, but this is an actual headline from today:
