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Benjamin Pope

@benjaminpope.bsky.social

4K followers 900 following 1.5K posts

Australian astronomer he/him Sydney/Gadi

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 8d

Super happy about this paper today led by the brilliant @astroshashank.bsky.social - equations and information theory about what an interferometer really encodes about a stellar surface.

Shashank Dholakia @astroshashank.bsky.social · 9d

New paper by me and @benjaminpope.bsky.social! How well can we map a star using optical interferometry?

This is just a submitted preprint at the moment--comments and questions welcome! (1/N)

arxiv.org/abs/2509.25433

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 41m

it’s doubly good that you can make it to the sunlit roof of a pub!

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 1h

no joke we should have daylight savings all the time, leaving the office while the sun is still up is so good

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 1h

this is serious! people have died and continue to die! The bloodiest conflict in decades and it's covered like entertainment news!

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 1h

I feel like I'm going insane that the Herald and the Foreign Minister are discussing peace in Palestine in terms of a fanciful peace prize for Trump. We're on aestheticization of politics level 7 or 8 by now and it's so dumb

SMH: "Why Trump is unlikely to win Nobel Peace Prize, even with breakthrough"

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 1h

Surely we have to consider the possibility they kicked him out bc he was winning all the footy matches

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...

Pocock booted from pollie sports club after criticising gambling lobby sponsor

The former star Wallabies player turned independent senator was kicked out of the social sports club after raising concerns about its links to the gambling industry.

www.abc.net.au

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 4h

look it would be *awesome* to have David Pocock on your amateur sports team, but to play against David Pocock on a different amateur sports team...

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 5h

Solidarity Gerard, the country is going crazy. You've been doing great science for a long time and we're here to support you in continuing!

Reposted by Benjamin Pope

Dr. Gerard van Belle @fringedoctor.bsky.social · 6h

Brief life update: On Monday I resigned from my appointment at Lowell Observatory. I wish my remaining friends and colleagues the best of luckin their endeavors in increasing new visitor center visitation, and continuing to pursue world-class research in the face of having ended tenure today.

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Rocketpilot 🇵🇸 @rocketpilot.xyz · 5h

Academics often are surprisingly driven by fads, but academic administrators? Those people are utterly, embarrassingly debilitated by fad-chasing

Eric Michael Garcia @ericmgarcia.bsky.social · 5h

The UNC School of Data Science and Society and the School of Information and Library Science will be consolidating into a new school focused on artificial intelligence.
www.dailytarheel.com/article/univ...

UNC schools of data science and information science to merge, forming unnamed ‘School of AI’

SDSS Dean Stanley Ahalt will be made dean of the new school while SILS Dean Jeffrey Bardzell will stand as the University’s Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer and Vice Provost for AI.

www.dailytarheel.com

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 5h

The subtext of this appears to be that Lowell, a major centre of astronomy, is substantially gutting its research department.

Lowell Observatory Announces Strategic Changes to Sustain Research Mission - Lowell Observatory

Lowell Observatory Announces Strategic Changes to Sustain Research Mission Flagstaff, Arizona – Lowell Observatory today announces a strategic restructuring of its science program to ensure the long...

lowell.edu

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 6h

seems great for the economy that we have done this. will personally love to pay three fifths of nothing for A100 and H100 time but my spending power is to put it mildly quite low

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 8h

Every single AI data center is a toxic investment, with most of its value tied up in GPUs that will be multiple generations behind by the time these things turn on - and then die in 3-5 years.

All to build for AI demand that doesn't exist.
edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

Actually, wait - how long do GPUs last, exactly? Four years for training? Three years? The A100 GPU started shipping in May 2020, and the H100 (and the Hopper GPU generation) entered full production in September 2022, meaning that we’re hurtling at speed toward the time in which we’re going to start seeing a remarkable amount of chips start wearing down, which should be a concern for companies like Microsoft, who bought 150,000 Hopper GPUs in 2023 and 485,000 of them in 2024.
Alright, let me just be blunt: the entire economy of debt around GPUs is insane.
Assuming these things don’t die within five years (their warranties generally end in three), their value absolutely will, as NVIDIA has committed to releasing a new AI chip every single year, likely with significant increases to power and power efficiency. At the end of the five year period, the Special Purpose Vehicle will be the proud owner of five-year-old chips that nobody is going to want to rent at the price that Elon Musk has been paying for the last five years. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the rental prices for H100 GPUs that went from $8-an-hour in 2023 to $2-an-hour in 2024, or the Silicon Data Indexes (aggregated realtime indexes of hourly prices) that show H100 rentals at around $2.14-an-hour and A100 rentals at a dollar-an-hour, with Vast.AI offering them at as little as $0.67 an hour.
This is, by the way, a problem that faces literally every data center being built in the world, and I feel insane talking about it. It feels like nobody is talking about how impossible and ridiculous all of this is - it’s one thing that OpenAI has promised one trillion dollars to people - it’s another that large swaths of that will be spent on hardware that will, by the end of these agreements, be half-obsolete and generating less revenue than ever.
Think about it - let’s assume we live in a fantasy land where OpenAI is somehow able to pay Oracle $300 billion over 5 years. Said money is paying for access to Blackwell…

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 7h

This essay is excellent, but one line hit me hard - "when people say that it is the job of college professors to keep students engaged but that we can also not ban devices, I want to sigh performatively—how, exactly, am I supposed to keep them hooked when Hollywood can’t keep them hooked?"

Liam Hogan @liamhogan.id.au · 8h

Read this you muppets: Paul Musgrave on post-literacy

musgrave.substack.com/p/a-post-lit...

A Post-Literate Society is a Too-Literal Society

Directness is a virtue and subtlety is lost

musgrave.substack.com

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 7h

genuinely going to cause me productivity problems to have this in the lobby of my building. Reckon I might have to look at it for five minutes every time I go in and out

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 9h

beginning to worry I have signed up to too many things

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Yvette Cendes @whereisyvette.bsky.social · 9h

Congratulations to @kelbadry.bsky.social for becoming a McArthur genius!!! 🤩🥳

www.caltech.edu/about/news/k...

🔭🧪🎢

Kareem El-Badry Named a 2025 MacArthur Fellow

www.caltech.edu

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Jason Wilson @jasonaw.bsky.social · 10h

I am the last in a long line of Catholics which is why I would not have characterized a pope raising the plight of the poor as divisive

The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 14h

As Pope Leo begins to reveal some of his views on divisive issues, some conservative critics of his predecessor are rejecting the possible rise of another “liberal pope.”

As Pope Leo riles conservatives, some say ‘just focus on the church’

Conservatives who hoped that Leo, the first U.S.-born pope, would be more of a traditionalist instead hear echoes of his predecessor, Francis, in his public statements.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Prof Anna Watts @profannawatts.bsky.social · 12h

Lol the Nobels can't even acknowledge women's contribution to discovery. But sure let's acknowledge The Machines.

Headline from an article in Nature this week that states "Prizes must recognize machine contributions to discovery. The future of science will be written by humans and machines together. Awards should reflect that reality."

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 21h

Looking forward to this!

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Rebecca McElroy @breaky.bsky.social · 21h

Yay Tam! Couldn’t have gone to a more deserving person.

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 21h

Super proud of @tamarastro.bsky.social winning this year’s Moyal Medal!

Tamara Davis pointing at a picture of herself on a big screen listing Moyal Medal recipients

Dean of Science Prof Sam Muller awarding Tamara Davis the Moyal Medal

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 21h

Super proud of @tamarastro.bsky.social winning this year’s Moyal Medal!

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 22h

Excited to have a tour today of the new AAO building at Macquarie, where the astronomers and engineers are just beginning to bump into their new facilities! The atrium and forum are going to be awesome event spaces and the labs are enormous.

View of a student study area, curtained with chain links

View of a huge lab, currently full of boxes as it is set up

View of The Forum, an event and social space at the front of the new AAO

View of the atrium looking out, with staircases spanning a large airy space

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 22h

This hologram (I believe the world’s deepest, and the largest laser transmission hologram) depicts the before, during, and after of a New Year’s party hosted by the artist. It was painstakingly reconstructed in the lab from photos by artist Fiona Hall - astronomer Ruby Payne-Scott’s daughter!

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 22h

Wonderful to tour the new Jim Piper Centre at Macquarie, and see Paula Dawson’s To Absent Friends in the new gallery!

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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 1d

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

nyti.ms

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 1d

repost this if an editor has ever saved you from yourself

violent alien @blipstress.bsky.social · 1d

An actual hot take: Too many authors are afraid of editors watering down their voice or whatever and not afraid enough of editors letting you put any old slop on the page.

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