The Space Age began sixty four years ago, #OTD in 1957, when Sputnik 1 was launched into low Earth orbit. It was the first satellite made by humans.

Image: NSSDC, NASA

@danhon furious that this never occurred to me

Should have been so easy.

“Science is hard, and so is figuring out who is likely to make meaningful contributions. We’ve been doing it a long time, but we still make mistakes. We got this one wrong. Congratulations to Dr. Karikó on this well deserved honor, and our apologies for choosing not to support her and her work.”

“Sure, of course the leopards are going to eat THAT guy’s face. But I am a fellow leopard, so surely they won’t eat MY face.”

@dgoldsmith @gregeganSF Thanks! One of mine related to spotlight search (specifically of pdfs) is FB12441002

@dgoldsmith Yep! I’ve done it for various things, after you told me about this. I keep it in my dock!

Penn demoted Karikó, removing her from the tenure track and making her an "adjunct associate professor." They also cut her salary. They should be issuing a public apology. Completely shameless.

@Aleggra Haha, it's an old saying, not mine. So feel free!

The definition of chutzpah is killing your parents, then begging the court to have mercy because you're an orphan.

Nature desk-rejected their paper!

This is right up there with the way the Nobel Committee used to tweet happy birthday to Russell Hulse, then mention that it also happened to be the anniversary of Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovering pulsars.

@gregeganSF It is so badly broken. I used to use it every day, but I’ve given up on it.

Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, was born #OTD in 1947.

@a_aphelion lol

@alexanderm I’m thinking of one that had a web interface, but this also looks good!

Updating the Richard Scarry books to reflect modern careers and workplaces.

Mastodon friends! At one point I saw a tool that would scour my posts and show the top entries by number of likes, boosts, replies, etc. I cannot for the life of me find it now. Does that ring a bell for anyone?

@BodyofBreen Nice

@sirlaffalot “On this day"

Besides deep contributions to fundamental physics, and his work establishing a controlled and self-sustaining fission reaction, Fermi also made a few observations of the late-night-conversation-in-the-dorm-room variety.

For example, he wondered why we haven't heard from any aliens. This lonely state of affairs is now known as the “Fermi Paradox.” If the universe is so big, so full of places where life might take hold, then where is everybody?

(Imo the answer is that we are in an alien zoo.)

Fermi was only 21 when he completed his PhD at Pisa, and after a few years abroad working with Born and Ehrenfest he became a lecturer at Florence. It was there that he worked out the statistics of a collection of particles satisfying Pauli's exclusion principle.

Fundamental particles like leptons and quarks, and many composite particles like protons and neutrons, satisfy these "Fermi-Dirac statistics.” For this reason, we refer to this broad class of particles as Fermions.