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👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻

@joeyneilsen.bsky.social

4.5K followers 1.1K following 4.7K posts

Black hole astrophysicist at Villanova. Formerly: MIT, Boston University, Harvard, Kenyon College | X-rays | husband | dad of 2 | cooking. He/him. Skeets are my own.

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👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · Sep 4

Wow hi new followers! I’m a physics professor and I study black holes. I’m here to talk about teaching, science, marriage, parenting, cooking, dogs, politics, my crumbling old house. I heart dad jokes. Trans rights are human rights, Black Lives Matter, and I abhor violence.

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👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 7h

I recall, for example, a conversation in which a postdoc told me that the only things that had value were ones that could be quantified. 😶

Many scientists I know love and appreciate and do all sorts of creative pursuits! But it's also not hard to find disdain for things that aren't "hard science."

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 8h

I think scientists are sometimes dismissive of creative work. It's sad for a lot of reasons, one of which is certainly that creative work makes the world a richer place to live. Another one is that scientists are extremely dependent on the idea machine and ought to celebrate all its many dispensers.

Emma Evans @trance.bsky.social · 8h

questions which are stupid because they're asking for magic shortcuts. They want to know how to do a thing without work.

Which is why also creatives are often treated like what we do isn't work

NOT REALLY.

When skull sweat is labor and laborous.

Anyway when all else fails, sleep on it.

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👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 16h

When my wife was a teenager, she was trying to get a horse back into its stall after riding, and it stepped on her foot. Not on accident, not in passing. It put its hoof on top of her foot and pressed down so she couldn't move. Why? Just because.

Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social · 18h

horses can SERIOUSLY injure you with their jaws - do not ever antagonize enormous animals with opinions

Rivikah @rivikah.bsky.social · 18h

My grandfather was missing a finger and a half from his right hand due to it being bitten off by a horse.

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 16h

There are dozens of us

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 1d

💀

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 1d

Gotta give it up for nurses tho

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 1d

I had to do chores instead of the work I needed to do and now I’m too mad to work

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👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 1d

Rats 😭

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · May 15

Last year, I was racing to finish a proposal for time on a shiny new space telescope. But mom had been sick, and there hadn't been time to work on it. 30 min before the deadline, I got a call to come home, and I dropped everything. Today, that proposal is submitted. I think Mom would be proud. I am.

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👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 2d

As I see it only ONE person came to your defense after that hot dog stunt you just pulled. So...

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 2d

This is just the correct way to eat a hot dog tho, except I'm a ketchup guy

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👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 2d

I think it's seasonal... maybe they just celebrated Canadian Christmas?

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 2d

cold french fries ftw

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👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 3d

I have been saying that shows need to explain how their characters got from one timeline to another

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 4d

Correct

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 4d

My crappy TV screen can't even show things that dark. Full brightness ftw

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 4d

You should be able to control the speed so that no time is wasted between turns.

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👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 7d

Me, Friday night: you guys gotta clean your room before you can play video games tomorrow

Later:

Kid 1: dad can you think of a system that keeps our room cleaner?

Me: what about putting stuff away when you’re done with it?

Later:

Kid 2: we’re going to clean our room every Saturday

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 10d

a man in a star trek uniform is laying on a bed with his head on a pillow

Alt: will riker awakes to find a his room illuminated by flickering light and a portal at the foot of his bed. he is pulled off the bed and floats through the air into the portal. his facial expressions betray an understandable lack of calm.

media.tenor.com

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 10d

It's more like pancake batter spiked with cinnamon. But cornbread peach cobbler sounds great! My wife made a cornmeal rhubarb cake a while back and I made that NYT blueberry upside down cornmeal cake a couple times this summer.

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👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 10d

Read this as "halloween candles" and though "ok well I can't disagree with ALL of this."

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 10d

We came across sonker from a recipe PURPORTING to be a cobbler. It was amazing but distinctly not a cobbler.

The Street Corn Trick You’ll Want to Use All Summer

No fireworks needed—this cobbler steals the show with juicy blueberries and buttery crumble. It’s the perfect sweet sleeper hit to round out your July 4th party spread.

tastesbetterfromscratch.com

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👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 11d

This was one of the most influential PhD theses in all of astrophysics. Knowing what stars are made of and what temperature they are allows you to do basically everything else.

👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 11d

You gotta scratch the tomatoes harder if you don't want pulp

Reposted by 👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻

Robert “The Bobby Yaga” McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 11d

If there is one physics formula everyone knows, it's E=mc².

Einstein proposed the famous equivalence between energy and mass in his second special relativity manuscript. It was received by Annalen der Physik #OTD in 1905, the day after they published his first special relativity paper. 🧪 ⚛️

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👻 Prof. Ghosty Neilsen 👻 @joeyneilsen.bsky.social · 11d

My whole family had to get the full sequence of rabies shots twice bc bats in the house and you don’t take that risk.

The shots are just regular shots, whatever. But the only place where we could reliably get the vaccine was the ER, so it was four ER trips for four people. Twice. 😭🤯💸

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