Notices by Prof. Sam Lawler (sundogplanets@mastodon.social)

The snow is melting fast now! Which means more room to frolic (and try to annoy the unflappable llama)

Had some meetings, answered lots of student emails (last official day of class for the semester before finals), updated my talk slides, and also got to spend a lot of quality time outside enjoying the woods (with an impressive quantity of moose poo sprinkled throughout), huge V's of migrating birds, and of course, baby goats.

Baby goat herd current status: ridiculously cute

I'm about! To! Teach! My! Last! Lecture! Of! The! Semester!!!!!

!!!!!!!

@Lana I may have told you this already, but I once had a transgender duck!

The male duck in our flock died, and one of the female ducks soon after started quacking like a male, then molted and grew male feathers. The coolest part was the other ducks immediately treated him like a male. No transphobia among ducks!

I totally ran out of time and energy for posting yesterday, but the first round of the #BabyGoatCountdown is done! Mama #5 had 2 healthy babies yesterday right before I needed to go teach my 2nd-to-last class of the semester.

That brings us to 9 babies from 5 mamas (6 girls and 3 boys, woo beating the odds!) There will be a few more baby goats in about a month, from the yearlings who were bred a little bit later, so #BabyGoatCountdown will return (and loads of photos in the meantime)

Good morning.

I was pretty sure that last mama was going to have her babies last night (sure enough that I got up at 2am to check, sigh). But no new babies yet!

But the ones I have already are pretty darn cute!

#BabyGoatCountdown

It is hilarious that seeing my name in yet another CBC article (where I was the one who actually did the investigative journalism!!) should make me super proud but instead gives me massive impostor syndrome! My brain says "what if you were wrong about this being space debris?" even though now actual professional journalists have verified this and SpaceX put it into their own freaking documents.

WHY does my brain do this?! Doesn't make any sense at all.

The solution to this problem of space debris hitting the ground is not "we'll get better at ablation and demisability" which is what the sat companies are trying to do. The atmospheric pollution from tens of thousands of satellites turning into metal vapour in the stratosphere is terrifying.

The solution is fewer satellites with longer operational lifetimes!

There's your engineering challenge: go!

Oh hey look: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/2nd-piece-of-space-junk-landed-on-saskatchewan-farmland-in-2024-1.7502192

I should add there are also big geopolitical implications to an American company being able to dump potentially lethal debris on Canada (and other countries) with no apparent consequence, but that's a whole other thread (that I've written before) and I need to go check for baby goats again.

#BabyGoatCountdown

Everything is still terrible, but LOOK more baby goats!

We're at 6 babies from 3 mamas now (and 5 of the 6 babies are girls, whoohoo). Time to take them out in the sun and take a bazillion super cute pictures.

Will be a little bit of goat drama coming up because the mama who hasn't had babies yet is very convinced that the one who was born last night is hers... interesting. Should be ok, I think (the birth mama and the other mama have actually co-parented together before)

#BabyGoatCountdown

Whoa! I was checking the bird migration map here https://birdcast.info/migration-tools/live-migration-maps/ (because I want birds to come back! Soooo tired of winter), and I noticed that the bird migration is actually stopping at that band of crazy weather happening along the Ohio/Mississippi Valley right now! Maybe this is a common thing, but super interesting to see.

Everything is still terrible, but at least there are more baby goats today!!
#BabyGoatCountdown

I have to say that having a barn full of cute baby goats (current count at 5 babies from 2 mamas) that I can snuggle anytime I need is much, much more therapeutic than rage-screaming in the hay field.
#BabyGoatCountdown

Everything is terrible, but LOOK BABY GOATS!!

#BabyGoatCountdown

I decided to put the 2 biggest mamas into a barn stall. One of them is possibly in early labour, but it's so hard to tell. I just sat there in the hay, listening to them chew their cud, and practiced my extremely short talk for tomorrow. They were unimpressed with what I have to say about space debris. Chin scritches are much better. #BabyGoatCountdown

So, at this point I knew it was real, and I knew it fell in Saskatchewan somewhere, but I didn't know where. Jonathan McDowell had a prediction based on the last known orbit of the failed Starlink launch (mentioned in the document). But...that's a really big area.

How could I find out where it fell? I was hoping a journalist would do the investigation for me. But nobody was picking it up for investigation. I realized I probably have the best odds of finding it.

Why Saskatchewan? As I posted earlier:

1. Most of the land is southern Sask is flat, large monoculture farms, that large machines completely denude at least once a year. It's the ideal place to find space debris.

2. Due to the orbits that have been chosen, we're under the densest band of satellites that has ever existed.