Prof. Sam LawlerImportant* paper coming up on the arxiv tonight!! Coincidentally I yelled swear words across the lonely, dark, frozen fields toward a Starlink train that destroyed my sky this morning. (The goats did not care about my yelling, they were too busy eating grain)
*Important = shit-disturbing
It was not a coincidence, there are too fucking many Starlinks
Prof. Sam LawlerTrying to see the bright side:
It was -28C this morning (it was -2C yesterday morning), so at least there were incredibly pretty ice crystals on the heated waterer.
And Starlink trains are a great way to test the Starlink reflection models I built with Aaron Boley and @hannorein@mastodon.social. I have never wanted to be wrong about a scientific prediction before that paper, but it sure looks like we did well. Fucking annoying. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ac341b
Prof. Sam LawlerRelatedly, data centers in orbit are a fucking terrible idea (not the title Scientific American used, but they should have) https://archive.ph/UPkWu
The SA article references a paper that analyses the carbon footprint of orbital data centers, since techbros talk about "unlimited" solar power so they are "green" right? Well, only if you ignore the GIGANTIC carbon footprint of launching them into orbit and burning them up in the atmosphere: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3757892.3757896