Physicist and professor at a school on the north side of Chicago. Black holes, quantum gravity, cosmology. Rocky Top, Tar Heel. Science, dogs, lake photos. Faves are spooky action at a distance, boosts are Lorentz transformations to another inertial frame. Opinions are mine, not my employer’s.
#Physics #BlackHoles #Gravity #SciComm #Dogs
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2024-05-11T15:36:49+02:00 Event JSON
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Last Notes npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees We pack a handful of folks into a tin can loaded with explosives. Their computers are running Windows and the ship's toilet is malfunctioning. We hurl them at a distant rock. Everything about where they are is trying to kill them. And it is sublimely beautiful, one of the greatest things we’ve done as a species. #Artemis npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Astronaut, author, professional football player, and STEM educator Leland Melvin was born #OTD in 1964. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees I cannot stress enough that you should not do this. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees This is incredible. An MTV simulator with almost 30,000 videos, organized by decade along with special sections for Headbanger's Ball and Yo! MTV Raps. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Accidentally typed “shatbot” instead of “chatbot” and decided to cancel the autocorrect and just let that one escape into the wild. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees I’m not sure what you mean? On my end, each one of these is a reply to the previous post. Does it look different to you, or am I misunderstanding? npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Planck’s hypothesis was in fact a deep statement about the nature of Nature. Electromagnetic adiation of frequency f comes in discrete chunks of energy E=hf. It's not an artifact of a complicated interaction with matter. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees This sequence of events was a not uncommon narrative in the transformative years of late 19th and early 20th century physics. It would go something like this: npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Many physicists remained skeptical. But Arthur Compton’s 1923 explanation of X-rays scattering off electrons was near-incontrovertible evidence that quanta were real. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees If so, it was a trick that *worked*. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Machine learning (umbrella term, I know) is a useful, sometimes transformative tool in the hands of trained researchers who understand how to deploy it and critically assess the results. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees This morning, during some chaos, this zipped by on one of my feeds. Maybe it was here? Maybe it was BlueSky? Hard to overstate how much this made my day. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Lolll. Lmao, even. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees My students are often surprised to learn that LLMs aren’t answering their questions. Rather, an LLM answers the question “what would a reply to this look like?” It’s one of the first things I explain in the “Should I use LLMs?” portion of my syllabus. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees I just pulled a fraction of really good ones from the six or seven hundred I sorted through. It’s an exquisite collection. They aren’t audiophiles, just music lovers. (To be fair, they always had a great hi-fi.) npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees A few months ago, while visiting family in Tennessee, I started digging through my parents’ substantial vinyl collection. They do not listen to them — the records were just sitting in closets and a spare room, in record crates. I pulled a bunch of records to take back to Chicago. It was quite a haul. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Yesterday morning I was explaining Ozzy Osbourne to the kids in my daughter’s carpool, doing the whole RIP tour of Black Sabbath and his solo stuff, and one of them nodded solemnly and said “Fly high, metal grandpa.” npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Chicago! There’s aurora! Even through all the light pollution! npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees It's not like we (society) talked about this and decided we'd sacrifice ground-based astronomy in exchange for internet access in remote areas. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees He has near total control over essential infrastructure, he has already used it to interfere in foreign policy, and he is stuck in the same right wing intel radicalization spiral as every gamer gather who ever tried to live out a revenge fantasy. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Letting this guy be in charge of starlink and spacex is a national security risk. He’s radicalized, erratic, and dangerous. Nationalize both companies and boot him. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees It’s not a free trial if you have to provide a credit card number. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees In Texas, being paid to not mine bitcoin is more profitable than mining bitcoin. This has moved from a simple grift to hostage-taking. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Look at these beauties. Pulled from my parents’ garage last year, belonged to my grandpa before that. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Happy birthday to Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who gave us the means to measure our Universe. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard Observatory, wrote back to inform Mittag-Leffler that Henrietta had passed away. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s work allowed Harlow Shapley to conclude that our Sun is further from the Milky Way’s center than previously thought. Unfortunately, he gave her little credit. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Cepheid variables were our first standard candles - phenomena that allow us to reliably determine galactic and extragalactic distances. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born #OTD in 1868. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Hydrogen bonding and stacking interactions between adjacent monomer chains in Kevlar make it about five times stronger than steel, by weight. It's used in everything from body armor to airplanes to race cars. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees The fellow who ran the spinneret – the solution is forced through a spinneret to make fibers – insisted it would clog the machine. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Basically, she had a hunch. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Kwolek received her BS in Chem from Margaret Morrison Carnegie College of Carnegie Mellon. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Chemist Stephanie Kwolek was born #OTD in 1923. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Calculating the fractional frequency shift of the satellite clock compared to the ground clock is a homework problem in GR textbooks. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees By 1977, scientists knew that relativity would cause orbiting and ground-based clocks to beat out of sync. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Friends, here is a fun little physics story about satellites and relativity. It’s a day late for an #OTD, but please indulge me. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees Tom Gauld in yesterday’s Guardian Books. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees In fact, it's sort of a long con initiated by my wife, who was clever enough to spend years writing novels like it's no big deal, leaving the kid to wonder what all the fuss is about. npub188wrkmlj6ayxlhvy4qjxy8tvzxk053na43fuc23lp8d72d7hqcvqf73emc Robert McNees This is probably the best thing I ever posted on Twitter. The memory is pretty dear to me; I'm sharing it here so it still exists somewhere if that place collapses.
