@kenwhite.bsky.social

This seems like @mcnees 's story of the time a scammer called a judge's house pretending that the judge had issued a warrant for his own arrest.

@mcnees Let me go through my shelves of books by people I know:

@AstroKatie , @chanda , Emily Levesque, Aomawa Shields, Alice Gorman, Don Yeomans, Nathalie Cabrol, ...

This could go on for a while, since I know lots of people who write books.

@mcnees Time magazine is doing a DnD special anniversary issue just now.

@mcnees Just what Altman do to be fired by the people involved "OpenAI"?

Since fraud and wholesale theft is their entire business model.

@martinvermeer @mcnees People not familiar with how delay-Doppler images work tend to be disappointed when I explain that the asteroid does not actually look like a skull.

@FediThing @mcnees Part of the limitation for Rømer's measurement was that he did not have a particularly good value for the astronomical unit - he knew how long the light was traveling, but not how far.

In between, Edmund Halley described how to measure the astronomical unit using transits of Venus (although large errors remained until the 1760s).

@mcnees FEMA has Leviticus Lewis' team working on protecting the grid: https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/fema_incident-annex_space-weather.pdf

@doctroid @mcnees Elektra 3
Kleopatra 2
Sylvia 2
Florence 2
Minerva 2
1994 CC 2
2001 SN263 2
Moshup 1
Didymos 1
...
...
Several dozen entries later:
Ida 1

@ncweaver @cstross SpaceX was briefly profitable. Then Musk was allowed to start the Starlink scam, which is losing huge amounts of money while making a mess of low orbit.

Along with Starship rockets that have only recently stopped exploding.

@davidaugust Attention @mcnees .

@CITIZEN_OCHOA Attention @mcnees .

@Kencf618033 @mcnees The original "A Message From Earth" paper gives the list of pulsars on the plaque: https://astro.swarthmore.edu/astro61_spring2014/papers/sagan_science_1972.pdf .

The spin periods and relative directions of the pulsars are intended to specify both the Sun's position and the time the plaque was made.

However, some of the pulsar periods were not well known then and all of them have some random variation. So eventually the map will become useless.

@mcnees Alas, I cannot mail order cookies for another 3 weeks.

@mcnees As when you asked this on Twitter:

The cast-iron teapot is a wonderful invention.