A lot of it involves Palomar, of course. 😉

I am delighted to share this announcement of my debut novel!

Well, my dear, you don't think that there is anything static in the universe, do you? Even the climate rotates. Everything moves, nothing remains the same, including your neighborhood. Let it all change and spin.

😂

And now for something completely different: For the best time call +1-303-499-7111

it's best to call at the top of the hour, but anytime works.

Bluesky Moderation Team 6:15 AM (8 minutes ago) to me Hi there, Thank you for getting back. We appreciate your immediate response to this matter. Recently, we applied a label to a Bluesky account you control (@roppenhe.bsky.social) for violations of our guidelines. After a thorough review, we found out that the action applied to your account was incorrect. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Consequently, we are revising our initial decision and have removed the label on your account. Thank you for doing your part to keep Bluesky a welcoming and empowering place for all users.

They just removed it, with no explanation.

Except then they told me to post anything on twitter to validate my identity. This is either an elaborate scam or something worse.

Thanks @davidho.bsky.social. There is something clearly dysfunctional about this platform. I posted something too. They throw libel at me and I am going to sue, and sue big time.

A stamp from 1948 depicting Palomar Observatory

One of the best stamps ever from the USPS. Thank you, @uspostal.bsky.social and @apwu.bsky.social

Defenestration is occasionally useful, one might suppose. I'd never conduct such behavior except in self defense.

Well, a nice manicure.

US stamps with astrophysics theme

US stamps with astrophysics theme

I love stamps and the USPS. Here are two new examples of expedited or same day delivery stamps that feature astrophysics. These I got recently to move physical items swiftly through the mail, and the mail is one of the most fabulous things we have in the US.

Enormous dark storm front arriving in the city

This is a real storm. I love storms. It's the storms, not the harsh Sun, that create life.

That's it. A poster at the conference I mentioned. 🙂

He is clean.

This is great, thank you. It also confirms what I wrote, although in substantially more detail. Part of this I knew but thank you for providing more context. Fantastic! Thank you.

It wasn't really a clean room. As you can see, the instrument is sealed up.

Dog poster about astronomical observations

Here is the poster that Paco presented about what it is like to be an astrodog, Chapter IV. He presented it in the front of the room at a conference in Delaware some years ago.
The Brown Dwarf-Exoplanet Connection Conference (BDExoCon) at the University of Delaware, Newark, October 2019.

Paco, the astrodog on top of Parvi, an astronomical instrument in use at Palomar

Here is Paco, guarding PARVI, an instrument my team and I deployed and have now automated to understand what our solar system might look like from ~30 light years away. Paco is gone now, but he had true pride as our spokesdog for two projects. He had a paper published and went to Palomar 10 times.

The pair are so far away that they likely aren't much influenced in that manner, but we have no idea how such a complex system formed. It's wonderfully fascinating!

These days pixels are rather ordinary, but perhaps not Ordinary.

Do you have a reference for that? I'd love to read it.

Very helpful! Thank you. @davidho.bsky.social also told me I should to this.

So she'd be a Jarutechi?

We certainly can. The technology now is so far superior to the imaginings of the early zoning laws.

Normalize this to population. In 1914 when the first zoning laws in the world came into effect in Manhattan, more than 2 million people lived below 14th street. These data need context. Manhattan is only about 1.6M now. It should be well over 55M as the 1914 law suggested and imagined for the future

I am an amateur urbanist and futurist, but these numbers need to be normalized to the population. 50,000 new apartments or huts in outer boroughs is about 0.5% growth per capita. In a city where the occupancy rate is well over 99.5%, hundreds of times this level of development is needed. Up not out!

Thank you. As you can tell, I'm a newbie at bluesky.

Haha, that's a great story!

Have you ever thought about the origin of the word pixel? In footnote 114 or so of my book, minor changes to come, before I get it out there, you might find something like this, well, fun! Let this post be a teaser.