The “fediverse” is the term for the federated social web, a collection of social media concepts (Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Friendica, Bookwyrm, etc.) that can all talk to each other by virtue of a common protocol: ActivityPub. The technical details don’t matter. What matters is that, in the fediverse, everyone can […]
Yearly Archives: 2025
9 posts
We are headed into the season of the Nobel Prize. Announcements of awards will begin on October 6, with the Physics Prize being announced on the 7th. This year, I decided to have some fun in the “fediverse” and try to tease some nuggets out of the wisdom of the […]
Will a 2019 Intel-based iMac (without the T2 security chip) happily run GNU/Linux? This was the question I set out to answer when we recently retired the first Mac we ever bought for our house. The answer is YES. But the details matter. Background: Forced Obsolescence of Good Hardware For-profit […]
This answer is for Alan. After my keynote talk at the Hartness House Workshop last night, he approached me with a really interesting question. What is the total mass of the neutrinos emitted by a core-collapse supernova (CCSN)? This is a great question and a chance to do some estimating […]
I am presently back in the US on a short vacation before heading to Vermont to participate in the Stellafane Convention. In what has been an intense and extremely busy year, this has been a few days of much needed rest and peace. After exercising in a state park yesterday, […]
The adventures continue! I run a number of computers at home, almost entirely GNU/Linux-based. As the hardware continues to age, data integrity had become more and more of a concern. I am particularly worried about sudden disk failures, and with a combination of ddrescue and timeshift I have been setting […]
In October 2023, I had the great pleasure to journey from Sudbury to Modane, France to participate in a workshop at the Modane Underground Laboratory (Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane, or LSM). That was an incredible work period and a great chance to visit the underground laboratory, which is a “horizontal […]
Join me in this continuing series of posts that explores the development of the material for my public lecture on Thursday, March 14, entitled “Catch a Dying Star: Astronomy Deep Underground”. Today, I explore the development of the storyline.
Join me for a series of posts that explores the development of the material for my public lecture on Thursday, March 14, entitled “Catch a Dying Star: Astronomy Deep Underground”. Today, I explore the origin of the title and the material that is the rough foundation of the lecture.