Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

Snow White
http://smbc-comics.com/comic/snow-white-3 (click for horrifying bonus panel)
#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics

Happy Rotating Black Hole Day!

Roy Kerr submitted his breakthrough paper describing the spacetime around a rotating black hole #OTD in 1963.

Physicists had been searching for decades for this solution to the field equations of Einstein's theory of general relativity.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11.237

"Describing [RFK's] views as ‘controversial,’ I think, is dishonest. They’re not controversial. They’re false. He’s not spreading controversial views, he’s spreading lies. And so the framing matters enormously, and that’s something that I foresee being a huge, huge issue in the 2024 campaign."

Agreed!

Some key distinctions made by journalist Seth Mnookin in this sharp interview. (He wrote a book about the anti-vaccine movement in 2011.)

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/robert-f-kennedy-jr-seth-mnookin-panic-virus-deadly-immunity-interview_n_64c137b7e4b0ad7b75fadc32

#journalism #uspol #science

Going to try posting on Mastodon more.

What do I do, personally, to avoid passing on the credibility deficit? How do I try to confront this?

- I try to be deeply intentional about checking whether I have evidence for skills, or am making loose assumptions about people's expertise
- I read deeply in the research literature on these effects. For me, understanding the world even in its adversities is somehow healing and undoes the gaslighting.
- I practice directly disagreeing with people's unspoken judgments of me. This takes courage.

🌺️ Remember: If you are wondering why you never see respirators on the rare occasions you go out, it's because you're unlikely to run into other COVID-cautious individuals if they too rarely go out.

You're not alone.

The structure of spacetime around a Kerr black hole leads to lovely and complex orbits.

Check out @duetosymmetry’s app that lets you visualize the orbits of a photon outside a rotating black hole:

https://duetosymmetry.com/tool/kerr-circular-photon-orbits/

Elon Musk deleted a fact check on Twitter that contradicted his tweet about Bronny James and COVID.
Mr. "Free Speech" is really Mr. "I'll Censor Anyone Who Disagrees With Me"

He then deleted my tweet about that.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/07/25/twitter-deletes-fact-check-of-musk-connecting-bronny-james-cardiac-arrest-to-covid-vaccine/

Can't stop thinking about the term "credibility deficit" from Glass Walls since I read it. An effect I've long known but a great naming of it.

When I did my first internship in tech I did more complex statistical modeling than the other interns. But I was told it wasn't "data science" because my background was psych.

That meant I never put "ML" on my resume even though I had learned many of those techniques. Years later realized everyone else had.

Phoenix is a sprawling city with a population of 1.6 million. The daily high temperature there has exceeded 43° C (110° F) for 25 consecutive days. For two weeks, the *low* temperature has exceeded 32° C (90° F).

So, Phoenix is a glimpse into the hellish future we are sleep-walking into.

Like any American city, Phoenix is addicted to cars. They've tried to make a lot of the highways concrete, which is whiter. But still, there's a lot of black asphalt. Now this asphalt routinely reaches 82° C (180° F), so it can burn the bottom of your feet - even when you're wearing shoes.

Outdoor jobs like construction work are no good when it gets this hot. So Phoenix is starting to try container storage housing, which can be built indoors in air-conditioned environments and then installed on site using a crane.

The mayor there says:

"Well, our priority is to get people into indoor shelter. Thanks to our partnership with the Biden administration, we now have hundreds of millions of dollars that we can put towards indoor, air-conditioned shelter. So that is our top priority."

Air conditioning. Lots of air conditioning! So lots of electricity. Last year 42% of the electric power in Arizona came from natural gas, 29% from nuclear power, 12% from coal, and 10% from solar, 5% from hydroelectric and 1% from wind.

I'm glad there's a lot of nuclear power. All of this comes from just one plant southwest of Phoenix, with three reactors and a capacity of 4 gigawatts. Imagine tripling this, and boosting solar too. This wouldn't save Arizona from global warming, but it would be a step in the right direction.

Multiple bright, young scientists I know have told me they will not be applying to jobs in TX & FL.

Faculty friends at institutions in these states have shared they are having trouble recruiting new students & concerned about what they could be accused of.

Having spent years working at UT Austin where I loved our weird & welcoming community, I’m deeply troubled watching things fall apart. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/07/25/texas-a-m-professor-opioids-dan-patrick/

As Biden dedicates a monument to Emmett Till, remember that his horrific 1955 lynching isn't ancient history.

Today 18 members of Congress are older than him & the white woman Carolyn Bryant who got him lynched just died this April—all without ever facing a lick of accountability.

Till's story is not ancient history—it's contemporary reality.

A defunded IRS means a tax evasion free-for-all for the ultra-rich.

The richest 1% already evade as much as $163 billion a year in taxes.

This is why the GOP relentlessly tries to gut IRS.

It’s all a ploy to help their wealthy mega-donors.

Just learned from the birdsite (h/t @bbrfnt) that Amer. Inst. Math's (AIM) new space has 9.7 ACH w/ outside air, and they're working on a high-quality remote/hybrid setup.

Can't tell you how excited I am to start to see developments like this! #CleanTheAir #AccessibilityMatters

“Weekly COVID-19 hospitalizations have risen by more than 10% across the country, according to new data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, marking the largest percent increase in this key indicator of the virus since December.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-hospitalizations-rise-biggest-weekly-increase-since-december/

Thought I'd make my first post here one of my recent astro photos, which is also my profile header picture. This is the Rosette Nebula, also known as NGC 2237, which lies 5,000 light years from Earth.

#astrophotography
#astronomy

I haven't cut my hair since before COVID. It's time to donate it. Any recommendations for a place I can just mail the braids to? To be clear: the hair is absolutely fabulous.