@the_guruji@astrodon.social
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

the_guruji

@the_guruji@astrodon.social

set{'Astronomy', 'Python', ``LaTeX''}

PFPs from NASA SVS 14146: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14146 via https://www.aesthetic-computation.com

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman (https://astrodon.social/@SchnittGetsReal) and Brian P. Powell

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johnbutler, to random

I love Robert Slimbach’s designs. He is arguably the most worthy living successor to Hermann Zapf. I don’t know exactly what’s going on at Adobe in terms of type marketing, but Slimbach released a gorgeous serif design, Ten Oldstyle, several years ago, that I only happened to notice this week. I suppose I might have heard about it if I were a Creative Cloud subscriber. Ten Oldstyle seems somewhere between Arno and Brioso. All of Slimbach’s designs seem to occupy a sort of beautiful continuum.

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@johnbutler I found it a few weeks ago via Acerola's video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-9UHZFBH08) about his game Philokalia (https://itch.io/jam/acerola-jam-0/rate/2580856). Immediately joined his discord just to find out which font it was because it was so good looking.

dyana, to random

Getting ready for the eclipse next week. I have a hotel in the path of totality booked. I have ISO certified glasses and lens filters, and I know to leave early (and expect insane traffic on the way back). Soliciting advice. Any tips to share from 2017?

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@dyana In a astronomy discord server I’m in, this website was shared: https://almadenobservatory.net/CaptureEclipse/JudysCheckList.html

Good luck for weather. Do let the rest of us know how your experience was.

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@dyana yeah, it's a bit more common during night-time observations, but I've never had the chance to go to a place dark enough where it would be worth it. Hopefully soon.

phonner, to math
@phonner@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Student 1: That's the craziest shape I've ever seen!
Student 2: That's a hyperbola.
Student 1: And that was hyperbole.

Believe it or not, a true story!

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@matthewconroy @phonner must be the Cool S: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S

redshiftdrift, to random
@redshiftdrift@astrodon.social avatar

#Multiverse
"Multiverses Are Pseudoscientific Bullshit"
by John Horgan

🔗https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/multiverses-are-pseudoscientific-bullshit

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@redshiftdrift I am skeptical of multiverse stuff myself, but I am even more skeptical of anything that John Horgan says after seeing first hand his disastrous attempt at an AMA to promote his book on Quantum Mechanics a few years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/q4082a/i_am_john_horgan_a_science_writer_obsessed_with/

By his own admission he cannot differentiate between experts and charlatans, so there's hardly any weight I can give to anything he has to say about anything in physics really.

typographica, to Fonts
@typographica@typo.social avatar

Speaking of Google Fonts, though: while we’re still in the midst of the weird-and-wonderful wonky soft serif phase, I am shocked we don’t see more Fraunces. It’s better than most of the others in the genre and deserves far more attention: https://fraunces.undercase.xyz/

#Fonts #Typography #WindsorTypeface #CooperBlack

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@typographica i saw Fraunces (or i think it was Fraunces; i am bad at fontid 🥹) on a book cover when my cousin and I went to buy some books for her. bought the entire series.

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

How deep is your bass?

Rappers are put to shame by the 19th-century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, who tried to find the point at which a note is so low it stops sounding like a note and you start feeling individual vibrations!

How? Using 32-foot tall organ pipes! Anyone who claims their measly little car speakers give a deep bass has gotta be kidding.

The biggest organ pipes are 64 feet tall - for example the Contra-Trombone in the Sydney Town Hall Grand Organ. I wonder what that feels like!

Helmholtz wrote:

"The 16-foot C of the organ, with 88 vibrations in a second, certainly gives a tolerably continuous sensation of drone, but does not allow us to give it a definite position in the musical scale. We almost begin to observe the separate pulses of air, notwithstanding the regular form of the motion. In the upper haIf of the 32-foot octave, the perception of the separate pulses becomes still clearer, and the continuous part of the sensation, which may be compared with a sensation of tone, continually weaker, and in the lower half of the 32-foot octave we can scarcely be said to hear anything but the individual pulses, or if anything else is really heard, it can only be weak upper partial tones, from which the musical tones of stopped pipes are not quite free."

From his great book On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of music, free here:

https://archive.org/details/onsensationsofto00helmrich

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@johncarlosbaez
(metal ahead)

The beginning of “Mind's Mirrors” in Meshuggah's album “Catch Thirty-Three” has a few guitar strums like this; I'd heard it a lot without actually knowing what it was and only had it pointed out to me by a nice youtuber (who did a whole series analysing the rhythmic and melodic patterns in that album): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aAFt57KEY&t=100s

(time-stamp should be at 1:40, a bit before he plays the strum)

it would definitely hit different with an actual pipe organ though…

aparrish, to random
@aparrish@friend.camp avatar

i am looking at languages for making little diagrams and the projects truly run the open source gamut from "still hosted on sourceforge" https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/ to "we've got a discord and a variable sans-serif font" https://mermaid.js.org/ to "our documentation is a 1300 page PDF" https://github.com/pgf-tikz/pgf

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@aparrish there's https://tikz.dev which is the (unofficial) html version of the 1300 page pdf if you'd prefer that but personally would love to see more hand-drawn (technical?) diagrams on the interwebs so i'm looking forward to whatever you are making (it's one of my favourite parts about Crafting Interpreters)

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@aparrish omg you use Piazzolla on your website!! I love that font. same foundry/designer as Alegreya; he's made some really good ones :3

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@aparrish ikr. i was skeptical at first tbh but then i came across its type specimen website (https://piazzolla.huertatipografica.com) which is the best i've ever seen. i use it on stackexchange/stackoverflow and wikipedia as the main body font. it's so legible. ^-^

markmccaughrean, to random
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social avatar

Vulture club.

Six large lappet-faced vultures over at the waterhole in the Namib desert just now, with temperatures around 39ºC.

But don't go there – it's very addictive 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydYDqZQpim8

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@markmccaughrean omg there's a jackal there and i can hear it drinking the water. this is too precious.

khaled, to random

A new libre math typeface to join the list of typefaces for math typesetting, IBM Plex Math, still beta:
https://github.com/IBM/plex/issues/250#issuecomment-1943481815

(OpenType MATH table engineering by me)

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@khaled thank you, can't wait to try it out.

very happy to also see Mikael Sundqvist and others are already testing it out. I've been tangentially following his and Hans Hagen's work on math typography and it's great to see more libre math fonts being made and tested extensively. thank you for your work.

teledyn, to Cosmology

don't ya just love it when a 2014 paper cites long gone URLs in the bibliography? More to the point (?) anyone know if this exists anywhere?

M. Hart, and G.S. Smoot, Rhythms of the Universe, a 360°
Production in association with the Berkeley Center for
Cosmological Physics at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, 2013. www.ustream.tv/recorded/39395730E.

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@teledyn that url seems to redirect to this video: https://video.ibm.com/recorded/39395730 which has a screening of the short film (starts about 20:00 in)

i had to use a vpn because for some reason my government has banned that domain lmao (even though it redirects to video.ibm.com)

elizabethtasker, to random
@elizabethtasker@mastodon.online avatar

I'm reading (or more accurately, listening to the audiobook) "Murtagh": the 5th book in the Eragon series by Christopher Paolini.

It's pretty terrible.

Paolini became famous for writing a "Lord of the Ring"-type book when he was a teenager. It sold so well that no editor touched the subsequent works, which became ludicrously bloated.

"Murtagh" could be cut by at least 2/3, and the majority of the tale is Murtagh being randomly tortured.

But. I somehow feel obliged to finish. 6 hours to go.

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@elizabethtasker damn, hadn't even heard of this. I'm lucky in that I finished the Eragon series early in my childhood, so I have fond-ish memories of it…which has kept me from revisiting it (after other disastrous revisits).

re: bloated—I remember finally finishing the whole series and crying lmao it was such an effort to get through it and it ending was too much for 12 year old me (Percy Jackson and Artemis Fowl were next 😭). Maybe I'll re-read the whole thing some day and include this one.

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@elizabethtasker shout out to Kofi Kingston's WWE theme song which I played on repeat while re-reading the last few chapters of the last book over and over again in an attempt to stop crying so much (it's a pretty festive tune).

It didn't work and I've successfully pavlov'd myself into bursting into tears whenever I hear it playing.

noctalgia, to Astro

I am certainly skeptical. Especially if Space.com is in favor it.

A simple streetlight hack could protect astronomy from urban light pollution

https://www.space.com/astronomy-light-pollution-streetlight-hack

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@noctalgia man i thought this was going to be about shielding for streetlights or something, this is some moronic shit. what about visual astronomy? Are we going to put the out-of-phase shutter thing on our eyes as well? How much is that going to bump up costs in an already expensive hobby? This has to be the most tech-bro shit I've ever seen.

telescoper, to random
@telescoper@mastodon.social avatar

The Return of a Small Universe?

Today I attended a cosmology discussion group where the paper being considered, was by Jean-Luc Lehners and Jerome Quintin and was entitled A small Universe. Here is the abstract: Many cosmological models assume or imply that the total size of the universe is very large, perhaps even infinite. Here we argue instead that the universe might be comparatively small, in fact not much larger than the currently observed size.

http://telescoper.blog/2023/10/05/the-return-of-a-small-universe/

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@telescoper you've been hacker news'd: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37778082

startswithabang, to random
@startswithabang@astrodon.social avatar

Anyone else finding that when you google for historical events/discoveries that occurred at some point in the past, you no longer get a quasi-reliable source like Wikipedia or some university webpage, but instead get a bunch of low-quality "study sites" like Khan Academy, Chegg, or some tutorial/online school site?

IDK about you, but I hate it. The "low-quality" results are taking over.

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@startswithabang yes, esp. in India, where for some reason everyone and their mother operates a “coaching center” each one with its own website and low quality AI generated/stolen content.

Any query with even one keyword that would be familiar to high-schooler/early undergrad needs a reddit/stackexchange/<insert technical blogs of known quality :P>; search results otherwise are just pointless SEO gibberish.

Some search engines like https://kagi.com/ allow deranking/blocking of such sites

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@startswithabang but kagi is a paid service (even if it is fairly cheap considering the value provided). There's also https://search.marginalia.nu/ which focuses on non-commercial content.

but i feel like pretty much every search engine drags up way too much shit, so some form of deranking from the client side is going to be essential, especially in the post-SEO world that Google has created. I'm not a Kagi user yet, but every search on google/ddg/bing/whateever is taking me closer.

markmccaughrean, to Astro
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social avatar

And we are live 🙀

It has only taken 25 years to get to this point, but here we are.

I'll post much more soon, but first I think need a moment.

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Webb_s_wide-angle_view_of_the_Orion_Nebula_is_released_in_ESASky

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@markmccaughrean it's a rare day when i look at a space telescope image and go hey i recognize that pattern of stars. Amazing; absolutely love the colours too—we need more purples and greens in astrophotography.

vicgrinberg, to fediverse
@vicgrinberg@mastodon.social avatar

1/16 This July, I gave an invited talk in the "Communicating Science Through Art" session at the European Astronomical Society annual meeting, organized by the amazing @theastrophoenix . And I thought it may be something that would also interest you #fediverse folks.

The aim of the talk was partly to give people insight into my why & how of my art. But mainly to encourage others to just try. In a very subjective manner.

A thread: 🧵

#VicisArt #AcademicChatter #SciArt #SciComm #WissKomm #Art

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@vicgrinberg
> the humbling experience of having been better as a kid

as a piano kid™ and an art kid™ who quit both fairly young (for non-health reasons), that hits hard. noticing a lot of people adding sketches and doodles to go with their work/writings, and it really does elevate it. ig it's time to learn how to use krita and inkscape. only so far i can take myself with just tikz :3

i do have a laundry list of things i want to illustrate, so i doubt there will be a shortage of ideas :P

elizabethtasker, to random
@elizabethtasker@mastodon.online avatar

People. We need to talk about K2-18b.

Contrary to almost EVERY SINGLE HEADLINE last week, has not detected life on this planet. And... actually, it did not detect water either!

It's time to snap on the marigolds 🧽 and clean up some bullshit 🪐 🐮 . And then take a serious look at how we're planning to discuss life detection on other worlds 👽 .

An exo-bloggity~: https://girlandkat.com/research-blog/2023/9/17/k2-18b-we-urgently-need-to-get-our-shit-together-about-life-detection

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@elizabethtasker thanks for writing this up; it's a very accessible overview of the paper and the science here. very often it's hard to read papers not just because the methods are hard but there's so much context assumed to be known to the reader, so there's always the uncertainty of not knowing if you're interpreting things correctly. having someone in the field distill down the main points with that context and confirm/correct is always a great find.

the_guruji, to random
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

Watching the First Year of JWST Science conference livestream, and a nice image of SN2023dbc by @naz features in a (also very nice) supernova talk by Melissa Shahbandeh.

joelchan86, to til

that you can place inline histograms in a paper... presumably with some LaTeX magic?? or just a... screenshot/emoji of a real histogram? what is this wizardry?

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@stephan @joelchan86 @AndrzejWasowski not nearly as fine control as sparklines, but Datalegreya: https://github.com/figs-lab/datalegreya, based on Alegreya Sans does something like this with but with the lines going through the letters. only 3 levels though iirc.

but in general, sparklines/inline histograms like that seem straightforward to achieve with tikz, for example.

ExoHugh, to random
@ExoHugh@mastodon.online avatar

Ah, the infamous . Hyped to hell after a paper called "Water vapour in the atmosphere of the habitable- zone planet K2-18 b" in 2019... now a far more precise spectrum from reveals... actually there was no H2O after all.
The JWST spectrum is quite nice though (if a bit noisy), and reveals an unusual methane-dominated H2 atmosphere suggestive of a very low atmospheric C/O ratio and metallicity in the atmosphere - not what I would have expected! https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05566

the_guruji,
@the_guruji@astrodon.social avatar

@elizabethtasker @ExoHugh also just found out that the lead author gave a talk on this, as part of the First Year of JWST Science conference (https://www.stsci.edu/contents/events/stsci/2023/september/the-first-year-of-jwst-science-conference).
Recording/stream of the talk from that page: https://cloudproject.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=ba3f9ab0-1572-4424-973c-b07a00f03f83

The relevant talk starts at 5:18:31.

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