Heading to COSPAR next week in Florence, and the weather does...not excite me. Nearly 40C every day! Hopefully the venue and my hotel have working AC...
Brandt Gaches
@brandt-gaches.space
Disabled astronomer/astrochemist. Emmy Noether group leader @ University of Duisburg-Essen.
The worst part about changing the morning alarm sound to Sam Reich singing the "Count the Rice" song from this past week's Game Changer on @dropout.tv is having to wait until the morning for the reaction. The best part is the "Really?!" after the realization hits first thing in the morning.
News You May Have Missed ⤵️ 3I/ATLAS Contains 30X More Semi-Heavy Water Than Comets In Our Solar System ALMA reveals interstellar comet’s home star system formed under far colder conditions than our own #RadioAstronomy #Astronomy #3iatlas #ALMA
3I/ATLAS Contains 30X More Semi-Heavy Water Than Comets In Our Solar System - National Radio Astronomy Observatory
The latest news from the NSF's National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
public.nrao.edu
Dropout's Game changer this season has been the best type of unhinged!
Sam Reich@samreich.bsky.social · last mo.great point vic
July is #disability Pride Month worldwide. As I progress more into my academic career, I notice time and time again that many institutions usually will only do what is minimally legally required for accessibility, and minimally regard disability in terms of diversity. 1/
Have to hand it to Paraguay: as much as Germany is pushing heavily offensively, they've held up a pretty good defense!
BlueSky #coffee people: a recent fire that impacted my flat caused too much smoke damage to my Timemore C2 grinder! So, I have to look for a replacement. Does anyone have any good recommendations for solid manual (or electric) grinders for filter strength? (There is, of course, just the C3...)
We had a car fire outside our house, impacting our flat this morning. I learned through this that a Mercedes hearse burns hot enough to melt/incinerate an aluminum bike, but not melt steel. The picture of our garage next to the car shows this - two ash piles from bikes in the metal garage!
Astronomy has a number of cursed units and conventions. While on my parental leave time, the lack of good sleep time has brought me to these new cursed units: 1 parmilliarcsec (pmc) = 1 kpc 1 parmin (pn) ~ 3438 AU 1 pardeg (pg) ~ 57 AU 1 parrad (pd) ~ 0.6421 AU Maybe this is why one needs sleep?
A nice paper by @asborlaff.bsky.social showing that launching telescopes to space doesn't necessarily solve the light pollution issue from satellites. These are satellite trails seen by NASA's SPHEREx space telescope, which appear in 73% of all its images. Eek. arxiv.org/abs/2605.27501
🔭 A cautionary tale for undergrads (and above!) using AI for #astro plots: our BSc student wanted to make a "quick" HR diagram showcasing M-dwarfs & thought some chatbot could make one and... well... ...extra credits are now offered to students who can correctly find all errors on cursedHR.png 🫠 🧪
It makes me quite depressed when I see a paper whose abstract looks interesting and I load up the PDF and the introduction was clearly written by an AI model . Complete with garbage or weird citations and all! Especially when I see that even the methods section seems to be written by an AI model...
This week I had another horrifying experience with the SOCIALIST healthcare system in Germany! I needed new crutches for long term use. It took me 6 days to get my appointment (sure 2 were the weekend and 1 was a holiday, LAZY!!). They had the audacity to charge 5€ for them! For SHAME! (!sarcasm!)
It took me way longer than I care to admit, but I figured out how to get the journal style of DOI links in bibliographies in #typst. A combination of weird, janky hacks into the csl and regex matching in the template, but it seems to work! (The templates will be public if/when I get the ok!)
Two HPC clusters in separate countries sent emails today saying they have to disable login access due to security vulnerabilities...
a close up of homer simpson 's face with a beard
ALT: a close up of homer simpson 's face with a beard
media.tenor.com
The award for the most bizarre #coffee I've had yet now goes to this coffee from Concept. It actually smells of strawberry, which is a very bizarre experience. However, it is also one of the best coffees I've had in my office! Sadly, this one was a limited run, so I can't get it again!
"Humanity's next great voyage begins" - from the broadcast
Brandt Gaches@brandt-gaches.space · 4mo ago1 minute!!
All that can be said about the announcement can be summarized as follows...
elmo and kermit from sesame street are standing next to each other and kissing .
ALT: elmo and kermit from sesame street are standing next to each other and kissing .
media.tenor.com
Paul Voosen@voosen.me · 4mo agoNASA Administrator Isaacman just said that they will launch a fission-powered spacecraft in 2028 called "SR1 Freedom" and that it will go to Mars (!) and drop a payload of Ingenuity-class helicopters to the surface. So that's the third suprise launch for the 2028 window.
![4-panel comic. (1) [Glowing black dot surrounded by clouds.] DOT: I think I did a good job with this universe. Pressure waves dance through gas clouds. They clump together and then pressure pushes them apart. (2) [Some of the clouds are clumping together.] DOT: Oh weird, that big clump of clouds is staying together. Their gravity is overcoming the pressure and more gas is falling in. (3) [More clouds are sucked in.] DOT: It’s not stopping! The heat is rising but the collapse is only accelerating! I messed up. I messed up *bad*. (4) [The clump has become a shining star.] DOT: NOOOOOOOO!!! My beautiful clouds! Ruined! It’s all ruined!](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreiae4qcq3k4rea6dmb4vcttgnajgfurbpa34isuyr6sclzdq3gijci)
Reminder! Just over one week left to apply to come to IPAC as a visiting graduate student! www.ipac.caltech.edu/page/graduat... We've got lots of great potential projects, including one option working with me and Aurora Kesseli on Pandora data! Click the link for more info and projects!
2027 IPAC Visiting Graduate Student Research Fellowship
IPAC at Caltech partners with NASA, NSF, JPL and the world-wide research community to advance exploration of our Universe.
ipac.caltech.edu
if you can afford it, you should start using @kagi.com, it’s 100% worth the cost to 1) not see ads, 2) not see unwanted AI summaries, and 3) not see what other batshit stuff Google keeps doing like this
nilay patel@reckless.bsky.social · 5mo agoGoogle is now screwing with the 10 blue links in traditional search and rewriting headlines - including ours - to be the worst kind of slop. This sucks so bad www.theverge.com/tech/896490/...
![Comic. [Small panel overlaying large panel.] PERSON 1: What’s up with this weird landscape? PERSON 2 with ponytail: Oh, it was caused by… [Large panel is map of the United States with with red overlays denoting landscape phenomena. Mega-floods in the northwest, a plate tectonics speedrun on the west coast, volcanoes next to the west coast, water and time in the southwest, geology in the west, a supervolcano within the west, glaciers in the north, farming in the middle, rivers in the mideast, geology in between rivers and farming, ??? toward the northeast, farming on the east coast, continents colliding next to the east coast, ongoing disputes between limestone and water in the south of Florida, volcanoes in Hawaii, geology in Alaska with volcanoes and glaciers below.]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreihzjireqyhyztitogqi7khxntfzmhzmyqdfvycvl2qcf5yik4z5zm)
Apparently, arXiv has been looking into adding support for @typst.app! I had idle hands during a day off, so I wrote up a template for the Open Journal @ojastro.bsky.social that is fairly complete with features (see image). It can actually do a bit more than the LaTeX template, from Typst!
Typst@typst.app · 5mo agoDid you know that arXiv is exploring to add Typst? The world's largest preprint archive faces unique challenges to keep science open. Join arXiv veteran Norbert Preining and learn what's ahead for arXiv and Typst. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZl...
German is filled with wonderful compound words, like Handschuh (hand + shoe = glove) and Bahnhof, composed from Bahn + hoffen, to mean a place you go to hope your train arrives. And yes, me learning German means I can start to make bad jokes in both languages!
Reducing radio interferometer data for the first time. It makes my mind wander to cursed thoughts, such as convenient but cursed units. We use SI sometimes and abandon it other times, like km/s but also Msun/yr! But scaling Msun/Myr makes some things cleaner! Or how 1 pc/Myr ~ 0.98 km/s, hm neat!
I've been playing around exploring @typst.app quite a bit. It's been quite interesting to see how different it is from LaTeX, but I have definitely found it much easier to make what I want. I decided to remake a recent A&A paper I wrote, with a full template, and it came out pretty darn close!
In kosmischen Dunkelwolken bestimmt Strahlung die Chemie des Gases. Ein internationales Team konnte das erstmals direkt messen. Modelle kamen von @brandt-gaches.space. Veröffentlicht @natastron.nature.com. www.uni-due.de/2026-02-03-i... 📸 ESO, CC BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/...)
In cosmic dark clouds, radiation determines the chemistry of the gas. An internat. team was able to measure this directly for the first time. Models were provided by @brandt-gaches.space. www.uni-due.de/2026-02-03-f... @natastron.nature.com 📸 ESO, CC BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/...)
