Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

Small thing:

So, during the last few years everything got sacrificed to getting A City on Mars done at the quality level we wanted. Even like, gardening, weekends, vacation. But also doing my comic with the level of patience I want. Currently breaking the habit of trying to finish up my writing as fast as possible, but it's hard.

Anyway, today's comic is the first comic I've made in a good while that makes me giggle every time I read it. Bodes well for 2024!

Edwin Hubble announced #OTD in 1925 that Andromeda and other spiral nebulae were in fact separate galaxies outside the Milky Way, in a paper read to an AAS meeting by H.N. Russell.

The Universe was far larger than what many astronomers had allowed themselves to imagine. It was more than just our little island of stars.

Hubble built on observations by Vesto Slipher, collaborated with Milton Humason, and relied on Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s Cepheid variable work to reach this conclusion.

Especially in tech, I often hear folks fear that providing a more supportive evaluation situation will weaken its accuracy. In other words, nice interviewers may make people feel good, but at the cost of us risking a bad hire.

This is actually counter to much of the science of evaluation! The fact that people perform *better* in the presence of social support is often *because it has become a more true evaluation of skills*!

The balloon launch of mission 736N carrying the #GUSTO (Galactic / Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory) occurred at about 6:35 UTC on December 31, 2023.

Now the #balloon is slowly ascending crossing 70.000 ft.
Real-time tracking (updated every 15 minutes) is available at: https://www.csbf.nasa.gov/map/balloon8/flight736N.htm

On-board camera showing the ascent via Line-Of-Sight link while it is near McMurdo station: https://video.ibm.com/channel/nasa-csbf-ldsd

Images of the launch by Hayden Boyd and Corey Weber
#NASA

May 2024 be the year that software management conversations finally discover the notion of heterogeneity of effects

Since everyone else has been having a go, here's my New Year's Eve attempt at a colour image of Jupiter's volcanic moon, Io.

From the data taken by NASA's Juno mission during its 30 December 2023 flyby.

Am quite pleased with how it came out, though I'm a long way from competing with the true planetary imaging masters 🙂👍

Will upload to Flickr later on.

Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Mark McCaughrean

#Astrodon #Astronomy #SpaceScience #JunoMission #SpaceRocks

Happy 2024!

Yesterday was a remarkably sunny day for winter in Edinburgh, and so is today.

(1/2)

West Coast of USA show alerts!
I'm hosting "Mathematics: A Quick Revue" at the JMM in San Francisco, Friday January 5. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mathematics-a-quick-revue-tickets-744572525467?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
Plus a full-on An Evening of Unnecessary Detail in LA on Sunday January 7. https://www.flapperscomedy.com/shows/an-evening-of-unnecessary-detail/72865/
I'll be around after both to say hi etc. See some of you there!

Indian mathematician & physicist Satyendra Nath Bose was born #OTD in 1894.

He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, in developing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics & the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, in 1954 by the Government of India. Bose Bose was nominated 4 times for the Nobel Prize in Physics, he was never awarded the honor.

#physics

"It's of no use whatsoever. This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there."

As quoted by Andrew Norton

~Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (February 22, 1857 – January 1, 1894)

#books #science #physics

Hey #mastodon, I need some #help. I've noticed that the official web client shows fewer boosts than 3rd party ones, Elk & Tusky in my case.

Even after waiting for a while those boosts never show up. Normal posts do keep appearing in a timely manner. The instance of the poster/booster doesn't seem to matter.

Just in case I tried disabling the "Group boosts" setting (even though that's just supposed to group recent boosts, which is not the case here), but nothing changed. Am I missing something?

I was looking for some more stories about the 12 percent decrease in the US murder rate and just look at the suggestions from search.

Naturally if you take these suggestions you'll find material that gives you the impression the rate is rising.

Some kinds of misinformation feel huge and intractable. No one wants to hear this, no one wants to looks for this, no one reports it and when they do it's literally headlines like "After Rise in Murders During Pandemic a Sharp Decline"

Let´s celebrate, today is Public Doman Day!

Plenty of new titles are available now and volunteers at @DProofreaders will have plenty of work ahead.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie
The Giant Horse of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Money for Nothing by P.G. Wodehouse
The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne
Hunting for Hidden Gold by Franklin W. Dixon

#books #literature
1/

Happy Public Domain Day! Disney's Steamboat Willie, the first appearance of Mickey Mouse, is now officially in the public domain - a day many thought might never come. Because I can, I've shared the entirety of the short film on YouTube, with a voiceover of me explaining public domain in the context of our favorite corporate Mouse. :) #publicdomain #publicdomainday #steamboatwillie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnGL55VOj_4

We wish everyone a pseudoperfect 2024!

(for anyone curious, a pseudoperfect number is a number for which two or more of it's divisors add up to the number its self)

Some people start the new year with a kiss. Others refresh English Wikipedia at midnight ET to see Mickey. Happy Public Domain Day!

going on Fox News to launch the War on New Year’s, arguing that I am part of a marginalized group that follows the Julian calendar and it’s insulting to say Happy New Year when it’s not even Christmas yet

Inspired by @johncarlosbaez's post on complex frequencies, thinking about complex numbers:

If you are learning complex analysis, and want to really understand branch cuts, and live in the US, I recommend moving to east Asia.

No, really: I lived in South Korea for a few years, working at KAIST, and having to deal with the international date line -- the branch cut for the Earth -- forced me to understand that little bit of complex analysis.

The extreme of this are two islands, only a couple kilometers apart, called "Yesterday" and "Tomorrow" islands: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=tomorrow+island

This is especially relevant today, December 31st, because as I write this in the morning, it's already tomorrow -- January 1st, 2024 (or, apropos of my recent post, January 1st, 45² - 1) in parts of Australia. Happy #newyear2024.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Full of mathematics, and logic and computation in particular, for all here on mathstodon and beyond.

🎆

No Right to Medical Care, Compensation for #Injuries or Time Off: How Immigrant #Dairy Workers Go From Vital to Disposable
==

Wisconsin’s dairy industry would almost certainly collapse without the #immigrants who do the dirty, dangerous work that #farmers across the state say citizens won’t.

But when #workers get hurt — and they get hurt with such frequency it’s considered a routine part of the job — the laws are stacked against them.

#News #Labor #Safety

https://www.propublica.org/article/wisconsin-dairy-farm-immigrant-workers-injury-safety?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post