Mastodon has been around for a while, but garnered interest recently in the wake of Twitter’s leadership-driven meltdown. I tried setting up a Mastodon instance over a year ago but abandoned the effort due to time pressure. My interest in spinning up an instance was rekindled by recent events coupled […]
We had quite a storm last night, with some power outages from high winds, ice, and snow. But everything has been quite driveable this morning (although the school system cancelled buses today). Here is the view from Highway 144 on the way into SNOLAB.
I hate moving. The fact that I am so happy after the big relocation from Texas to Canada tells you how great Sudbury and SNOLAB have been. Moves irritate me because it takes so long to recover from them. You unpack for what feels like (or actually are) years. I […]
Happy new year, everyone. The calendar says it is 2023. From the perspective of our orbit about the Sun – the solar year – we are still several hours from that mark. Earth takes 365.25 Gregorian calendar days to make one orbit about the Sun. As a result, every fourth […]
It was October in the void. The white dwarf, Nain Blanc, had been, for some time, slurping up the hydrogen and helium from the vast gas envelope of its partner, a red giant, Géant Rouge. When they were younger, the two stars burned bright in the dark of empty space, […]
The pastor was prayin’For sinners unpracticed,Preparin’ communion(Except for us Baptists) And I’m in the second pew ready for healin’When a voice next to me says “We should be wheelin’;The ERs the place that I want to beOn Christmas Eve, o brother, why can’t you see?” We’ll go to the ERAnd […]
The most common thing Canadians say to us after we exclaim how much we love it in Sudbury is this: Just wait until January. All Sudburians to Foreign Nationals from Warmer Climates To which I say: some like it Hoth. Hoth was, and still is, my favorite setting in the […]
The last few months on this blog have been quiet … too quiet. I think it is generally true that the activity level of a blog may be inversely proportional to the level of activity of the writer. If that be true, then let the lack of effort here be […]
I own a number of internet domains, including most notably cooleysekula.net (this one), polari.us (where some social media stuff is run), and astrohep.org (hosting some services for astrophysics and high-energy physics research). Since these are all hosted on servers I own and run out of my house, and since we […]