Did I travel all the way to #JodrellBank this morning for a 5min TV interview? Yes reader, I did. Did I then persuade the fab e-MERLIN Director Simon Garrington to let me climb inside the Lovell Telescope? Well, if you can't flex a Royal title occasionally, then what is the point of having it? 😇🔭🧪

Strong and shallow #earthquake with a magnitude of M6.8 in southern #Japan this morning. Here's the seismic signal of my Raspishake seismometer 12 mins after origin time in Herne, Germany, which is 9100 km away from the epicenter. 🧪⚒️ #geology @raspishake.bsky.social

@chadbourn.bsky.social oh no, those woke radical anarco-leftists at *checks notes* The Economist are at it again!

It's time for our first Server Spotlight! We want to help people find their communities across the #fediverse so we're featuring servers here on this account. First up: The Mended Drum, a home for fans of all things Sir Terry Pratchett. It is said that if you stay on The Mended Drum long […]

@skyglowberlin Looks like it might be a species of Echinops, which is indeed a bee magnet. One might almost say a honeypot.

The bees on a street I frequently walk down LOVE this one flower. There are several of these flowers on the street, both in the yard where the photo is taken and also in another on the same street. But this one flower is frequently covered in bees, and the rest of them aren't.

Immigrants completing PhDs in the US and then staying on to become residents is one of the things that has given the US a lead in technology. Spending US money to train PhDs and then telling them to "get the hell out of the country, you're not welcome here" […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

Fun Saturday night trying to clean up a computer takeover/banking scam my 82-year old mother in law fell for. If you have no yet had the talk with older people in your life please do. She fell for the classic "your computer is compromised call this number" trap. The steps were comically standard:

Want to have some fun on the internet? Check how well you can draw countries at https://country-draw.vercel.app

country draw

can you draw your country? or any country?

country-draw.vercel.app

"Some designs of emojis are very different for the same codepoint, especially the ones depicting emotions/reactions. Examples coming to mind are 😨, 🔫. What are your thoughts on this?" - The (water) pistol 🔫 was originally a hand gun which looked a lot more real. In response to its frequent use […]

“If you were an emoji, what emoji would you be?” - Hm, I think I’d pick 👩‍💻 because that represents how I spend my days the best. Representation and diversity is an important topic when it comes to emojis. Studies show that the skin tone modifiers 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏼‍♀️🤷🏽‍♀️🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏿‍♀️ are primarily used for […]

Is emoji interpretation just a "fun" summer topic, or does emoji misinterpretation ever become serious, like in court discussions? - In face there have been several cases both in North America and Europe where emoji meanings were negotiated in court! I keep a collection of them because it's a […]

Does being an emoji researcher make me more wary to use them - like am I watching my emoji use all the time? - I'd say the opposite is true, I feel more free and whimsical in using emojis, as I see them all the time in different contexts, and I can easily pretend to just use them ironically or […]

"Do you know of any unexpected pattern of emoji usage? For example I'd expect younger folks to use emoji more than older folks and private communication to use it more than business... But maybe my assumptions are wrong or there is something else interesting?" - Yes generally our studies show […]

"what about double meanings like in 🍆🥦 and 🍑?" - Ah yes, these ambiguities are very famous. In order to get a new emoji approved nowadays, it's even helpful to be able to point out additional meanings and usages that are metaphorical in this way. The Unicode consortium is wary of introducing too […]

"which emojis are used the least often?" - Great question, and we rarely find data on this! But luckily, we studied this at least for two corpora with German users (and admittedly only for face emojis). So: Many object or symbol emojis (from the "tail end" of the emoji list) are very, very […]

🤔 Are #emojis a universal language? - No, for two reasons. 1) They are not a language, as they do not show the properties that human languages have: grammatical structure and free combinatorics, enabling us to express complex thoughts. 2) They are not really universal. While many emojis are […]

@Kuchenschwarte "Why are emojis standardly not animated?" - a complicated question. The Unicode standard lists a code point for each emoji (and other symbols, too), as well as, roughly, its meaning (really a short name). You can see the full list below. E.g., codepoint "U+1F601" corresponds to […]

There are now almost 4000 emojis supported in the international Unicode standard, as of last year, with a few to be added this year You can look them all up here: https://emojipedia.org/ #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay

📙 Emojipedia — 😃 Home of Emoji Meanings 💁👌🎍😍

emojipedia.org

@skyglowberlin "Can emojis be removed from Unicode? Or are they there forever once they are in?" - As of now, once they're in, they're in. The code point in Unicode is then reserved for this symbol. This can be a problem because emojis are kind of open-ended (other than alphabets and many other […]

🧐 #AMA on #emojis for #WorldEmojiDay ❗ #linguistics

Good morning Leiden, from a distance I was very confused.

😍 Tomorrow is #WorldEmojiDay !! Are you as excited as I am?? 🤩 Get you emojis ready to 🎉! #emojis

This is AWESOME! Cast members from different #StarTrek series make the case for reducing #LightPollution and preserving our ability to experience the stars from here on Earth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc2zeKd-xf0 #DarkSkyInternational #StarTrek60

[obituary] I just learned that Steffen Lohse died unexpectedly this week in his 50s. Steffen took the photos Nature Cities used as the cover image in the month our #Nachtlichter article was published. I remain very grateful to Steffen for his fantastic […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

Job opportunity at British Antarctic Survey The British Antarctic Survey is seeking to appoint someone who can contribute to our world-leading research on radiation belt modelling. This is an open-ended appointment, and the successful candidate will be expected to develop their skills to lead […]

At the faculty of #mathematics at #OvGU we are seeking to fill two professorship in the broadly defined area of statistics: W2 Applied Stats and Data Science […]

A student showed this graph in a presentation today, and at first I was thinking it was #AISlop he had made and therefore possibly a case of plagiarism. But it turned out he got it from the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (German Federal Agency for […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

Today I learned that there are only three English cities with an electrical consumption greater than 200 megawatts: London, Manchester and Birmingham. By comparison, the people who want to build AI data centres here, which nobody asked for, want a supply of up to 1 gigawatt (1,000 megawatts) for […]

Today marks 250 years of US independence from a monarch 🎉 🇺🇸 #NoKings!