Reporter: Madame President, what's your favorite Hüsker Dü album?

Harris: What kind of question is --

[Walz grabs podium]

Walz: FLIP YOUR WIG

@annaghughes Same (entering year 15)

This is fun.

You can tell MacOS's "Text Replacements" setting to replace a typed LaTeX command with the associated unicode character.

Some apps will just ignore this, but it shows up most places. And it still compiles correctly when used inside LaTeX or MathJax views (for example, in Obsidian).

Easy way to insert characters like α, β, etc into a post. You can do subscripts and superscripts, too. For example: H₀

@Asbestos I have some bad news for you

@rattlersix Jfc

This #OTD thread contains my favorite newspaper headline of all time.
https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/110882817597054183

The guy who couldn’t run a livestream on Twitter last night, wants to be in charge of your oxygen on Mars.

@jni Good point!

@kims Hahahaha. (The header was made by Darth — that’s my dog Linus on the far right)

Hmm, so these sophisticated hackers penetrate the campaign’s systems, extract sensitive documents, and then… turn them over to a publication run by an ardent Trump supporter. Got it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/10/trump-hack-iran-vance-report/

@gruber looks legit, better settle up

@drcrypt Yeah, pretty sure I’ve read all the short stories, but not the novels. So I’m going to start “The Old Gods Waken.”

Perfect setting to catch up on some Manly Wade Wellman reading.

And a hazy view of the Great Smoky mountains from about 2800 feet up.

The Crab Orchard Mountains from 12,000 feet.

[Just walked out the front door and directly into a giant spider web.]

Nice try, little guy.

*kisses bicep*

Maybe next time bring a few hundred friends.

@iampytest1 https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/112906010339230798

Cepheid variables were our first standard candles - phenomena that allow us to reliably determine galactic and extragalactic distances.

These stars brighten and dim with a regular period that correlates with their maximum brightness. Measure the former and you know the latter. Compare that brightness, inferred from period, with how bright they appear to be, and you how far away they are.

Basically, a light bulb looks dimmer from further away. Quantify that and you can judge the distance.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s period-luminosity relation for Cepheid variable stars allowed Edwin Hubble (building on work by Vesto Slipher, and relying on contributions by others) to establish that so-called “spiral nebulae” were in fact separate galaxies outside our Milky Way.

https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/111681499901380126

Henrietta Swan Leavitt passed away in 1921, at the age of 53.

A few years later, the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler, unaware that she had passed, wrote her a letter praising her accomplishments. It read:

“Honoured Miss Leavitt, your admirable discovery ... has impressed me so deeply that I feel seriously inclined to nominate you to the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1926.”