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Dvandom

@dvandom.bsky.social

150 followers 36 following 4.6K posts

Physics Professor, Transformers enthusiast, comics reader and reviewer, etc. He/him. http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom http://www.dvandom.com Automatic follow-back helps trolls and bots build a false legitimacy, so don't expect it from me.

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Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · Jan 19

People who know me from elsewhere who are part of a new migration wave, please don't be offended if I don't follow back. My feed is about as active as I can manage following right now.

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Reposted by Dvandom

Jess Nevins @jessnevins.bsky.social · 32m

Good Lord!

Christopher Hale @christopherjhale.bsky.social · 4h

BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV is set to effectively disband Opus Dei in the coming weeks.

This would be the most sweeping internal reform of his pontificate — and a dramatic continuation of Pope Francis’s legacy.

NEW: Pope Leo Set To Break Up Opus Dei

If Pope Leo does indeed approves a plan that effectively dissolves Opus Dei’s structure, it would be the most significant internal action of his short pontificate to date.

open.substack.com

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Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 1h

The "official" color for this set of protests is yellow, amusingly. (And annoyingly, since I own no yellow clothing.)

Reposted by Dvandom

Dr. Damien P. Williams Wants A Better Sociotechnical Paradigm @wolvendamien.bsky.social · 6h

I really really enjoy this dude 😂

Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 12h

An important message to the people of New York City.

More information at zohranfornyc.com/birthday

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Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 5h

Students wonder why I push so hard for them to learn SI when all their other classes use American units. This is why. It's just the last nail, but we've been pissing away our innovation advantage for decades...if you can't comfortably work in metric units, you'll be left behind as an engineer.

Dr. Dawn Wright @deepseadawn.bsky.social · 6h

"The secret sauce has been poured down the drain," says David Draper, former Deputy Chief Scientist of NASA, over the recent firing or departure of 1000s of NASA employees, which will be catastrophic for the legacy of the US🇺🇸😖🚀

www.planetary.org/articles/400...

h/t @floragraham.bsky.social 🧪

4,000 gone: Inside NASA’s brain drain

In exclusive interviews, ex-NASA scientists speak out on the impact of the agency's mass departures.

www.planetary.org

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Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 7h

Probably this?

What do you like about the [Cyber]truck?

What I love about the truck is just how it's so polarizing. The shape of it, the body of it, the manufacturing technique with the body panels and everything. I just love that it's completely outside of the box.

And are you married?

I was married, but I'm not married anymore. Women don't like the vehicle.

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 7h

Or the version, "The Sea Peoples were just all the refugees from various environmental and social disasters, becoming someone else's problem."

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 9h

a close up of a squirrel looking at the camera with a blue sky in the background .

Alt: The dramatic prairie dog GIF. The automatic alt text generator thinks this is a squirrel.

media.tenor.com

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 22h

The Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur cartoon's first season had one of the best "omniscient narrator" gags I've seen.

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 1d

*Sigh* "GREED is Good." Republicans have never been about Green being good, unless you mean greenbacks.

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 1d

(Also, my university didn't have Young Republicans, it had College Republicans, which I suppose was a different organization. CRs struck me at the time as being much more in the Green Is Good mold than the "Nazis copied off our homework" types.)

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Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 1d

The reason we can think they weren't Like That in the 80s was that they never let the mask slip in public, and the few that were online were still cautious enough to not assume anything they did there was secure. Now they're arrogant enough to think they can unmask safely online.

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Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 1d

Native - Born there.
Indigenous - Born there, and your ancestors going way back were born there.
Autochthon - Species evolved there. (Whether evolving from naturally occuring gears, built by Quintessons, or born from Primus's body, the species originated on Cybertron.)

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 1d

Neither indigenous nor autochthonic, but they did immigrate well before any humans. The Dinobots would be native, having been “born” under Mount St. Hilary, though. Definitely wanna see ICE try to hassle Grimlock.

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 1d

(For those who don't follow Transformers stuff, the original cartoon had the original Autobot and Decepticon cast crash-land on Earth 4 million years ago, where they spent the time in stasis lock...not dead, but not moving around either, until the eruption of "Mount St. Hilary" woke them.)

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 1d

Hot take: G1 Megatron resided in the PNW for several hundred times longer than humanity has, and under any reasonable test should have U.S. citizenship.

That said, I'd still like to see ICE try to detain him.

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Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 1d

If the "microexpressions"-based pain scale DOESN'T work fine on ND people, that is also very useful information that needs to be researched...because it could become a much quicker diagnostic tool (and along the way figure out how to make the pain scale work for ND as well).

Kate Watson @loreandordure.com · 1d

This will work fine on neurodivergent folk, I’m sure…

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 1d

Facial expressions common to all humans! 🙃

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 1d

If neurodivergent people are objectively, provably different on this scale, it might make diagnosis less of a "wait a year and pay ten grand" thing as well.

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 1d

At the other end, people with chronic pain have an issue with underreporting pain, because their "annoying but I can function" level is about where most people's "almost passed out" level is. A pain tool that ISN'T subjective is important in both the over and under directions.

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Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 1d

I wonder how ship-of-Theseus it'd have to get before the edits become a full-blown translation.

Reposted by Dvandom

The Podokesaurus Project @podokesauruspro.bsky.social · 1d

Hey, guys, so it turns out the Spinosaurus holotype wasn’t blown into oblivion, the Germans just sent it to Japan under the shroud of night! #paleosky

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Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 2d

Happy 20th Anniversary of the first recorded use of UwU!

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 2d

There's some truly horrifying upper division math with names that sound simple, Linear Algebra isn't the worst of it. I can't remember one that made math majors shudder, might've been (checks a course catalog) Abstract Algebra.

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 2d

IIRC, I got the Manga Guide to Relativity thinking I might use it as a supplemental textbook. Once I finished reading it, I put the kibosh on that idea. I dunno if the rules are different in Japan or the writers just don't care, but teacher/student relationships can get you fired some places here.

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 2d

And a new Texas law could make the output illegal if the AI girls look under 18. Watch the first one to be caught by it be a state senator.

Dvandom @dvandom.bsky.social · 2d

Heck, DC's leaving money on the table not keeping their Superhero Dictionary (from whence came the 40 cakes) in print.