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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 · 6d

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 · 7d

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 · 4h

It's so good! Thank you so much!

Reposted by Benjamin Pope

Rebecca McElroy @breaky.bsky.social · 5h

Lovely to see my art out in the world! I made this fun logo for the Stellar and Planetary Research in Greater Sydney (@sprigs.au) group. How many subfields can you spot in the flowers?

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 8h

Turns out you can still break your favourite enamelware cup if you drop it on concrete hard enough

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 13h

Totally diabolical funding situation if UW, one of the best departments in the USA, has had to pause admissions.

Meg Schwamb @megschwamb.bsky.social · 15h

Sad to see the University of Washington Astronomy Department has suspended graduate admissions for the 2026-2027 Academic Year. astro.washington.edu/graduate-adm...

Graduate Admissions | Department of Astronomy | University of Washington

The Department of Astronomy has suspended graduate admissions for the 2026-2027 Academic Year. General Information for applying to UW Astronomy Graduate Program. Applications must be submitted using ...

astro.washington.edu

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Reposted by Benjamin Pope

Meg Schwamb @megschwamb.bsky.social · 15h

Sad to see the University of Washington Astronomy Department has suspended graduate admissions for the 2026-2027 Academic Year. astro.washington.edu/graduate-adm...

Graduate Admissions | Department of Astronomy | University of Washington

astro.washington.edu

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 14h

Certainly something like that - depends how completely new the slides and how familiar the material, can easily be more

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 1d

it's actually not two Nobels for Josephson junctions, just one that tunnelled over a gap of 52 years

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 1d

Look I’m really hoping to get some cheap GPUs second hand to use for science when it bursts, but I’d rather that it not collapse our whole society on the way

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 1d

Oh no

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 1d

the best thing about it being 30 years of 51 Peg b is that I can tell students "when I was a kid we didn't even know if there were exoplanets" and they look at me like I'm Methuselah

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 1d

the thing is I can see why they did it, it's necessary in context to use it as a countable noun, we're seeing linguistic innovation in real time people

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 1d

thanks - yeah a GP pipeline for rotation periods is not a new thing and there are many implementations, but a stable one you can pip install that uses a recent Jax version would be pretty helpful

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 1d

broke: data is an uncountable noun
woke: the singular of data is datum
bespoke, in a paper I am reading: the plural of datum is datums

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 1d

nice work - just a question, I see the code for this at github.com/ssagynbayeva... - afaik there's a current lack of good off-the-shelf student-friendly rotation period codes, interested in packaging this up?

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Matthew Buckley @physicsmatt.bsky.social · 1d

Advising students thinking about grad school is always a difficult thing to do: I want to be appropriately encouraging, while also discussing the pitfalls and the realities of the academic job market.

Which is why I’m goddamn fucking furious about how much harder this year’s students have it.

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Reposted by Benjamin Pope

Mike Sowden @mikeachim.bsky.social · 1d

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy:
www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

Post from Threads user rodneyowl: "Ireland has declared the Basic Income for Artists scheme permanent. This will be officially announced in tomorrow’s budget. Details to follow. Congratulations to all who fought for it and the present and future artists of all sorts in Ireland. That includes me 👌We’re just comin to the end of a 3 year pilot scheme. It’s been a roaring success. For every €1 paid out to the 2000 participants, the government got €1.46 back. Can’t argue with that. Other countries are already taking note."

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 1d

This is so great

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 1d

Official death toll must be by this stage an order of magnitude higher than this too

Reposted by Benjamin Pope

Shashank Dholakia @astroshashank.bsky.social · 2d

And as a bonus, here's a false-color composite of the same. Blue is mapped to all of visible, green is infrared beyond 850nm, and red is the methane band at 889nm.

🔭 #astrophotography #saturn

An azure planet on a stark black background with neon orange-pink rings seen nearly edge-on.

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Reposted by Benjamin Pope

derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 2d

jane goodall releasing a video of her listing the people she dislikes and ending with a vague message of hope is so iconic. truly someone i aspire to model myself after

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 2d

Savage Dreams is one of my favourite books and totally the most quotable Solnit

occidentalop.bsky.social @occidentalop.bsky.social · 2d

I like this passage from @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 2d

Yeah the analogy seems right to me re someone who spends a lot of time gleefully simulating torture of a barbie doll and, like, I think I wanna avoid that person and not because I am confused about whether or not the barbie is actually feeling pain.

GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE @golikehellmachine.com · 3d

i don’t think it should be very controversial to think that LLMs are not conscious beings while simultaneously thinking that people who prompt them in hateful or abusive ways are likely hateful and abusive people and it is very strange to me that people actively choose either far end of this

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Reposted by Benjamin Pope

Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 3d

"This new ratchet enhances the Signal Protocol’s resilience against future quantum computing threats while maintaining our existing security guarantees of forward secrecy and post-compromise security." Fascinating @meredithmeredith.bsky.social!

Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets

We are excited to announce a significant advancement in the security of the Signal Protocol: the introduction of the Sparse Post Quantum Ratchet (SPQR). This new ratchet enhances the Signal Protocol’s...

signal.org

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Ahhhhh @nerdjpg.com · 3d

Trying to not weigh in on this ai discussion but it’s important to remember technology exists in a political economic context and what a tech “is” and whether it is a net positive or even useful to most people is largely contingent on that context

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Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 3d

for every post someone makes that is in any way related to “being mean to AI”, one of their 5 most recent interactions with a person doing customer service should be chosen at random and appended to said post

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