I drove by the new RM Sherwood data centre on my way in to work this morning. I almost puked. I can't believe how fast it's going, and how stupendously much money is being dumped into this one data centre. No wonder it blew past any possible approval hurdles, there's no regulation in the world that can stand up to that much money. Fuck. How completely demoralizing.

Time to try to make myself care about science I guess.

Just got an official email from Amazon's reps who wrote up their FCC consolidated response to all the opposition comments on the bazillionty direct to device satellites they want to fly. I don't remember the details, and I don't think they were supposed to email me since I was just a co-author on behalf of organizations... and I am definitely not going to read this right before bed.

Fuck off into the sun, Amazon.

I just started writing up complaints about several different things. And it's all just so far beyond what I can even complain about.

So please enjoy these cats while keep writing about the terrible shit that's happening in orbit until my brain switches off for the night.

I think the terrifyingly huge SpaceX Starship launch that's happening right now is the one that's planning to deploy a bunch of the new Starlinks that are not actually approved by the FCC yet because SpaceX knows that the FCC will eventually approve them because they approve literally everything and absolutely nobody with power cares about safety or pollution or Kessler syndrome or the future at all.

Good morning.

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vqtp5dj2o6rqnge56sz2db5a/post/3mwle22petc2d

Academia is so freaking weird. Part of my job as a professor is actually to occasionally cosplay as a medieval wizard while helping hand out scholarships.

As you look up and admire the beautiful moon over the next few nights, remember that a US-based company has clearance from the FCC to launch a satellite that will be about 4x brighter than the full moon, and moving across the sky at Starlink speeds. And they want to launch 50,000 of them.

Don't live in the US? Ask your government to make obtrusive space advertising and obtrusive reflections from space illegal.

Fuck. This. Shit.

I don't want to talk about satellites and genAI (though I appreciate all the comments in my mentions. I just need a little break)

I want to talk about goats and squash! Positive things I can directly affect! (Well, goats are you know, goats. So there are some limits to directly affecting them.)

What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!

I was very sad to see the rescue mission didn't work. And now I guess Swift is also going to have an uncontrolled reentry? And it's pretty big and not designed to "fully demise" (though of course I know better than many that "full demisability" for satellites is a lie).

I really don't like this russian roulette game, even if deaths are an extremely low probability, there are so many reentries now that bad things will happen.

Well, *someone* needs to post about this on Mastodon

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/adams-lake-mastodon-tooth-kamloops-9.7356189

Every year there's always one hen who goes and hides in the barn and makes her own nest in September, which is rather late for chicks in Saskatchewan. This particular mama did this last year too. I was going to see how many eggs she's sitting on, but I forgot that she's kind of evil and she tried to peck my hand off. My teenager named her "Motherclucker" which is delightful. (Except she's a jerk. Good protective mama hen, though!)

Currently watching an IAU-CPS talk given by Olivier Hainaut.

His simulations show that 30,000 sats at 350-600km causes the same astronomy research data loss as 6,000 sats at 1200 km. This is because higher altitudes are visible for a larger fraction of the night, and the sats move more slowly across the image so they cause brighter streaks even though they are farther away