Jason Wright

@astrowright.bsky.social

3138 Followers 397 Following

Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State. Son, father, partner, scientist, teacher, student, human, Earthling. Mostly posting astronomy. Mostly.

Scene from the Karate Kid between Mr. Miyagi and Daniel. Caption: "First wash all the cars, then wax."

A still of the character Will Hunting delivering the "$1.50 in late fees" line.

Scene from Real Genius in which students have placed tape recorders on their desks to record a lecture being delivered by a tape recorder placed at the front of the room.

The summary points above were compiled with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists. The full story in the link at top was reported, written and edited entirely by journalists.

There is no output from generative AI in this book.

The trafficking of slaves into the United States was
outlawed in 1808. See An Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves, 2 Stat. 426, § 1 (1807). Yet thousands
more were unlawfully taken here afterward. See J. David Hacker, From ‘20. and odd’ to 10 million: The
Growth of the Slave Population in the United States,
41 Slavery & Abolition 840, 846 (2020); see generally
Gabriel J. Chin & Paul Finkelman, Birthright Citizenship, Slave Trade Legislation, and the Origins of Federal Immigration Regulation, 54 U.C. Davis L. Rev.
2215 (2021). They were, through no fault of their own,
unlawfully present in the United States, and presumably many wished to return home. But by the Government’s logic, that would mean their children weren’t
citizens by default. The Fourteenth Amendment would
have recreated a racial caste where one could be “a citizen to obey, and an alien to demand protection.” William Yates, Rights of Colored Men to Suffrage, Citizenship and Trial by Jury 37 (Philadelphia: Merrihew &
Gunn 1838) (cleaned up). That can’t be right.

Last, the Government’s logic would have made aliens out of the children of slaves, many of whom entered “unlawfully” by virtue of being trafficked here
after a federal ban.

Almost all primary journals are digital only - there are no hardcopy prints of the publications. It is hard to imagine how it is justified
to charge thousands of USD for a single article. Especially when considering that current peer-review journals would not exist without the
main ingredient: free reviewers.

Throughout the years, there has been a constant increase in the publishing costs of journal publications.

Young people, especially young women, often ask me for advice. Here it is, valeat quantum. Do not undertake a scientific career in quest of fame or money. Undertake it only if nothing else will satisfy you; for nothing else is probably what you will receive. Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward you will ask no other.

Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.

$Screenshot of the Mac Text Replacement screen showing Greek letters latex commands like \alpha on the left and proper Greek symbols like α on the right.$

Plot showing strength of Ca II H&K lines increasing by a bit before getting about 17% weaker during eclipse, then reversing the pattern on the way out. The curve is slighly asymmetric and misses the model by about 1% during the brightenings.

$fraction of disk (t) = 2/pi (theta(t) - sin(theta(t))cos(theta(t)) fraction of limb = theta(t) / pi$

plot showing measurements of the strength of the H-alpha absorption featured getting first slightly stronger then 8% dimmer in the hour before mid-eclipse. The sequence reverses for the next hour. Red line shows the one-parameter model that fits it pretty well.

Textbook cover for The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Theory and Practice by Jason T. Wright published by an American Astronomical Society and IOP Publishing Partnership (ebooks)

Was the Wow! Signal Emitted from 3I/ATLAS?

By Avi Loeb

Next comes a by-now routine dismissal of astronomical observations, in order to claim 3I/ATLAS’s dusty coma (which does exist: de la Fuente Marcos et al.; Seligman et al.; Bolin et al.) does not exist and is just photographic fuzz. What would be bold and novel would be to lean in to the observations of dust and assert that any spaceship coming in hot from the interstellar medium would be very dirty and in need of a wash.

I first calculated that a primordial black hole with a Hawking temperature of 1,000 degrees Kelvin would produce only 20 nanowatts of power, clearly insufficient to power 3I/ATLAS. A natural nuclear source could be a rare fragment from the core of a nearby supernova that is rich in radioactive material. This possibility is highly unlikely, given the scarce reservoir of radioactive elements in interstellar space.

Alternatively, 3I/ATLAS could be a spacecraft powered by nuclear energy, and the dust emitted from its frontal surface might be from dirt that accumulated on its surface during its interstellar travel. This cannot be ruled out, but requires better evidence to be viable.

Insisting on 3I/ATLAS being a natural object, one might consider the hypothetical case of an object heated by friction on an ambient medium.

[Image of an email]:
Subject: Your ebook has been accepted for publication in the AAS-IOP Astronomy collection

from: ebooksproduction@ioppublishing.org 4:50 AM (6 hours ago)
to: me

Body:
Re: "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" by Wright

Dear Professor Wright,

We are pleased to inform you that IOP Publishing has accepted your book for publication.

Our next step is to prepare a proof, which may take up to six weeks for large books. You will next hear from us when your proof is available. We will send you an email with instructions on how to access and review your proof.

In the meantime, we are interested to hear your thoughts on your experience with IOP Publishing so far. We would be grateful if you could complete a very short survey: Accepted Author Survey. (Please be assured that we will only use your details for the purposes of the survey).Thank you for your support of AAS-IOP Astronomy.

Best regards,

IOP Publishing eBooks Production Team
ebooksproduction@ioppublishing.org

This elongation is not mitigated by freezing the object’s image and letting the background stars move relative to it. It results from the fact that a single snapshot of the image takes a hundred seconds. The product of this exposure time and the speed of 3I/ATLAS yields a scale of order 6,000 kilometers (comparable to Earth’s radius), extending over an angle of ~2 arcseconds in the sky given the object’s distance of 4.5 times the Earth-Sun separation. While 3I/ATLAS may well be a comet, this elongation should not be taken as evidence for its cometary tail.

Panel 1: Arrow labeling a figure Deadpool with a speech bubble “something snarky”

Panel 2: Figure labeled Deadpool saying “something flirty” to a figure labeled “Wolverine”

Panel 3: Wolverine responding “Something violent” near a dog labeled “Dogpool” saying “woof”

NYT crossword with “group sending radio signals into space“ as the clue for the answer SETI

error message

$LaTeX rendering of fractional arcseconds, arcminutes, and degrees with the default AASTeX macros and the redefinition$

(c) 1988 Mike Blake

Photograph of a smiling man with classes, a mustache, and a corded phone wrapped playfully around his torso a few times.

Boston area phone and pager numbers listed.

Mike Bl

Third, the mass
of Jupiter, if distributed in a spherical
shell revolving around the sun at twice
the Earth's distance from it, would have
a thickness such that the mass is 200
grams per square centimeter of surface
area (2 to 3 meters, depending on the
density).

10 people at two tables in a restaurant

Phase diagram of helium showing the α (solid) phase existing only at pressures above 2.5 MPa and low temperatures.