@mcnees@mastodon.social
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mcnees

@mcnees@mastodon.social

Physicist and professor at a school on the north side of Chicago. Black holes, quantum gravity, cosmology. Rocky Top, Tar Heel. Science, dogs, lake photos. Faves are spooky action at a distance, boosts are Lorentz transformations to another inertial frame. Opinions are mine, not my employer’s. #Physics #BlackHoles #Gravity #SciComm #Dogs

Level 14 Prof of Physics, Neutral Good, S:11 I:16 W:15 D:11 C:12 Ch:11, HP: 68, THAC0: 11, Equipment: Vorpal Chalk, Periapt of Tenure, Tweed Jacket (Cursed)

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mcnees, to random
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Best Steely Dansk song.

mcnees, to random
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Turt’s out.

hannah, to random
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I’m actually very patriotic but just for stuff like this

mcnees,
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@hannah Skokie, right? I think we saw it when we were looking at places a few years ago.

mcnees,
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@hannah I knew I saw it somewhere. You don’t really forget that.

mcnees, to random
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glides into the faculty meeting wearing a cape and holding a candelabra

Velcome to… dark academia.

mcnees, to random
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The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration has released their latest results, including this image of polarized light from the region surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/blog/astronomers-unveil-strong-magnetic-fields-spiraling-edge-milky-way’s-central-black-hole

Image: EHT Collaboration

mcnees,
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How it started / how it’s going

image/png

mcnees,
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@lxsameer Data. Check link in first post. It’s a real image produced by combining info from multiple observatories.

mcnees,
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@hfalcke Who amongst us hasn’t forgotten a factor of 4 pi in an estimate!

mcnees, to random
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Physicist Caroline Herzenberg was born in 1932. She is known for pioneering early work in Mössbauer spectroscopy, including an analysis of the first samples returned from the moon by the Apollo astronauts.

Image: Herzenberg as Finalist in the 1949 Science Talent Search

mcnees, to random
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“Happy Meal II” by the Cardigans was the best possible song for that scene in the last episode of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.”

mcnees, to random
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Good evening.

mcnees, to random
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Elf -> Elves
Dwarf -> Dwarves
Smurf -> Smurves

mcnees,
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@internic Prof -> Proves!

mcnees, to random
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Happy Noether day!
https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/110072925812796303

mcnees, to random
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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that if you set aside six hours to work on a really complicated project, you’ll have your only good insight in the last five minutes, or maybe the next day in the shower.

mcnees, to random
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Pro tip. (Amateur tip, really.) When you are giving a webinar directly from your computer, hide your desktop. Especially if your collection of scanned books is right there. This is right up there with blurring or cropping your browser tabs in screenshots.

mcnees,
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On a Mac
• Open Automator
• Select the "Run shell script" action
• Add the following:

"defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop false

killall Finder"

• Save this as an application called "DesktopHide."
• Repeat these steps with "false" replaced by "true"
• Save this one as an application called "DesktopShow"

Now you have two little apps to hide/show ur desktop. Use them.

mcnees,
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@lffontenelle I used GNOME for years. At one point (early-mid 2000s) my gtk2 and metacity themes had over quarter-million downloads on the old gnome themes website!

mcnees,
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@lffontenelle I sort of miss Gnome, tbh.

mcnees, to random
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A lot of people are picking Gonzaga, but I think I can pull off the upset.

mcnees, to random
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Not to brag, but I am currently ranked number one on my university's "didn't click on any of our simulated phishing attacks" leaderboard. My secret is that I ignore practically every email I receive.

mcnees, to random
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It was... unnecessarily difficult, getting Mathematica to plot a small set of electric field lines for a simple set of charges.

None of the built-in plot types (StreamPlot, etc) are compatible with all the standard rules for field lines!

mcnees,
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Basically had to numerically solve for the integral curves from a set of starting points around the charge, and extend them until they reached the other charge.

It should not be this involved! But visualizations like StreamPlot aren't consistent with all the rules for field lines that we teach in intro classes, and the problems become more pronounced when there are more than two charges. Yikes.

mcnees,
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@sudnadja Oh nice, thanks for the link! I'll have a look at how they draw their diagrams. Unfortunately, that demo does things like draw colliding field lines. But it's better than other examples I've seen.

mcnees,
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@sudnadja Oh wow, I did not know that. Thanks!

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