@Luke_Drury@mastodon.dias.ie
@Luke_Drury@mastodon.dias.ie avatar

Luke_Drury

@Luke_Drury@mastodon.dias.ie

Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics in DIAS, member and former president of the Royal Irish Academy, currently VP of ALLEA. Interested in open science and the future of scholarly communication. All views expressed here are personal. Languages are English, German and some French.

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Luke_Drury, to random
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An important revision and they make a very good point about local versus global temperature shifts. I suspect they may still be underestimating the true economic cost though because of nonlinear correlations and feedback effects.

From: @pvonhellermannn
https://mastodon.green/@pvonhellermannn/112445350908655322

franco_vazza, to Astro
@franco_vazza@mastodon.social avatar

Correcting a student's thesis or article still is a good way to learn english, and especially to discover things you are used to say since decades are likely wrong.
Latest discoveries for me:

  • difference between amount and quantity
  • "meridional" vs "meridian"

Luke_Drury,
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@franco_vazza Ones I see all the time: affect/effect and complement/compliment

Luke_Drury, to random
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"Beware of geeks bearing gifts" - love this opening line from @pluralistic

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Luke_Drury,
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@pluralistic @aral I see that the same word play was used by Aral eleven years ago! As true now as then.

markmccaughrean, to random
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You know the drill by now โ€“ don't go to the Etosha National Park webcam linked below. Nothing ever happens there ๐Ÿคทโ€โ™‚๏ธ๐Ÿ˜‰

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAmFZj1y_a0

Luke_Drury,
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@hfalcke @markmccaughrean So have I, and it was magical to see the animals come to the waterhole to drink.

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
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I love this picture comparing different telescopes. Space telescopes are sexy - but the really big telescopes are down here. The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope is so big you might miss it: 100 meters across. Unfortunately the European Southern Observatory wimped out and decided to build a merely Extremely Large Telescope instead.

Radio telescopes are even bigger. The 305-meter dish at Arecibo is famous. In 2020 scientists decided to shut it down after it was damaged by a hurricane and two earthquakes and two important cables snapped. But before they could even shut it down, more cables snapped and the support structure, antenna, and dome assembly fell into the dish, destroying the whole thing.

Luckily in 2016 the Chinese had built an even larger radio dish in Guizhou: the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST. It's the largest one shown here. But in Russia there's a radio telescope 576 meters across - not a dish, but a bunch of separate structures.

And then there's the xkcd cartoon....

(1/2)

Luke_Drury,
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@johncarlosbaez Itโ€™s unfortunate that it doesnโ€™t include the six foot (72 inch) reflector built in Birr Ireland which from 1845 to 1917 was the largest telescope in the world, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_of_Parsonstown

jaztrophysicist, (edited ) to random
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    Luke_Drury,
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    @jaztrophysicist @apolitosb This is so true, especially if they were also the first to publish in ApJ! Probably truer in the past than now though tbh.

    selzero, to random
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    The rich are so out of touch, the only thing they know to sell is fear.

    @fkamiah17 https://toot.wales/@fkamiah17/112071739594684836

    Luke_Drury,
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    @selzero @fkamiah17 Just as with Brexit thereโ€™s a little problem with Northern Ireland - the ECHR is a key part of the Good Friday agreement.

    markmccaughrean, to random
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    Aaaand โ€ฆ done ๐Ÿฅต

    My 44th & final presentation of recent results from ESAโ€™s missions to the Science Programme Committee in our Paris HQ today ๐Ÿš€๐Ÿ›ฐ๏ธโœจ

    Why final? Because after 15 years, Iโ€™ll be retiring from ESA in just a few weeks from now ๐Ÿ˜ฑ

    It has been a privilege to be involved in so many history-making spaceflight moments over that time, with Rosetta & JWST perhaps primus inter pares, & I will miss my amazing colleagues ๐Ÿ™‡โ€โ™‚๏ธ

    Future plans? Many, but more on all that soon ๐Ÿ˜‰

    A screenshot of the Keynote slide deck from my final science highlights presentation to ESAโ€™s SPC, featuring results & events from EnVision, LISA, Einstein Probe, XRISM, INTEGRAL, XMM-Newton, Solar Orbiter, SOHO, Cluster, Mars Express, Euclid, Gaia, HST, CHEOPS, JWST, & (kind of) Rosetta.

    Luke_Drury,
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    @markmccaughrean @apolitosb Same from me - your presentations to the SSAC were always a delightful moment of scientific wonder amidst all the politics and bureaucracy.

    Luke_Drury, to random
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    Clearing out my old files - this is what preprints looked like before the arXiv. From 1988.

    markmccaughrean, to random
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    Vulture club.

    Six large lappet-faced vultures over at the waterhole in the Namib desert just now, with temperatures around 39ยบC.

    But don't go there โ€“ it's very addictive ๐Ÿ˜‰

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydYDqZQpim8

    Luke_Drury,
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    @jaztrophysicist @markmccaughrean

    I was in Namibia many years ago for the inauguration of the HESS telescopes - an amazing and beautiful country with a sad history. Rather amusing to see the German colonial buildings with steep pitched roofs to throw off the snow which of course never falls.

    jaztrophysicist, to random
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    Luke_Drury,
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    @jknodlseder @jaztrophysicist @cazencott I think itโ€™s a bit deeper than that. We have been gaslit into thinking of computation as a free resource where CPU cycles cost nothing. The reality of course is that all computation is energy intensive - even our own brains use 20% of our calorific intake.

    Luke_Drury,
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    @jaztrophysicist @jknodlseder @cazencott which I guess is why Altman is pushing fusion.

    rhettallain, to physics
    @rhettallain@mastodon.social avatar

    New post - answering a question from . What would happen if the Earth was hollow? How do we know it's not hollow?

    https://rjallain.medium.com/what-would-happen-if-the-earth-was-hollow-8e2e71d463b5

    Luke_Drury,
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    @rhettallain seismology.

    Luke_Drury, to random
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    Good progress but still a long way to go.

    From: @Sustainable2050
    https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/111694171384233979

    j_bertolotti, to random
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    Just crossed a group of teeneger walking down the street with a boombox firing high volume, bad quality music.
    The '80s are back.

    Luke_Drury,
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    @jaztrophysicist @j_bertolotti You make me feel really old! PhD 1975-1979.

    Luke_Drury, to random
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    After careful consideration, @ALLEA has decided to cease communication activities on X, formerly known as Twitter, starting from January 2024. ALLEA's commitment to academic freedom and science as a global public good is at the core of its activities, and Xโ€™s current policies donโ€™t align with its mission.

    Luke_Drury, to random
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    Interesting innovation - for the first time thereโ€™s an open call for expressions of interest to serve on these important advisory bodies.

    From: @vicgrinberg
    https://mastodon.social/@vicgrinberg/111466731700608220

    Luke_Drury, to random
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    I think many of us in theoretical astrophysics can empathise with this deeply personal and honest account.

    From: @Francois
    https://lookingup.francois-rincon.org/why-research/

    Luke_Drury, to random
    @Luke_Drury@mastodon.dias.ie avatar

    Growing consensus that the future of can not be based on APCs if it is to be equitable and affordable.

    https://sciencebusiness.net/news/open-science/new-wave-support-musters-push-open-access-publishing

    jaztrophysicist, to Astro
    @jaztrophysicist@astrodon.social avatar

    All right, I've just learned that it was my yesterday and I have a new paper out on arxiv today, so let's celebrate all that with an ๐Ÿงต on magnetized accretion, and it's surprising connections with turbulence in ... pipes ! It's quite a ride in terms of research story

    https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00034

    Luke_Drury,
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    @jaztrophysicist I worked on this for my PhD! There is a weak acoustic instability for compressible discs involving over-reflection of sound waves from the coronation region.

    Luke_Drury,
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    @jaztrophysicist @Luke_Drury Sort of. I showed its existence analytically and they later and independently found it numerically. See my thesis https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/a3940f45-7c6d-45a5-aff5-c9f3c94a9026

    Luke_Drury, to random
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    A reminder that two years ago the GA of the International Science Council adopted these eight principles of scientific publishing.

    Luke_Drury, to random
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    At a quick first glance this is very well aligned with the similar list of principles adopted by the International Science Council! Excellent progress towards an equitable and fit for purpose scholarly and scientific communication ecosystem!

    https://council.science/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/18.2_Resolution-Two_-Scientific-Publishing.pdf

    From: @cOAlitionS_OA
    https://fediscience.org/

    Luke_Drury, (edited ) to random
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    Interesting and alarming article on the consolidation of commercial academic publishing - "the top 10 largest publishers went from 47% of the market in 2000 to 75% in 2023, and the top 20 largest publishers from 54% to controlling 83% of the corpus." In large part an unintended consequence of "Gold OA" and "Big Deals".

    https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/10/30/quantifying-consolidation-in-the-scholarly-journals-market/?informz=1&nbd=831004ad-ec0f-4df0-9050-7d262a371c05&nbd_source=informz

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