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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 5h

Bell-Burnell very much stayed in physics and became President of the Royal Astronomical Society & later the Institute of Physics. She noticed the pulsar and it was only her persistence that got it noted. Later, she was excluded from discussions about what she found. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn...

Screenshot of "nobel prize controversy" section of linked article

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Reposted by Emily Hunt

Yvette Cendes @whereisyvette.bsky.social · 6h

Are you interested in working on astronomical transients/ radio astronomy, all while exploring the beautiful Pacific Northwest on your weekends? I'm hiring a postdoc! Come work for me!

aas.org/jobregister/...

Please get in touch if you have any questions!

🔭🧪🎢

Postdoctoral Positions in Time-Domain Astronomy | American Astronomical Society

The department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Oregon invites applications for a postdoctoral scholar to work with Prof. Yvette Cendes in the field of time-domain astrophysics. This inc...

aas.org

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 6h

This is a common myth. The year after Bell-Burnell was snubbed, Aage Bohr was one of the recipients of the 1975 Nobel prize in physics.

He was a PhD student when he did the work.

Aage Bohr - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

This is tragic - UW is a great place for grad students. 🔭☄️

Do we know why? 🫤

Meg Schwamb @megschwamb.bsky.social · 1d

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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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

One of the worst ones 🫠 giving the Nobel to her PhD supervisor instead of her.

To this day, the Nobel committee has never admitted wrong in her case (or any other), and they probably never will, because they are only interested in saving face

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

Incredible woman who went through so so much, and the idea that she somehow didn't deserve a Nobel for her work is so utterly ludicrous

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

> PhD from the university, and ended up as the first woman full professor of physics in Germany.

And *then* the Nazis stole her professorship in 1935 because she was Jewish, and she had to flee to Sweden, and yet she STILL managed in 1938-39 to derive the theory behind nuclear fission.

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

Read today about how Meitner became a French teacher because teaching was the only allowed job for women. Then, when Vienna allowed women to enroll, she crammed all of high school into just two years to be able to pass the entrance exam, went on to become only the second woman to get a physics >

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

eep

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

All programming (they've only learnt Python so far)

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

doing a PhD Stockholm syndrome'd me so hard that I pretty much just enjoy stress now 😅

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

Live tech demos don't scare me anymore, it's hilarious fun when something doesn't work and I have to improvise in front of 50 people 😅

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

I feel like an important part of being a software engineer is hating every single tool and language other than a very small number of things 😅

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

Today's reading begins with Lise Meitner, who co-discovered nuclear fission (she wrote the paper!) and was in general an INCREDIBLE trailblazing scientist.

Except, as a Jew, she had to flee Nazi Germany to Sweden and lost her professorship in Berlin. The men she worked with got the prize instead 🧪🔭

Lise Meitner - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

Oooh the Nobel Prize is out today, so it's time for my yearly round of ignoring that news and reading about many of the women who were snubbed of the prize in the past and who the Nobel Prize committee refuses to apologise for. 🧪🔭

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

This isn't a dig at the Python course here, which I think is really well done - I think it's symptomatic of how girls are systematically encouraged not to do 'nerdy' computer-related things and struggle with it later in life. The pipeline leaks

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

It is absurdly depressing to ask a class of Bachelor students if they don't like using Python, and immediately 50% of the women in the room (and almost no men) put their hands up. #astroedu

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

I've seen it - but there are also other PDS implementations, and the basic PDS implementation doesn't really have amazing mod tools (just a CLI tool) & I still wonder about legal things unfortunately. It's fine to host a small private PDS, but >1000 people is another challenge

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

We have good hosting infrastructure (everything is bare metal but managed by ansible, so is a breeze), so in principle I could spin this up pretty damn quickly - I just want to get it right, most of all, and not run in to e.g. legal pitfalls

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

ATProto devs - what do we need to do to ship independent PDS hosting to the Astronomy community ASAP?

Main Qs:
1. What software should we use (reference PDS implementation? The rsky one? Or another)
2. Legal aspects: what do we need to be careful of? Does GDPR apply? + are there PDS mod tools?

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

about to phone hetzner and ask them to unlock the big server options on our account 🥺 it is time

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

It feels like there has been a huge tone shift in the last 1-2 weeks from the Bluesky team, and I think it's very plausible that they're under major threat from the US government.

Most of the foundational work has already happened - now is the time to decentralise the network ASAP.

Laurens @laurenshof.online · 5d

connect the dots

jason koebler post: so the US government just forced a tech company to delete an app it doesn’t like, which is totally normal stuff, with link to 404. media article

truth social post by trump, calling the democratic party the party of hate, evil and satan

THE FEDERALIST: While this alleged assassin used Discord, there are other platforms that are cesspools of left-wing radicalism — where the standard-bearers of the American liberal movement are openly cheering Kirk’s assassination. Another such platform is Bluesky.

While Apple, Amazon, and Google removed the social media app Parler from their platforms after it was falsely said to have had a connection with the January 6 riot at the Capitol, they are silent on the fact that Discord and Bluesky are allowing the celebration and encouragement of political violence.

The Big Tech oligarchs could use some encouragement, perhaps in the form of legal liability.

Blueskyism
American political pundit Nate Silver wrote about Blueskyism early september. In the article, Silver first sets out the statistics of how user activity on Bluesky is declining (which it is). Then he follows with the statement that Blueskyism predates Bluesky, and describes Blueskyism as behaviour Silver does not approve of: criticising people on other parts of the political spectrum, valuing academic authority, and being too dissatisfied with the current state of the world.

Blogger and centrist pundit Noah Smith followed up on Silver’s writing about Blueskyism, in a blog titled ‘The Bluesky-ization of the American left’. The article is mainly about grievances that Bari Weiss got criticised too hard on Twitter in the late 2010s, and how he’s upset that Jamelle Bouie called Smith a ‘a weird antisocial loser’.

On the surface these articles are simply grievances from centrist pundits who are extremely online and are very bothered that people on Bluesky criticise them. They are trying to paint a picture of Bluesky as a network in decline. Their articles do not mention it at all, but at least Silver is explicitly aware how important Bluesky has become to the scientific community.

However, both articles serve two important purposes:

It provides moral cover for people who might otherwise grapple with the implications of being active on X that it’s fine to do so because Bluesky is not a real alternative.
It sets up a permission structure where Bluesky is seen as a left and democratic space. This is what makes both articles relevant. I think their arguments are petty and show that they have not grappled with the subject matter well, but that matters little: it is a major contributor to the idea that Bluesky is a ‘left’ space.

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

We maybe don't give the kids enough credit. A lot of them scroll and use social media a lot, but they also grew up with it & know it well, and presumably also know how damaging and shitty it can be far better than other generations

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 1d

Absolutely fascinating data: almost everywhere other than in North America, screen time use has gone *down* since 2022. Has social media enshittified itself too much?

Dr. Jens Foell @jensfoell.de · 1d

This sounds plausible to me. But if it’s true, it means that the age of social media might be over soon, with only the old and wrinkled (like myself) spending any actual time there.

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Reposted by Emily Hunt

Henry Ngo @astrodino.planetngo.ca · 1d

It's the start of postdoc job application season again. I see quite a few #astro fellowship postdocs posting the same salary this year as they offered when I was applying in 2016, almost 9 years ago :O

For those who are applying, this was the hardest part of my career! Take care of yourselves <3

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