Notices by Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)

One of my favorite #OTD threads, not least because I get to quote lines like "...ordinary low-mass stars that have settled down into white dwarf configurations and become cold spheres of pure iron."
https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/109518631792805808

The last moonwalk began #OTD in 1972.

No one has set foot on the Moon since Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, 50 years ago today.

Images: NASA

Jocelyn Bell Burnell transformed astronomy #OTD in 1967 when she made the first observation of a pulsar.

She and advisor Antony Hewish initially dubbed the object LGM-1 (“Little Green Men”) for its regular signal, but soon identified it as a rotating, magnetized neutron star.

#astronomy #pulsars #neutronstars #JocelynBellBurnell

The most terrifying Halloween story I know.
https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/111329860712410917

[MODEMINIT=AT&F2&M5]

Sending File= rip.txt

< Transferring Data File >
Sending record # 0058

_
(_)
_ __ _ __
| __| | | | _ \
| | | | | |_) |
|_| |_| | __/
| |
|_|

< XMODEM Complete >

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/ward-christensen-bbs-inventor-and-architect-of-our-online-age-dies-at-age-78/

@freemo great resource, recommend it to students a lot, but here I’m looking for popular science for the lay reader.

Science friends! If you were stocking the science section of a book store, what popular (as opposed to academic) titles would you put on the shelves? What books, in your opinion, are absolute essentials?

(To keep things manageable, let's say from the last ten years.)

In the interest of fairness (but against my better judgement) I read Altman's "essay" linked in the article.

You will not be surprised to learn that he never actually explains how everyone will be more prosperous in this future that he's trying to sell us.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/ai-superintelligence-looms-in-sam-altmans-new-essay-on-the-intelligence-age/

Happy 118th birthday to special relativity!

Albert Einstein introduced special relativity in the paper "On The Electrodynamics Of Moving Bodies," published #OTD in 1905 in the journal Annalen der Physik.

Manuscript: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/andp.19053221004
English Translation: https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/

Oh, very neat: a library of open access academic books. The section on Physics has a few classics, as well as some nice new books.

https://library.oapen.org/browse?type=classification_text&value=Physics

Hard to believe the tech companies weren’t being completely honest with us.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-datacenters-worse

For fans of Terry Pratchett, or the Pratchett-curious, there's a Humble Bundle right now with 35 Discworld books (epubs through Kobo) for around $20. Pay more to donate more to charity.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/terry-pratchetts-discworld-harpercollins-encore-books

@thomasfuchs Read it a little too quick and thought it said “No Mas Narnia”

The Voyager 1 space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral #OTD in 1977, a few weeks after Voyager 2.

Now it's the most distant human-made object – about 14.96 billion miles from Earth, racing away from us at 38,000 miles per hour with respect to the Sun.

Images: NASA/KSC/JPL

Well, it finally happened. One of the kid’s friends sent her a link to a YouTube video featuring this tweet and asked “Is that you??”
https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/110334058263166569

Helen Sawyer studied chemistry at Mount Holyoke, but two things made her switch to astronomy. First, as part of a class with Dr Anne Sewell, she viewed the total solar eclipse of 1925.

"The almost incredible beauty and grandeur of a total eclipse, tied me to astronomy for life."

Imo, every awestruck kid looking up at the sky during a total eclipse is a new astronomer being born. Here’s mine, back in 2017, at Manhattan Project National Park in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Astronomer Helen Sawyer Hogg was born #OTD in 1905. She was an authority on variable stars and globular clusters, and a pioneer of communicating science to the public.

Image: University of Toronto, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics

Somehow, while doing all this, Helen Sawyer found time to be a sci-comm pioneer, reaching out to large audiences through newspaper, books, and TV.

She wrote a column called "With the Stars" for the Toronto Star from 1951-1981, and a column about the history of astronomy, called "Out of Old Books," for the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada from 1946-1965.

The couple moved to Toronto in 1934, where she got a job at Dunlap Observatory. Later, she became a professor at the University of Toronto.

Helen Sawyer Hogg was an NSF astronomy program director, the first woman to serve as president of the Royal Society of Canada physical sciences section, and was also the founding president of the Canadian Astronomical Society:
http://casca.ca/?page_id=53

Helen Sawyer’s husband got a job at an observatory in Victoria, BC. Officially, she worked there as his "volunteer assistant."

It was there that she began her work on variable stars in clusters. The detailed catalogs that she started compiling during this period (and first published in 1939) are still in use today.

https://www.astro.utoronto.ca/~cclement/readhistory.html