Brutkey

Prof. Sam Lawler
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social

Important* 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

Looking down on a mass of black, white, and brown goats, all jammed together, trying to squeeze in to a trough of grain. There is one small white goat who is hilariously contorted in the middle of the trough while everyone jams their heads in around her.
Prof. Sam Lawler
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social

Trying 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

A close-up view of a skin of ice on top of a water trough. On the skin of ice are a bunch of gorgeous fluffy white ice crystals. They look like tiny white Christmas trees.
Prof. Sam Lawler
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social

Relatedly, 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