Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born #OTD in 1943. As a grad student at Cambridge in 1967, she discovered an entirely new type of celestial object: Pulsars!
Photo: National Science & Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library
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Thinking again of Jane Grey, a royal of Tudor times, and how the world was robbed of her brilliance when she was beheaded on orders of Queen Mary, when Jane was only seventeen. Most people focus on the history around her short time wearing the crown of England (the first woman, or girl, to do so in her own right), but to me her life before is much more fascinating.
The writings of her tutor and of philosophers in Europe, where you can feel how much in awe they were of her intellect while knowing she was a fifteen year old girl, are spine tingling. Her translating a book into ancient Greek from another ancient language and giving it to her father as his birthday present, at that same age, indicates she was indeed super smart but also a total show-off.
During her months in The Tower, Mary sent her own chaplain, the most learned Catholic in the country, to Jane every single day to try and convert her. Every day he reported back to Mary that he had not succeeded in converting Jane to Catholicism. His private writings in his journals have been preserved. In it he says that not only did he not succeed in converting her, but many days Jane almost succeeded in converting him.
She could argue like the best. And she would never give in.
(She was aware that the deal was that if she converted to Catholicism, she would be let out and not executed. It says quite something that she didn't take that deal.)
In those days science wasn't some people together doing experiments, but it was a network all over Europe of individual people, usually old gray men, at home thinking about stuff and writing their thoughts down in letters to each other. What blows my mind is that 15 year old Jane Grey was part of that network. Not by trickery, writing under her father's name, or them only replying out of politeness. No, they fully knew who she was and they accepted her as an equal. It's a shame her letters have not been preserved.
What could she have achieved had she been able to live into adulthood. I believe she would have become an important scientist whose name we'd remember. Can you imagine that an earlier scientist even than Isaac Newton would have been a woman, rather than us having to wait centuries later for Marie Curie? I think our whole perception of gender in science would be different.
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#EmiliaClarke #ThePodGeneration
The Pod Generation | Official Trailer (HD) | Vertical
Living in the not-so-distant future, a New York couple takes a wild ride to parenthood after landing a coveted spot at the Womb Center, which offers couples ...YouTube
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A #Fediverse #feditips #mastodon question as a poll: How does #markdown render in your web-UI or Masto-app?
I was astonished when I realized what rendered in my web-UI didn't render at all an app. See the images in the first comment to see what choices A and B would look like. If you see lines rendered without leading symbols or italics, the rendering engine is eating the markdown silently, which is choice C.
This is quoted text starting with a right angle bracket and a space.
This paragraph includes italics quoted by a single asterisk and bold quoted by double asterisks.
- This is a bulleted list item starting with an asterisk and a space.
This is a section header or title starting with a hashtag and a space.
Please boost for more visibility.
Hit up the comments to add further detail, especially if choice C is applicable.
Writing hashtags because having your writing render as expected is important.
#CommentingIsCool #fiction #fantasy #sf #sff #sciencefiction #writing #writer #writers #author #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon
- A. It renders with quoted text, italics, and bullets (31%, 10 votes)
- B. It renders with a right bracket, asterisks, and a hashtag (0%, 0 votes)
- C. It renders as plain text; right bracket, asterisks, and hashtags are discarded (68%, 22 votes)
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Of course it's Aimee Carrero who has the best words, as always. Actors are on strike and of course they deserve to be paid properly for their work, even if it's on streaming, and deserve guarantees against misuse of AI, like the writers do.
instagram.com/p/CupRXuuprsa/
SAG-AFTRA
StrikeFor the first time in over 40 years, union film
and television actors are on strike.I'm reflecting on the importance of unions.
Though *never* above reproach or
improvement, unions harness the power of
the collective.Together, we can alleviate the crushing
weight of unfettered capitalism.Together, we can slow the terminal spread of
endless consumption and growth-at-all-cost.At their best, unions represent the hope that
the worker is not a pawn, that The Man is not
invincible, and that the fight for human
dignity cannot and will not be deterred.Unions are the ever-rare reminder that
power is really in the hands of the people.See you on the picket line.
@AimeeCarrero
#Clinical #IndiaEisley
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#JennaOrtega
Rewatching We Hunt Together one episode per week, now they are finally showing it on the BBC (One) after I had previously seen it on the BBC (First) and caught up with the repeat on the BBC (Entertainment).
Hermione Corfield and Eve Myles, double the reason to watch.
#WeHuntTogether
#DutchPolitics #NLPol
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Good. Then let's talk money and not lollipops.
-- Sally
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Found via "Do large language models know what they are talking about?", a good article by itself. The answer is obviously "no" (as fedizen Betteridge will tell you), but the point is why and how.
Nothing new if you've been listening to DAIR people or I suppose computational linguists in general, or linguists in general, but maybe there's some part of the argument that makes it click for someone.
I didn't know that my conclusion about the Chinese Room thought experiment was the same as that of Ray Kurtzweil!
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Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, Pixelfed, PeerTube, dare I say it even Twitter, all have websites that work perfectly fine on mobile. I don't understand this obsession with 'I'm on mobile so I should select an app' or 'I want to see the website so I should use a computer'. The sites may even work better than the app. Often you can save them to your home screen too.
You may consider the feature that apps of mainstream social media provided of extra tracking and snooping to be a nice bonus, but you're not going to get that anyway in fediverse apps.
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Great to see Prof Francesca back. Reshared, not because of the tech advice request, looks like she got a lot of answers already, but this is of course a very serious and important archaeological photo.
I like the grin...
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The fair is in town!
#Fair #Fairground #FunFair #Best
(Photos licensed cc-by Gidi Kroon, reuse with attribution allowed)
![Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL]](avatar/570/66d7b9e49ef23576dbc9f030d261-80.jpeg?ts=1784237656)
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The lead role of Charlotte in Sanditon is played by Rose Williams. I may not like how the scenes are edited and filmed, but she is certainly the good thing about this series. I'll keep watching it.
Here some photos of her from Imdb.
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#Twitter has completely cut off public access to posts. Twitter accounts are now unable to share anything with non-Twitter people. Direct links no longer work, which is a disaster for accounts distributing public information.
This is a textbook example of why you should have your own server as part of a federated social network. Ownership means your public links will never break, federation means you can reach a mass audience.
It's VERY easy to set up your own server: growyourown.services/grow-your…
Grow your own social network | Grow Your Own Services
Helping non-technical people create their own online servicesgrowyourown.services
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I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know liability on your own instance is no different to having a website, as long as it isn't open to public signups?
For example the European Union set up their own server purely for their official accounts at social.network.europa.eu The European Commission has an account there at @EU_Commission
EU Voice
EU Voice is the official ActivityPub platform of the EU institutions. With EU Video, it is part of an alternative social media pilot proposed and provided by the European Data Protection Supervisor.Mastodon hosted on social.network.europa.eu
Also, supposedly the amount of Twitter posts you can see without an account is zero, which they say breaks the Twitter embed functionality. So far that seems untrue, I can see the embeds just fine on my own site even in an incognito window. E.g. this one where Chloë Grace Moretz answered my question.
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When I removed the wallpaper from the bedroom walls, I found the walls to be quite uneven, too much to paint over. I finally applied the material that is supposed to smooth it out (don't know the English word and neither does Google) to half the wall, since the remainder I can't reach yet. I'm not that happy with the result, it's still a bit uneven.
It's drying now so I have time to think about it.
#JennaOrtega #Adidas #AdidasSportswear
Robert McNees
Unknown parent • • •Robert McNees
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Bell was a graduate student in 1967 when she and her doctoral advisor Antony Hewish constructed a low frequency radio array to study the effect of the solar wind on nearby radio sources.
During the commissioning phase of their array, while analyzing long readouts of data by hand, Bell discovered a regular signal with a very stable period of about 1.33s.
Bell and Hewish quickly ruled out a problem with the instrument or human-made interference as explanations.
Robert McNees
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Imagine seeing that remarkably regular signal and not knowing of an astrophysical source that might explain it.
They jokingly nicknamed it LGM-1, for "Little Green Men."
Here is a transcript of Jocelyn Bell Burnell's after-dinner speech at the Eighth Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics, recounting the discovery.
bigear.org/vol1no1/burnell.htm
Cosmic Search Vol. 1, No. 1 - Little Green Men, White Dwarfs or Pulsars?
www.bigear.orgRobert McNees
in reply to Robert McNees • • •The sources were soon identified as rotating, magnetized neutron stars. A tightly collimated beam of radiation is ejected along the neutron star's magnetic axis. We see regular pulses as it rotates, hence the name "pulsar."
The discovery of pulsars provided an extraordinary new laboratory for physics. For example, a gradual decay in the orbit of the pulsar-neutron star binary PSR B1913+16 matches the prediction of general relativity, with energy lost via gravitational waves.
Image: NASA
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Robert McNees
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Antony Hewish received the Nobel Prize in 1974 for his "decisive role in the discovery of pulsars." In a move that can only be described as gratuitous sexism, the Nobel Committee decided not to include Jocelyn Bell Burnell on the prize.
A younger graduate student (Brian Josephson) had received a share of the prize the previous year, so it's not like there was a prohibition against awarding students.
But that's not all. It gets worse.
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Robert McNees
in reply to Robert McNees • • •In 1974, the year Hewish got the prize, there was another important pulsar discovery.
That year, Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor discovered an important binary pulsar pair. They were rightly awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for this discovery!
Russel Hulse was 24 year old graduate student at the time, just like Jocelyn Bell Burnell when she made her discovery. Taylor was Hulse’s advisor.
But Hulse was a man, so he was given a share of the prize.
The Nobel folks always leave this bit out.
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Robert McNees
in reply to Robert McNees • • •"Although I was not included, I celebrated that first award in 1974 of the Physics Prize for an astronomical discovery. Now I celebrate the fact that we have a better understanding of the teamwork necessary for scientific progress."
science.org/doi/10.1126/scienc…
Robert McNees
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Jocelyn Bell Burnell has received just about every other award under the sun, including the 2018 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. She used the prize money —about £2.3 million— to establish a scholarship for white women, minority, and refugee students in physics.
Anyway, happy 80th birthday to Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars!
Robert McNees
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Important pulsar fact!
The cover of the Joy Division album "Unknown Pleasures" was adapted from a plot that radio astronomer Harold Craft made for his PhD dissertation, using data collected at Arecibo while studying the pulsar discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
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Robert McNees
in reply to Robert McNees • • •I know this is a tangent, but here's an excellent Scientific American piece explaining how the album cover came about.
SA: blogs.scientificamerican.com/s…
And here is a short documentary where Peter Saville explains how he designed the cover after seeing Craft's plot in a copy of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy. The video uses the same image of Jocelyn Bell Burnell that I included in the first post.
The Story of Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" Album Design: youtube.com/watch?v=reEQye0EOA…
Pop Culture Pulsar: Origin Story of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures Album Cover [Video]
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whereisk
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Robert McNees
in reply to Robert McNees • • •BettinaKoza
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Stargeezer Smith
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Was it astronaut Gordon Cooper who said:
You don't have to be the best known to be the best?
STEMcoding Project
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Michael Porter
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Juan Cabanela
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Akshay
in reply to Robert McNees • • •IIRC it was seen as blatant sexism even at the time!
Chien-Shiung Wu and Lise Meitner would be other Nobel snubs which embarrassed even their male contemporaries.
Vera Rubin missing out is a head-scratcher, though not sure it was sexist, and I guess nobody understood Noether’s Theorem…
neville park
in reply to Robert McNees • • •"We did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem - if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe how does one announce the results responsibly? Who does one tell first? We did not solve the problem that afternoon, and I went home that evening very cross here was I trying to get a Ph.D. out of a new technique, and some silly lot of little green men had to choose my aerial and my frequency to communicate with us."
Absolutely fantastic, thank you for linking it.
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SabrinaDent
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Robert McNees
in reply to SabrinaDent • • •RossS
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Robert McNees
Unknown parent • • •Robert McNees
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Robert McNees
Unknown parent • • •Robert McNees
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Kenneth
in reply to Robert McNees • • •spencercmd
in reply to Robert McNees • • •vibhor 🍑 🏳️🌈
in reply to Robert McNees • • •the roamer
in reply to Robert McNees • • •Wonderful thread: informative, exciting, infuriating, and ultimately so encouraging. The Nobel prize committee blew it big time in this case, others did better, progress is painful, a great scientist succeeded. Thanks for writing this account, it tells us so much.
#JocelynBellBurnell #WomenInScience
Robert McNees
in reply to the roamer • • •maxelcat
in reply to Robert McNees • • •