← Feed

Posts

• Post #3994972

  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" is the US shooting itself in the foot. It took me 6 years to complete my PhD in the US. Would the border guards have let me back in to complete it after the new 4 year deadline? Who knows. For more than a dozen years after I...

• Post #3908311

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

• Post #3827191

  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

• Post #3356484

  Any astronomers looking for a wild new job? I got a message from an ecologist in Belgium today, and he's looking for a postdoc with experience in photometry to work on analysis of all-sky imagery for an experiment on the impact of #LightPollution on birds. This is not a job offer! He would work together with the candidate on an internal university grant. If anyone is interested (PhD in #astronomy or closely related field required), send me a message.

• Post #2296392

  WOW! An astronaut on the #InternationalSpaceStation captured a photo of the last rays of sun hitting a tall mountain in the #Himalayas (I've adjusted the contrast to show more detail in the parts that aren't directly lit by the sun. Original here: https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ISS074&roll=E&frame=88374) #RemoteSensing #Sunset #Photography #Nature #Mountains

• Post #2086685

  I misread someone's German political post, and initially thought it said "schmerz-rote Koalition" instead of "schwarz-rote Koalition" 😂

• Post #2086684

  Question for academics who have spent time in both Germany and North America: How would you translate "Hausarbeit" into English? A colleague of mine says that "essay" doesn't work for her, because she sees an essay as always having a strong central thesis, whereas a Hausarbeit does not. (That kind of surprises me, because I pretty much always have a thesis in mind when I write something, even if it isn't explicit. But maybe I'm still l...

• Post #2086681

  I'm teaching an undergraduate class this semester called "Introduction to Nighttime Lights", and I want to share this (from the EU) because it's absolutely AMAZING how much more efficient lights have become in the last 15 years. For outdoor applications, high pressure sodium had already offered very high luminous efficacies (100 lm/W or better) for decades, but those lights weren't appropriate for indoor use. The last 3 classes I've tried to dr...

• Post #1769618

  In 2021, hundreds of citizen scientists walked a distance of 600 km, counting up and classifying all of the outdoor lights they could see while they did it. The results of their observations have just been published in the journal Nature Cities: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-025-00239-5 Find out why they did it, and what they found out in this thread 👇 (1/) #CitizenScience #LightPollution #OpenAccess #NighttimeLights #RemoteSensing #Nachtlichter

• Post #1758958

  I was today years old when I learned that scientists from the 17th century had their own form of "preprints" to lay claim to ideas before they got them officially published. Galileo wrote in a letter to Kepler "Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur o.y.", in English "These are now too young to be read by me". *After* his work was formally published, he explained the anagram to Kepler: "Cynthiae figuras aemulatur mater amorum&amp...

• Post #1032225

  If you have some time, this article is worth a read: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying

• Post #1008852

  A paper that I co-authored was just published (#OpenAccess) a few minutes ago in Nature 🎉 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10260-w Here's a short thread about what we did and what we learned 👇 #LightPollution #Energy #ALAN #RemoteSensing #NightLightRemoteSensing #EarthObservation #VIIRS_DNB

• Post #900377

  RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324676116121930 This thread is amazing. A data center is probably being built next to you as we speak (making noise, sealing the soil, raising your electricity price, and burning natural gas) because computer code written by "AI" is disastrously, shockingly, hilariously inefficient.

• Post #700679

  Dusting the tops of shelves: the last, best defense of the procrastinator.

• Post #700677

  It's hilarious that Trump - the guy who is so bad at being President he made George W. Bush look good in hindsight - has started saying that Starmer is "no Churchill". But it makes me wonder what witticism Churchill might have come up with about Trump if he were alive today 🤔

• Post #565785

  I'd love for a journalist to ask the following question to one of the Prime Ministers, Chancellors, or Presidents who say they think what the US is doing is right (even if they don't want their country to join the war): "If a civil war results from the bombings and elimination of leadership in Iran, how many Iranian refugees are you planning to welcome?" #Iran #Refugees #Carney #Merz

• Post #537599

  15 years ago, I co-authored my first paper in the field of #LightPollution studies: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0017307 Up to that point, work on artificial brightening of the sky had been done almost entirely by astronomers, who (for obvious reasons) weren't really interested in cloudy nights. But because I was involved closely with ecologists from the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries @LeibnizIGB, we realized that it's also important to meas...

• Post #510081

  RE: https://mastodon.online/@BrentToderian/116152369590601768 More than half a year old but boosting because everyone should know about this.