Britt Lundgren

@brittlundgren.bsky.social

2954 Followers 1319 Following

quasar gazer | science & education policy wonk | prof. of physics & astronomy at a public liberal arts college | Illinoisan

A photo of Kratsios at a congressional hearing, with him in the foreground, and in focus in the distance, a screen showing the 55% decrease in total grants from FY 2024. Caption: "Mr. Kratsios did not directly defend the Trump administration's proposal for political oversight grans. - Eric Lee/ Reuters"
An AI generated image of some sort of balance or bridge in a street or river, with two different spheres on either side, not tipping the balance. The lesson in this section on "AI for Managers" reads: "Decisions: An AI can help you weigh up options. But the more serious a decision is, the more important it is to understand the different arguments and share transparent information on them."
Learning module on "AI for Managers". An AI-generated headshot with a quotation "As a manager, I would like to use AI applications more often in the future." Select each drop-down to learn more: Project planning; Employee evaluations; Decision
A training module on AI in HR, with a little robot in a green space with papers floating all around them. The text reads: "AI in HR.. Application Documents: The applicants' personal data contained in their applications must be protected during processing. Unfortunately, AI systems tend to favor one gender when making selections for certain professions, [bold] so you should always check the results. [bold]
A cartoon of a green pill with a face and open arms, standing over a red box where the user is invited to "Add your name"
Two nesting kittiwakes and their chicks.
Seaside peat bog on the Isle of Mull
A sunset over a Scottish loch, with clouds forming a wave pattern
Plot shown in the NYTimes Editorial Board's piece, showing "SAT scores strongly predict college grades". A near-perfect linear trendline fits to the data of first year GPA at college vs. SAT score for ivy-plus students
A mother bear and baby, walking through a backyard
Three young raccoons sniffing around a cat door and then leaving
A cranequin for extending a crossbow
"High quality surgery at no cost to you.. * Select non-emergency surgeries are covered when coordinated through Lantern * Access top-rated surgeons with complication rates under 1%-- far below the national average * Your Care Advocate handles everything from scheduling to paperwork, making it easy to get started
Quick facts returned from a Google search of Michael Knowles... Born 1990, married, yadda yadda ... Yale
Wooden abstract sculpture by Henry Moore of a person reclining, shown displayed on a red platform.
Large green weathered bronze sculpture by Henry Moore outside, with passing visitors for scale
Plot of solar energy production (blue), household energy use (orange) and the net exported (gray)... Showing 50kwh produced, with 33.6 kwh exported to the grid
The corner of a mattress, with the label reading "Verlo mattress"
A turtle swimming in a pond
An old fashioned with its ingredients, including Squirt
A baby bunny in a concrete planter
1944 August 3: Opened 21h. Sky clear. Found red light on spectrograph not working, owing to plug having been left in and battery run down. Set on gamma Cen with help of dark room red light. I started exposure 21h 44m GMT. Flying bomb exploded very close, and shifted star in dec out of field. Star recovered, and exposure restarted 21h 47m GMT. Just after starting the second time, a second flying bomb exploded. This was more distant though it shifted image from the slit, star did not go out of field and was quickly recovered. Exposure ended 22h 7m GMT. Exposure time = 20m. Plate developed. Closed 22h 1/2.
Done of Yerkes Observatory at twilight, with clear skies and a view of a crescent moon and planet
Doppler radar of a storm front with tornado warning
A box labeled "Hubble Thesis Plates"
The U505 German submarine, on display in the basement of the Museum of Science and Industry Chicago
Squirrel eating at a birdfeeder
A raccoon raiding a bird feeder
A male cardinal repeatedly fetching food at a feeder to pass to a female cardinal in the distance.
A Google search for "pollen count asheville" returns: AI Overview The current pollen count in Asheville, NC, registers in the high to very high range, primarily driven by elevated levels of grass and cypress pollen. Tree pollen has mostly subsided for the season, though weed pollen remains in the low-to-moderate category. Local Allergen Breakdown: Grass Pollen: Very High Cypress / Tree Pollen: Low to Moderate
Title slide for the PhD defense of Samantha Creech, reading: "An X-ray Investigation of Active Galactic Nuclei and their Environments"
Roxanna Medina, 38, who was a student in Janos’s classical social theory course, never intended to seek out a job at OpenAI or Nvidia or Adobe. After spending several years at home caring for her young son, she returned to school hoping to earn her degree so that she could one day re-enter the work force. “I come from immigrant parents, from the hustle-bustle kind of life,” she said. She told me that interacting with Janos’s chatbots had fundamentally altered how she thinks about her life and work. When she started having conversations with the bot, she said, she felt as if she had unlocked another layer of understanding. For one assignment, Medina asked the bot if it thought Marxist theory had anything to say about the acceleration of technology, if it was still a relevant framework for the present day. In response, MarxGPT said that the workers of the world were still struggling, and that “capitalism has found a new way of hiding things,” she recalls. The exchange led her to think more critically about the value of her own labor. Medina graduated this spring; her son is now 6 years old, and she plans to spend some time caring for him before she decides on her next steps. But her interactions with MarxGPT continue to influence how she speaks to him about his own value and the balance of work and life. “It’s helped me with my son,” she said. “You’re worth this, remember that.”
A figure from Wilkens 2026; OpenRouter2025, showing a histogram of ChatGPT usage by month. There is a significant drop in use during the months of summer school holiday (Jun-Aug) in the Northern Hemisphere. The text from the Brookings Institution authors below the figure reads "It does appear that many users are using these AI tools as part of their educational experience.."
"The association of education with earning a living, and developing industrial power, which was a legitimate subject of debate when this book was written, is, a decade later, patently absurd. Everybody is now aware that the official rate of unemployment among young people is double that among adults. The actual rate is undoubtedly higher, because many young people have thought it useless to apply for work. The general reaction to this situation borders on fantasy: it is to propose widespread extension of vocational training. In short, the cure for the disease of no jobs is training for them." - Robert M. Hutchins (1964)
Earth work perimeter of the Cissbury Ring hill fort, overlooking the South Downs
A dome at UCL Observatory, backlit on a sunny day, wrapped by a small, well-kept hedge and vines
Black and white portrait of British-American astronomer Margaret Burbidge.
Excerpt from page 9 of Robert Maynard Hutchins' "The University of Utopia" (1969): "The people have received, as a result of the movement toward universal education, just enough education to permit them to be victimized by advertising and propaganda, not enough to enable them to appraise and resist the arts of those who have been engaged in depriving them of the political power their education was to give them. The nature of the education that the people have received has contributed also to the continuous enlargement of the area of wasted time. There has been little in their education to suggest that time should not be wasted or to propose methods of employing it usefully. Only an education conceived of as moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual growth could accomplish these aims. An education dedicated, for ex-ample, to training a boy to earn a living cannot lay the basis for the useful employment of those hours of his life in which he is not earning a living."
1 Corinthians 3:18-20 New International Version 18 Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become “fools” so that you may become wise. 19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness”[a]; 20 and again, “The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.”[b]
A green dragonfly, resting on an SDSS aluminum plug plate
A brown thrasher gathering food at a feeder and flying off to its best with a full beak
Monkey looking away
A small bottle of prosecco and a card from UNC Asheville
Photo of the group members of Boyz II Men with the headline: "LATEST: Boyz II Men to perform at Hard Rock Casino Rockford this summer"
Two children and their mother, dressed for Easter Sunday, in a full meltdown.
Cumulative number of NSF Astronomy awards by date, comparing FY22, 24, 25, & 26. The trend shows that most funding of selected awards goes out at the end of the fiscal year, in August.
some sort of 3D graduation card for Pre-K and Kindergarten "graduates" being sold at Target, which is made for being stocked with 20 dollar bills. The item is called "Big Dot of Happiness Kindergarten Grad - DIY 4K Preschool Kids Graduation Party Money Holder Gift - Cash Cake"
The SDSS telescope at Apache Point Observatory is pictured as it takes calibration observations under the night sky. The associated article's title reads: "Share Tactics -- How the Sloan Digital Sky Suvey's two-decade commitment to open data is revolutionizing astronomy"
Downtown Chicago, shrouded in a low cloud layer, with only a few skyscrapers poking out.. as seen from the Sears Tower weather cam
Internet ad featuring an AI image of an aged Melania Trump, with the headline "If you get social security, don't skip this April benefit check"
1989; Smokey Bear poster showing a half body image of Smokey pointing at the audience with one hand while holding a shovel in the other hand. Poster reads "Only You". This work is maintained in the National Agricultural Library, in Beltsville, MD.
"Mission Aborted: How NASA Illegally Implemented the President's Budget Request Without Congressional Approval" - Minority Staff Report Prepared for Members of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, US House of Representatives - April 2026
Yale was founded in 1701 to educate students “for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State.”10 Like most colleges at the time, it was then a small, private, and religious institution. Over the next three centuries, higher education in the United States was transformed by the founding of large public land-grant institutions, by the rise of the research university with an emphasis on graduate study and professional training, by the creation of community colleges, and by a dramatic expansion in both the size and nature of the nation’s student body.