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Bruce Macintosh

@bmacastro.bsky.social

1.5K followers 450 following 270 posts

Astronomer working on imaging extrasolar planets, instrumentation, and science policy. Spare time involves hiking with a golden retriever, and not playing enough boardgames. Director, University of California Observatories, but opinions are my own. He/him

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Dec 1

Prompted by this and a need for distraction I Did Some Math. Turns out most extrasolar planets are quite cauliflower-compatible. A thread, with citations. And laboratory astrophysics. And footnotes.

Jonathan O'Callaghan @astrojonny.bsky.social · Nov 16

What I want from Bluesky

Kanye meme saying he doesn't want news about the world ending, only obscure science papers

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 1h

More broadly theorists and observers need to think about what quantities microlensing measures, what the selection effects are, and how that's different than transits.

Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 1h

I think Roman data is unlikely to address the radius valley, because (a) in most scenarios it wouldn't be present in mass space, and (b) it requires extremely precise measurements to establish its existence that are likely to be swamped by mass uncertainty in microlensing.

Reposted by Bruce Macintosh

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 3h

SCIENCE POLICY NEWS:

During Yom Kippur, all the members of the High Energy Physics Advisory Committee (HEPAP), myself included, received a letter thanking us for our service and telling us essentially that the almost 40 yo standing federal advisory committee was no more. ⚛️🧪🔭

Why that matters 🧵

DOE Consolidates Office of Science Advisory Committees

Six long-standing committees advising the Department of Energy’s Office of Science have been rolled into one.

www.aip.org

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 3d

Loeb says: “Not aliens.”

🏰meg⚔️ @Birthright Audiobook! @impavid.us · 6d

In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand

I'll go first: Six page commercial lease.

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Reposted by Bruce Macintosh

Patrick McCray @patrickmccray.bsky.social · 3d

My hotel room in Brussels is quite something.

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 14d

Sure, it doesn't look like it'll hit the Earth now, but how will it feel after a couple of spacecraft getting in its face?

Also, the H3 looks surprisingly adorable in that log.

Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 17d

Highlights include stealing a valuable item from an academic by pretending to be a rich potential donor, the trained Iruvian Squirrel attacking the Provost's feet, and confusing the "move stealthily" button with the "electro-berserk mode" button on the stolen remote control for a robot spider

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 18d

Although the median number is zero there could well be a long tail. I believe we can assume the electric spider number density as a function of mass follows a power-law distribution.

Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 18d

With sightly more killer electric spiders than a typical AAS.

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 18d

I'm running a Blades In the Dark RPG session tomorrow for @debbieohi.com @wjrucklidge.bsky.social @aiabx.bsky.social @drbrake.bsky.social and after a long week with limited brain space for creativity I'm just going to set the damn thing at an American Astronomical Society meeting.

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Reposted by Bruce Macintosh

Elise Cutts @elisecutts.bsky.social · 21d

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪

Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students.

I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 23d

They might be Asymptotic Branch

Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Sep 15

Similarly, Marketplace is one of the best shows on public radio because they’re trying to provide useful business information and hence they’re willing to say out loud facts like “tariffs are taxes” “presidential control of the central bank would be a bad idea”

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Sep 8

Almost certainly true that it's stellar - I was taking it that they were saying that the effect was bigger than stellar models would have forecast at these wavelengths (but I am 100% not an expert)

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Sep 8

Excellent papers of hard analysis by smart people. My takeaways: (1) Trappist-1E doesn't have a massive primordial hydrogen atmosphere (2) There's no evidence for or against an earthlike atmosphere and in fact (3) the data is too noisy to detect an earthlike atmosphere and don't quite know why.

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Sep 8

"The atmospheric model and the flat-line model are indistinguishable according to the Bayesian evidence—more data are needed to distinguish between those. "

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Sep 6

Of course, the impact on science is a feature rather than a bug from the ICE standpoint; the cruelty is the point.

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Sep 6

"Many of the LG employees arrested were on business trips with various visas or under a visa waiver programme"

This seems worrying for scientific collaboration. Will ICE decide that people coming to give colloquia, or use a telescope, on visa-waiver are "working"?

www.bbc.com/news/article...

US Hyundai raid: South Korea vows support for citizens detained by ICE

US immigration officials detained 475 workers on Thursday - most of them South Korean nationals - saying they were working illegally.

www.bbc.com

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Sep 6

Also I got to reference (Smith, 1776) in some powerpoint slides.

Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Sep 6

Some versions of Excel have had suprisingly effective multivariable optimization.

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Sep 6

Today I did Actual Math and solved a problem with nonlinear least-squares.

To be fair, it was an accounting problem and the optimization was in Excel but I'm still going to call this a win.

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Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Sep 5

Automatically-refocusing spectacles is a billion-dollar holy-grail problem in my field (adaptive optics) but we're pretty much never going to make that work. "Let's make a piece of glass that's cleverly curved" does work, so get the damn progressives. Very happy with mine.

Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Sep 4

Food is one of the things I miss about Stanford. But UCSC has much nicer trees.

Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Sep 4

Congratulations! Extremely happy to hear this.

Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · Sep 4

It's UCSC, so don't get your hopes up for the food.

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