Ohhhh now I see what you mean about shapes in solid vs dotted lines
12.03.2026 12:57
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Ohhhh now I see what you mean about shapes in solid vs dotted lines
Oh yeah I see that now!
I do see a (very small) difference. Theres a small lip on one side of the sketch that isn't in the cup. I'm surprised that's different enough?
Yes, enormous. As a point of reference: if you're flying over them at normal cruising height (35000 feet or thereabouts), you can see them. Not as a speck with a wake behind it; you can actually see the boat as a boat from the edge of the stratosphere.
He's not even a good primary choice! He's like 4th most popular *among* people who tend to vote Dem!
I live in the state of California, he's my governor, I voted for him in 2018, and he's the worst piece of trash imaginable.
He hates the trans community, he's criminalized being homeless in a state where hardworking people are one missed paycheck from the street. He had Bannon on his podcast
Feta without fat is just e
After revelations that companies like Ring have been selling home security footage to ICE, the most common defense of keeping a camera up seems to be, “But what if I’m stalked?”
And as a violence researcher, I’m just here to state for the record that police do not care about your security footage.
I’m a single-issue voter for the phrase “the only minority destroying this country is billionaires” Talarico didn’t coin it but I’m glad to hear him say it.
Debra Messing?? Wtf is up with her?
Gonna drop this in here : Canada recently changed the rules on citizenship by descendence, opening it up from one generation to pretty much "whenever". For folks who have **any** Canadian ancestry (which is a lot of the US), there is a path to citizenship in Canada. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.
And all because a fish decided once they wanted to see the world and grew legs
FYI, if you ever find yourself thinking "maybe I'll buy this panflute for the toddler in my life," no. Stop right there and move on to your next thought.
The public have no idea that it takes ~30 years for a mission to go from concept to launch.
For reference, without AXIS, the earliest that a high-resolution X-ray imaging mission can launch -- the successor to the Chandra X-ray Observatory -- is 2050s or 2060s. 🔭
The gutting of NASA Goddard has had a devastating effect on high energy astrophysics. The AXIS probe mission proposal was rejected without review. (The Goddard X-ray mirror lab was significantly impacted by shutdowns and pressured retirements, against the congress approved budget for NASA.)
oh my god
while I was disappointed that AXIS was selected over STROBE-X, I would not have ever wanted their concept study not to proceed and this is a loss for the entire field and a sign of how much Donald Trump and his goons have damaged science in the United States and NASA in particular 🔭🧪
Email from Chris Reynolds to the AXIS Team. Subject is disappointing AXIS news. Text of e-mail reads: Dear AXIS Friends, The AXIS team has received some very disappointing news – we have been informed by NASA HQ that AXIS is not eligible for selection and hence the Concept Study Report (CSR) will not be subjected to the full review process. AXIS represents the scientific aspirations of a large international community. As a member of one of the AXIS science working groups, you deserve a candid explanation from the PI of what happened and why. That is the purpose of this note. NASA’s decision was programmatic and not based on a review of the technology or science; the mission profile described in the submitted CSR was over the allowed budget and schedule. How was such a thing possible? In short, with NASA-GSFC as the AXIS managing center, the mission formulation process was critically compromised by the seismic shifts occurring in NASA and the Federal government. The AXIS study team was hit hard by three unprecedented challenges: NASA’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) and the pressure at GSFC to resign/retire created a rapid and uncontrolled loss of over 20 personnel with key expertise during a critical mission formulation period, including the main GSFC Project Manager (Jimmy Marsh) and the X-ray mirror lead (Will Zhang) and many discipline engineers.
GSFC priorities rapidly realigned to the FY2026 President’s Budget Request (PBR) that eliminated the Probe program, further reducing the availability of GSFC engineering and mission formulation personnel (incl. cost analysts and schedulers) over the critical Summer and Fall months. Key work was halted for almost seven weeks when the core GSFC AXIS study team, dominated by NASA civil servants, was furloughed during the government shutdown. NASA HQ’s extension to the CSR submission deadline (from 18-Dec-2025 to 29-Jan-2026) was inadequate compensation for the disruption and lost time. Taken together, these factors disrupted the basic grass-roots costing process (which requires extensive “reach back” to the discipline engineers to assess labor requirements) as well as the cost-design iteration process that is central to the formulation of a cost-capped and schedule-constrained mission. While the mission design was finalized in April, our initial grass-roots costing (which was ~10% over budget) could only be completed in September due to the lack of assigned resources. With the subsequent government shutdown and then “pens down” in early-December forced by the GSFC Executive Review process, there was no opportunity to work through the set of cost/schedule savings that had already been identified by the AXIS team. Ultimately, the GSFC executive council gave AXIS leadership the choice of submitting a CSR with a non-compliant schedule and cost, or not submitting a CSR at all. We of course proceeded with the submission, including a narrative that we understood the path to a cost-compliant profile (that we would have discussed with the review panels during the Site Visit). NASA HQ has ruled this stance to be unacceptable. It is important to stress that NASA’s programmatic decision was before any technical review had been conducted. The decision was NOT due to any concerns about AXIS technology. Indeed, the AXIS Phase A work had major successes with furthering
Indeed, the AXIS Phase A work had major successes with furthering the key technologies. GSFC’s Next Generation X-ray Optics (NGXO) team successfully demonstrated iridium-coated, stress-compensated mirror segments that meet AXIS baseline requirements (i.e. segment-level performance at sub-arcsecond level). NGXO also built the first AXIS demonstrator mirror module, learning critical lessons about mirror alignment, mounting and bonding. On the detector side, MIT quickly moved to fabricate AXIS-like CCDs and, working with our colleagues at Stanford, recently demonstrated that they achieve the required readout rate and spectral resolution. Similarly, NASA’s decision was NOT a judgment of the importance of AXIS science. The AXIS science case was rated excellent in the Step 1 review, and it only became stronger during our Phase A study. The AXIS Community Science Book, which many of you contributed to, is an extremely powerful demonstration of the relevance and importance of high-resolution X-ray observations to all areas of astrophysics. The Science Book is one of the most important legacies of the AXIS Phase A study and, I believe, will help define future mission concepts for many years to come. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for all of your work on this. AXIS has been a long journey; we started under the leadership of Richard Mushotzky more than nine years ago. During that time, it’s been an enormous privilege to work with amazing people; the AXIS science team, the incredible/brilliant GSFC and Northrop Grumman engineers, and the wider astrophysics community. I am, quite frankly, livid that AXIS ultimately fell victim to the programmatic chaos of 2025. The astronomical community deserves better. I hope that NASA leadership, especially at GSFC and HQ, can have an honest discussion about how to better support and protect programs during extraordinary times.
For now, as a community, we must look forward. There is still one excellent mission under consideration for the Probe program, PRIMA, and we wish them a smooth and speedy path to selection and flight. In X-ray astronomy, the SMEX and MidEX programs represent concrete pathways for focused, high-impact missions, and the scientific case we built for AXIS provides a strong foundation for those concepts. The technologies we advanced in Step 1 and Phase A, particularly the NGXO mirror work and the MIT/Stanford detector demonstrations, can anchor the next generation of proposals. Most importantly, the AXIS Community Science Book, representing more than 500 scientists across, is a living document and a powerful signal to NASA leadership that this community is organized, serious, and not going anywhere. I encourage everyone to use it actively, as a resource for future concept development, for Astro2030 engagement, and for building the next mission that will deliver high angular resolution X-ray imaging to address the fundamental questions about black hole growth, galaxy evolution, and the hot universe that motivated AXIS from the beginning. This community built something remarkable over nine years and that doesn't end here. Thank you again for your support of AXIS over these times. Best Chris and the AXIS leadership team
The @axisprobe.bsky.social team learned that the phase A concept study report of AXIS (the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite) will not be reviewed because the lost personnel at NASA Goddard and government shutdown impacted our schedule and budget. 🔭 Here is the PI's e-mail with the explanation.
Absolutely bananas
*x-ray hugs*
I have never grown roses before, but I love their flower shape and fragrance!
(My large garden is almost entirely native plants, and I'm going to finish getting rid of the grass in the front yard entirely this summer, so please let me enjoy a nonnative plant in my garden, as a treat.)
Rose people, do you grow New Dawn? If yes, do you like it or would you recommend a different fragrant climbing rose? (I'm zone 5b/6a growing in clay that will need amending.) #GardenSky
this is endless discourse...so I will just reiterate that *Newsom is not ahead in polls* and talking about him as if he's already the nominee helps him. don't do that. www.everythingishorrible.net/p/we-can-bea...
For an easy way to follow everything that happens on Bsky, I'd suggest the Mushersky feed, listening to all the good keywords.
The feed is curated in that I will personally remove any posts from the well-known not-Pitá and their ilk.
Satellite view of Alaska showing the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race's northern route marked with a red line and yellow location pins. The trail stretches from Anchorage in the south, heading northwest through checkpoints including Wasilla, Yentna, Skwentna, Finger Lake, Rainy Pass, Rohn, Nikolai, McGrath, Takotna, Ophir, Cripple, Ruby, Galena, Nulato, Kaltag, Unalakleet, Shaktoolik, Koyuk, Elim, Golovin, White Mountain, Safety, and finally Nome on the western coast. The dramatic aerial perspective shows snow-covered mountain ranges (including the Alaska Range), the Yukon River, and the vast wilderness these mushers and their dog teams traverse over approximately 1,000 miles. This is the Northern Route visualized from space with the camera moved so far back that a large part of the curvature of the earth is showing - just to be able to see the whole track in one picture.
Why is there all this fur in the servers?
Mapping servers spinning.
Trackers bribed, bots greased.
This is the Iditarod 2026:
Yes, this thing is big. That is either the curve of the globe or the rim of the world. Whatever you believe these days. 😬
#UglyDogs
#MusherSky
#Iditarod54
Map of the Iditarod Trail Northern route showing the checkpoints of Anchorage, Willow, Yentna, Skwentna, Finger Lake, Rainy Pass, Rohn, Nikolai, McGrath, Takotna, Ophir, Cripple, Ruby, Galena, Nulato, Kaltag, Unalakleet, Shaktoolik, Koyuk, Elim, Golovin, White Mountain, Safety and Nome.
The teams will run up and over the Alaska range and into the interior over the first 2-4 days. Teams must take a 24 mandatory rest at any checkpoint on the trail and most will take them in McGrath or Takotna. Some will push up to Ophir or even Cripple. #mushersk #iditarod54 3/
Unofficial official 2026 Iditarod thread starts now. All the teams are out of Willow after the official restart. We have 34 real teams and 3 "expedition" mushers who I probably won't be talking a lot about after today, but we'll see. #mushersky #Iditarod54 1/
At the risk of boring everyone,a little context.
$100 oil in isolation isn’t that bad. It averaged around that level from 2011-2014 without severe economic ramifications*.
It’s the pace of the rise that has people spooked. And not knowing where it might stop.
