Happy goats, delighted to eat invasive leafy spurge, burdock, and wormwood. Might be the last new grass patch they get this year before all the grass dies from cold weather and they switch to eating hay until like... May. We'll see...

This paper title is 🔥🔥🔥 "Systematic non-compliance of satellite megaconstellations with IAU brightness limits" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.10834 Congrats to the Global Meteor Network team on a great paper demonstrating how bad SpaceX and other satellite operators are on following through on […]

I just learned that the documentary Shifting Baselines https://f3m.ca/en/film/shifting-baselines/, about the environmental destruction caused by SpaceX, is available through most US libraries streaming on Kanopy I'm in it. So is @planet4589.bsky.social. So are my goats and my llama! (RIP llama […]

One positive of digging through SpaceX FCC documents is that I learned about this excellent (scary) debris fall database: https://reentry.esoc.esa.int/home/recovereddebris

Just got a spam email from a textbook company trying to sell me access to OpenStax Astronomy (which I use for my Astro 101 class) which is... you know... free? https://openstax.org/books/astronomy-2e/pages/1-introduction

Ch. 1 Introduction - Astronomy 2e | OpenStax

We invite you to come along on a series of voyages to explore the universe as astronomers understand it today. Beyond Earth are vast and magnificent rea...

openstax.org

[food, dairy] My stress level shows via the ratio of satellite yelling to goats in my recent posts. Trying to lower that stress level by making some cheese this morning before all the meetings start. This is the only cheese I've had consistently good results with aging. I made a batch of […]

Everybody has to coordinate with Starlink because SPACEX CONTROLS ORBIT. That's against the Outer Space Treaty. Your engineering challenge, SpaceX, is to provide your services with fewer satellites. Not yell at everyone else for having satellites too […]

Co-author paper accepted dance!! (It's a doozy of a paper too. FINALLY DONE.)

I just saw "PCT" instead of "PDT" or "PST" in an email from a colleague in BC (which has decided to stay on daylight saving time all year round). While I am glad they are staying the same time difference relative to me, in a province that stays on standard time all year, the rest of pacific time […]

First snow in the forecast. Sigh.

Hey academics: 'By consuming AI products (which is optional, nobody – nobody – is forcing you to do it as an intellectually–independent academic, which you are, aren’t you), you are fueling these crises and are therefore actively sabotaging and annihilating the hard efforts and work of many of […]

Vale Margaret Hamilton. She was a Software Engineer. She was the _first_ Software Engineer because she defined the term, Software Engineering: "When I first came up with the term, no one had heard of it before, at least in our world. It was an ongoing joke for a […] [Original post on aus.social]

This is going to continue until we shut cooperations down https://m.youtube.com/shorts/xB6fF6sR_iA

The RM Sherwood data centre protest had like 10 people, because the meeting was online and the shadily-appointed RM decision makers weren't even there. But we all chatted and then did some "Water is life" chanting while 3 security guards and an RCMP officer looked on grumpily, and I did a CTV […]

With today's Nobel going to IceCube, delighted for Jenni Adams and her team. Jenni is one of very few women physics profs in NZ (here awarded in 2021 for IceCube work)

IceCube collaborator becomes first woman to win physics award

This article originally appeared on the University of Canterbury website. IceCube collaborator and UC Physics Professor Jenni Adams was presented with the 2021 Dan Walls Medal, the top award of the Ne...

icecube.wisc.edu

What if I do an interview for the Wall Street Journal about orbital AI data centers while I'm also at a protest for the local hyperscale AI data centre that's being built. Hm. This might actually happen tomorrow...

Hoo boy, not often that I feel the need to go rage-scream in the hayfield before 8am. It's going to be a hard day.

I am still half a page over the limit in the longest section of this grant proposal, and I need to totally redo the budget portion because of stupid formatting requirements. Maybe rage-screaming out in the hayfield for a while will help? This is the draft that has now received feedback from one […]

I want to go here so badly. Especially right now, after I've spent all day trying to get the 197 parts of this stupid grant into the word limits and perfect formatting with a couple of "breaks" for meetings with astronomers to talk about satellites destroying everything... sand dunes in the […]

It’s election day today in Québec :flagqc: If you’re eligible and have not yet vote, for fuck’s sake, go out and vote! 🗳️ You have until 20:00 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-provincial-election-voting-day-2026-9.7364241 - - - C’est journée d’élections au Québec :flagqc […]

It's the kind of auroras right now where it just looks like a greenish smudge to your eyes, but then you take a photo and it's ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE Please enjoy this lovely instrument (a camera) that lets us see a bunch of colours too faint for our eyeballs!

Androgoneous Spacecraft docking because neither the US or Russia wanted to be the "Female" docking part. I know a lot of stupid Space shit, but I was today years old when I learned this.

Goats are on patrol out in the woods eating invasive leafy spurge (and everything else, but all the plants around here evolved to be eaten by buffalo, so they can handle some goat nibbles)

A neighbour was out very late last night finishing up the harvest. A bit more light pollution than usual in photos, but found a tiny bit of auroras, and it was late enough that there weren't many satellite streaks. Yay.

I had a meeting today that taught me that the SpaceX launch site in Louisiana is an even worse idea than I could have even imagined. You know what causes really intensely powerful vibrations in the ground? Rocket launches. And do you know what really powerful vibrations in the ground cause in […]

Planning out my teaching schedule for 2 years in the future and thinking fondly of the not-very-distant-past when Chegg was the biggest problem I had to deal with to make sure students were actually trying to learn my course material. Fuck LLMs.

Goat morning to you

Feeling very stressed about everything, and I went out to do some astrophotography. I was hoping for auroras, and was first excited to see an orange glow on the horizon, then annoyed as I realized it's probably a combine, then delighted again as I realized […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

I don't think that's what was meant in a post I just read about a SpaceX launch that includes a Canadian astronaut from Fort Saskatchewan, but anytime I see "Saskatchewan" and a SpaceX Crew Dragon in the same place, I think about the terrifyingly huge pieces of debris that SpaceX casually drops […]

Today was the first morning it was dark enough when I went outside for morning chores that I could see a handful of stars... and two stupidly bright satellites UGH. I'll try to not be so angry that I forget to count next time: our prediction from late 2021 was one in 15 visible points in the […]