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Neal Stephenson is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels Termination Shock, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning … Was the Command Line. He is also the coauthor, with Nicole Galland, of The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. His works of speculative fiction have been variously categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, maximalism, cyberpunk, and post-cyberpunk. In his fiction, he explores fields such as mathematics, cryptography, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. Born in Fort Meade, Maryland (home of the NSA and the National Cryptologic Museum), Stephenson comes from a family comprising engineers and hard scientists he dubs “propeller heads.” He holds a degree in geography and physics from Boston University, where he spent a great deal of time on the university mainframe. He lives in Seattle, Washington. As The Atlantic has recently observed, “Perhaps no writer has been more clairvoyant about our current technological age than Neal Stephenson. His novels coined the term metaverse, laid the conceptual groundwork for cryptocurrency, and imagined a geoengineered planet. And nearly three decades before the release of ChatGPT, he presaged the current AI revolution.” His new novel is Polostan, the first installment in his Bomb Light cycle.

Shermer and Stephenson discuss:

• How to write professionally
• How to write science fiction and fantasy
• How lives turn out: genes, environment and luck
• How so much of history is contingent
• No Hitler, No Atomic Bomb
• How the bomb was developed and why
• The ethics of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• The Hobbesian Trap, Security Dilemma, and the Other Guy Problem and the bomb
• Mutual Assured Destruction and why it has worked (so far)
• Cryptocurrency
• AI, ChatGPT, and the Singularity
• Mind uploading
• Human evolution and the far future of humanity
• What type of political and economic systems will we have on Mars?
• Charles Sanders Peirce and the philosophy of Fallibilism
• Platonic realism.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

For most of human history, the Sun appeared stable. It was a stoic stellar presence, going about its business fusing hydrogen into helium beyond our awareness and helping Earth remain habitable. But in our modern technological age, that facade fell away.

We now know that the Sun is governed by its powerful magnetic fields, and as these fields cycle through their changes, the Sun becomes more active. Right now, according to NASA, the Sun is at its solar maximum, a time of increased activity.

Solar Maximum means pretty much what it sounds like. In this phase of the cycle, our star is exhibiting maximum activity. The Sun’s intense magnetic fields produce more sunspots and solar flares than at any other time in its 11-year cycle.

The Solar Maximum is all based on the Sun’s magnetic fields. These fields are measured in Gauss units, which describe magnetic flux density. The Sun’s poles measure about 1 to 2 gauss, but sunspots are much higher at about 3,000 gauss. (Earth is only 0.25 to 0.65 gauss at its surface.) Since the magnetic field is so much stronger where sunspots appear, they inhibit convective heating from deeper inside the Sun. As a result, sunspots appear as dark patches.

Sunspots are visual indicators of the Sun’s 11-year cycle. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and an international group called the Solar Cycle Prediction Panel watch sunspots to understand where the Sun is at in its cycle.

“During solar maximum, the number of sunspots, and therefore, the amount of solar activity, increases,” said Jamie Favors, director of the Space Weather Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This increase in activity provides an exciting opportunity to learn about our closest star — but also causes real effects at Earth and throughout our solar system.”

The effects came into focus for many of us recently. In May 2024, the Sun launched multiple CMEs. As the magnetic fields and charged particles reached Earth, they triggered the strongest geomagnetic storm in 200 decades. These created colourful aurorae that were visible much further from the poles than usual. NASA says that these aurorae were likely among the strongest displays in the last 500 years.

Scientists know the Sun is at its solar maximum. But it lasts for an entire year. They won’t know when its activity peaks until after they’ve watched it for months and its activity has declined.

“This announcement doesn’t mean that this is the peak of solar activity we’ll see this solar cycle,” said Elsayed Talaat, director of space weather operations at NOAA. “While the Sun has reached the solar maximum period, the month that solar activity peaks on the Sun will not be identified for months or years.”

Each cycle is different, making it difficult to label peak solar activity. Different peaks have different durations and have higher or lower peaks than others.

Understanding the Sun’s cycle is important because it creates space weather. During solar maximum, the increased sunspots and flares also mean more coronal mass ejections (CMEs.) CMEs can strike Earth, and when they do, they can trigger aurorae and cause geomagnetic storms. CMEs, which are blobs of hot plasma, can also affect satellites, communications, and even electrical grids.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured these images of solar flares below, as seen in the bright flashes in the left image (May 8, 2024 flare) and the right image (May 7, 2024 flare). The image shows 131 angstrom light, a subset of extreme ultraviolet light that highlights the extremely hot material in flares and which is colourized in orange.

via GIPHY

During the solar maximum, the Sun produces an average of three CMEs every day, while it drops to one CME every five days during the solar minimum. The CMEs’ effect on satellites causes the most concern. In 2003, satellites experienced 70 different types of failures. The failures ranged from erroneous signals in a satellite’s electronics to the destruction of electrical components. The solar storm that occurred in 2003 was deemed responsible for 46 of those 70 failures.

CMEs are also a hazard for astronauts orbiting Earth. The increased radiation poses a health risk, and during storms, astronauts seek safety in the most shielded part of the ISS, Russia’s Zvezda Service Module.

Galileo and other astronomers noticed sunspots hundreds of years ago but didn’t know exactly what they were. In a 1612 pamphlet titled “Letters on Sunspots,” Galileo wrote ‘The sun, turning on its axis, carries them around without necessarily showing us the same spots, or in the same order, or having the same shape.’ This contrasted with others’ views on the spots, some of which suggested they were natural satellites of the Sun.

We’ve known about the Sun’s magnetic fields for 200 hundred years, though at first, scientists didn’t know the magnetism was coming from the Sun. In 1724, an English geophysicist noticed that his compass was behaving strangely and was deflected from magnetic north throughout the day. In 1882, other scientists correlated these magnetic effects with increased sunspots.

In recent decades, we’ve learned much more about our stellar companion thanks to spacecraft dedicated to studying it. NASA and the ESA launched the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) in 1995, and NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in 2010. In 2011, we got our first 360-degree view of the Sun thanks to NASA’s two Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft. In 2019, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe, which also happens to be humanity’s fastest spacecraft.

Our understanding of the Sun and its cycles is far more complete now. The current cycle, Cycle 25, is the 25th one since 1755.

This figure shows the number of sunspots over the previous twenty-four solar cycles. Scientists use sunspots to track solar cycle progress; the dark spots are associated with solar activity, often as the origins for giant explosions—such as solar flares or coronal mass ejections—that can spew light, energy, and solar material out into space. Image Credit: NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center

“Solar Cycle 25 sunspot activity has slightly exceeded expectations,” said Lisa Upton, co-chair of the Solar Cycle Prediction Panel and lead scientist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “However, despite seeing a few large storms, they aren’t larger than what we might expect during the maximum phase of the cycle.”

The most powerful flare so far in Cycle 25 was on October 3rd, when the Sun emitted an X9 class flare. But scientists anticipate more flares and activity to come. There can be significantly powerful storms even in the cycle’s declining phase, though they’re not as common.

On October 3, 2024, the Sun emitted a strong solar flare. As of this date, this solar flare is the largest of Solar Cycle 25 and is classified as an X9.0 flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured imagery of this solar flare – as seen in the bright flash in the center – on October 3, 2024. The image shows a blend of 171 Angstrom and 131 Angstrom light, subsets of extreme ultraviolet light.
Image Credit: NASA/SDO

The Sun’s 11-year cycle is just one of its cycles, nested in larger cycles. The Gleissberg cycle lasts between 80 to 90 years and modulates the 11-year cycle. The de Vries cycle or Suess cycle lasts between 200 and 210 years, and the Hallstatt cycle lasts about 2,300 years. Both of these cycles contribute to long-term solar variation.

However, even with all we know about the Sun, there are big gaps in our knowledge. The Sun’s magnetic poles switch during the 11-year cycle, and scientists aren’t sure why.

There’s a lot more to learn about the Sun, but we won’t run out of time to study it any time soon. It’s in the middle of its 10-billion-year lifetime and will be a main-sequence star for another five billion years.

The post The Sun Has Reached Its Solar Maximum and it Could Last for One Year appeared first on Universe Today.

Specific molecular property of lignin in trees determines difficulty of using microbial fermentation to turn trees and other plants into industrial chemicals.

A professor has helped create a powerful new algorithm that uncovers hidden patterns in complex networks, with potential uses in fraud detection, biology and knowledge discovery.

A professor has helped create a powerful new algorithm that uncovers hidden patterns in complex networks, with potential uses in fraud detection, biology and knowledge discovery.

On July 1st, 2023 (Canada Day!), the ESA’s Euclid mission lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. As part of the ESA’s Cosmic Vision Programme, the purpose of this medium-class mission was to observe the “Dark Universe.” This will consist of observing billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away to create the most extensive 3D map of the Universe ever created. This map will allow astronomers and cosmologists to trace the evolution of the cosmos, helping to resolve the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

The first images captured by Euclid were released by the ESA in November 2023 and May 2024, which provided a glimpse at their quality. On October 15th, 2024, the first piece of Euclid‘s great map of the Universe was revealed at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Milan. This 208-gigapixel mosaic contains 260 observations made between March 25th and April 8th, 2024, and provides detailed imagery of millions of stars and galaxies. This mosaic accounts for just 1% of the wide survey that Euclid will cover over its six-year mission and provides a sneak peek at what the final map will look like.

The IAC 2024 session, which took place from October 14th – 18th in Milan, was the 75th annual meeting of the Congress. The session welcomed over 8,000 experts from space agencies, the research sector, and the space industry to come together and discuss the use of space to support sustainability. The mosaic, presented by ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and Director of Science Carole Mundell during the event, contains about 100 million sources, including stars in our Milky Way and galaxies beyond.

The main objective of the Euclid mission is to measure the hidden influence of Dark Matter and Dark Energy on the Universe. These will hopefully resolve questions that astronomers have been dealing with for decades. It all began in the 1960s when astronomers noted that the rotational curves of galaxies did not agree with the observed amounts of matter they contained. This led to speculation that there must be a mysterious, invisible mass that optical telescopes could not account for (aka. Dark Matter).

By the 1990s, thanks to observations made by the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers also noticed that the rate at which the Universe has been expanding (the Hubble-Lemaitre Constant) was accelerating with time. By observing the shapes, distances, and motions of billions of galaxies, Euclid‘s 3D map will provide the most accurate estimates of galactic masses and cosmic expansion over the past 10 billion years. Zooming very deep into the mosaic (see image below), the intricate structure of the Milky Way can be seen, as well as many galaxies beyond.

Another interesting feature is what looks like clouds between the stars in our galaxy, which appear light blue against the background of space. This is the gas and dust of the interstellar medium (ISM), which is known on a galactic scale as the “galactic cirrus” (because of its resemblance to clouds). Euclid‘s super-sensitive optical camera—the VISible instrument (VIS), composed of 36 charged-coupled devices (CCDs) with 4000 x 4000 pixels each—can see these clouds as they reflect optical light from the Milky Way. Said Euclid Project Scientist Valeria Pettorino in an ESA press release.

“This stunning image is the first piece of a map that, in six years, will reveal more than one-third of the sky. This is just 1% of the map, and yet it is full of a variety of sources that will help scientists discover new ways to describe the Universe.”

This graphic provides an overview of the mosaic and zoomed-in images released by ESA’s Euclid mission on October 15th, 2024. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA/CEA Paris-Saclay/J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi

As noted, the mosaic shows only 1% of what Euclid will observe during the course of its six-year mission. In just two weeks, the observatory covered 132 square degrees of the Southern Sky in pristine detail (more than 500 times the area of the full Moon). Since the mission began routine science observations in February, 12% of the survey has been completed. By March 2025, the ESA will release 53 square degrees of the survey, including a preview of the Euclid Deep Field areas. This will be followed by the release of the first year of cosmology data sometime in 2026.

The Euclid Consortium (EC) consists of more than 2000 scientists from 300 institutes in Europe, the USA, Canada, and Japan and is responsible for providing the mission’s instruments and data analysis.

Further Reading: ESA

The post Check Out This Sneak Peek of the Euclid mission’s Cosmic Atlas appeared first on Universe Today.

Researchers used a collection of charged atoms to create a quantum superposition of an exotic type of defect

It’s Friday, and you may have noticed that I haven’t done a lot of braining lately, and put up virtually no science posts. That’s because I am going through another bout of insomnia (it’s now five nights since I had a decent sleep), and it’s hard to concentrate on anything. So bear with me; I do my best. Instead of something intellectual, science-y, or literary this Friday, have a look at the world’s longest truck.

It’s in Australia, of course, where there are long stretches of straight road that can be navigated by “road trains”.

Rats perform better on memory tests when certain brainwave-producing neurons are stimulated while they sleep. If we can boost these brainwaves in people, it could help treat memory impairments in those with dementia

A research team has successfully developed a new approach to create switchable magnetic materials by using hydrogen bonding at the molecular level. This groundbreaking study shows how certain metal complexes, previously unresponsive to external stimuli, can now exhibit sharp and complete magnetic transitions by introducing chiral hydrogen bonds.

Physicists have shown that extremely light particles known as axions may occur in large clouds around neutron stars. These axions could form an explanation for the elusive dark matter that cosmologists search for -- and moreover, they might not be too difficult to observe.

Physicists have shown that extremely light particles known as axions may occur in large clouds around neutron stars. These axions could form an explanation for the elusive dark matter that cosmologists search for -- and moreover, they might not be too difficult to observe.

A story passed down in folklore led scientists to evidence of an 8-metre tsunami that hit an island in Hawaii hundreds of years ago

A review of Informatica: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright (2023) and Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge, From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic by Simon Winchester (2023)

Can the history of how humans organize knowledge help us understand 21st century information overload? Two readable new books help us address these questions with interdisciplinary narratives: Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic by Simon Winchester, and Informatica: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright.

To varying degrees and slightly different ways, both books review the history of information technologies as a helpful tool. Both cover the familiar chronology from the clay tablets and papyrus scrolls of ancient times, monks in the Middle Ages copying texts in their scriptoria, the 15th and 19th century technologies that made books cheaper and more common, the development of reference books, and the mid-20th century innovations leading to modern computers and World Wide Web. Both books are also stimulatingly interdisciplinary, discussing many more historical topics than I’ve mentioned above, but also grounded in science and technology. After these similarities, the books diverge.

Cuneiform tablet
Mesopotamia, circa 31 CE

Although Knowing What We Know is rich in history, it is not chronological. It instead progresses from the learning of information (education) to the storing of knowledge (museums, libraries, and encyclopedias), and then to the dissemination of knowledge, concluding in thoughtful discussion of the implication of new technologies, such as the AI-based Large Language Models (LLMs). These topics are corralled by Winchester’s background in journalism, and the grounding of each topic in precise examples.

On education, for example, Winchester contrasts three striking 21st century cases. He vividly recalls the woman he interviewed who started a school in a poverty-stricken village in India. Those students’ joyous thirst for knowledge is contrasted against the high-tension stakes in China, where a single exam taken in students’ teenage years determines their job opportunities for the rest of their lives. Winchester’s third example of education is the most striking—that of an illiterate island group whose oral storytelling tradition saved them, alone, from a tsunami.

Winchester progresses to knowledge summarized in encyclopedias, recalling his own love of them in his youth and summarizes the rise and cessation of the leading print encyclopedia of the 19th and 20th century, Encyclopedia Britannica. How can complex issues about the leading online encyclopedia Wikipedia, with its vast size and reliability, be better illustrated than by Winchester’s own experience late in his research seeing there that a pioneer of internet technology was listed as having died, the correction of which Winchester learned the next morning on social media?

And so it goes: Winchester focuses on a few extraordinary cases to illustrate each of his points. For the preservation of knowledge in museums, it is the remarkable story of the saving of museum treasures in China during political turmoil, and how the Chinese government has viewed this precious collection. Similarly, the rise of mass media is illustrated by the BBC because, Winchester notes, its style was influential in the development of radio news around the world. This flows naturally to the following chapter’s discussion of propaganda, focusing on the chilling example of the Nazis. His penultimate chapter is about polymaths and, finally, wisdom, focusing less on religion than on whether it was wise to drop the atomic bombs in 1945. The book concludes with the implications of ChatGPT and other new technology for our brains.

Winchester has a remarkable ability to turn what could be a dry recitation of facts into a series of compelling stories, with numbered subsections in each chapter. The one time I felt that he could have used a copy editor was during his overly long digression on Krakatoa, the subject of one of his previous books, though he did make even this topic surprisingly relevant. In his hands, such meandering is usually done masterfully.

Like a well-structured novel, all that came before leads Winchester to his conclusion. His fear is that technology, as currently progressing, can hurt our ability to think for ourselves. Characteristically, he illustrates this with a specific example: the complex skill set he stumbled through when his small boat needed to navigate toward land rather than be lost in the ocean in the days prior to GPS. Can people even read maps anymore? In one of the book’s few missed opportunities, he does not draw an extended parallel to the people who (accurately) decried in Gutenberg’s era that if books were mass produced, people’s ability to remember vast amounts of knowledge would decline, which it did (the skill of modern mnemonists, such as the late Harry Lorrayne, notwithstanding).

If Winchester’s book is grounded in concise case studies, Wright’s contributions in Informatica are science and the history of structured systems for organizing knowledge. These merge when Wright discusses the biological classification scheme developed primarily by Carl Linnaeus, including an amusing anecdote involving Thomas Jefferson mailing the decaying body of a moose to acclaimed scientific theorist Comte de Buffon. Although science is mentioned several times in Winchester’s Knowing, Alex Wright’s Informatica opens with it, following the late biologist E.O. Wilson in speculating about the biological role of epigenetics in human knowledge transmission. Wright compares “networks and hierarchies” in the natural and the human worlds. He sees parallels between creations by groups that are unlikely to have communicated, such as the similarity between the plant taxonomies created by Western scholars and those formed through oral tradition in other societies.

Using more traditional evidence, Wright explicitly links the Linnaean classification scheme to the development of librarians’ attempts to organize books, culminating in the Dewey Decimal System at the turn of the 20th century. He appropriately refers to this 19th century arc as “the industrial library,” the creation of more elaborate organizational schemes being demanded by vastly increased numbers of published books, which was in turn allowed by new technology.

Successive chapters discuss early to mid-20th century utopian information sharing projects using then-existing technology, including index cards and telegraphy, or the briefly famous Mundaneum (an institution that aimed to gather together all the world’s knowledge and classify it according to a system called the Universal Decimal Classification). In Informatica, Wright’s discussion of these utopian schemes does not flow as well as it could, the reader being left to make the connections.

Worse, Wright’s extended history of the developments leading to the modern internet is shoehorned into a subsection of the revised “Web That Wasn’t” chapter as “The Web That Was.” This combination of topics in the same chapter was tenable in Glut, but in Informatica the subsection discusses so many people and inventions, all of whose work made the World Wide Web possible, that it should have been a new chapter. Finally, Wright recycled some of his earlier writing and did not update it, such as referring to CD-Roms and America Online (AOL) as leading technologies. This could have been fixed easily.

That said, the narrative in Informatica is more clearly chronological than in Knowing What We Know, but Simon Winchester is so skilled a writer that his book is generally a smoother narrative despite being more episodic. Except in the book’s outline: I was halfway through the book before realizing that its main chapters had a logically progressive sequence to them, from data acquisition to information display to the uses of knowledge and finally to wisdom. Winchester could have made this clearer earlier in the book with just a few words.

One side topic bears noting: Winchester said in at least two media interviews that his discussion of the racism found in a leading mid-century encyclopedia was edited out of the published version of Knowing What We Know, on the grounds that it would be too controversial or offend too many of his readers. Perhaps it would have, but its inclusion would have been valuable, partly for highlighting the important point that even the most well-respected reference materials can be wrong. While it can be argued that this is excusable because Knowing is not written by an academic scholar, a similar edit was also made in a book by Yale historian Beverly Gage, G-Man, (which I reviewed in an earlier issue of Skeptic), with pages 62–63 twice leading the reader to guess, but never know for sure, which apparently offensive word is represented. The criticism that only elite scholars know about the history of racism will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if that history is not included in popular books.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.3
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On the other hand, Informatica and Knowing What We Know both have problems with the wording of their titles, and with such vast topics, it would be easy to quibble with decisions on which topics to focus. I wonder if Informatica’s new title could make readers think they are getting a wholly different book, rather than an update of Glut (originally published in 2007), with uneven revisions and only a chapter’s worth of new material? In Knowing What We Know, it’s the last third of the subtitle (“From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic”) that could mislead: in other cases, the phrase “Ancient Wisdom” has sometimes referred to religious traditions, but here seems to refer more to any ancient writing, and the book’s late discussion of wisdom is not primarily about religion.

The important point shared by Knowing What We Know and Informatica is that greater access to information also presents challenges. Informatica is more theoretical and historical, Knowing being more a historically informed snapshot of our present. Both are stimulating and both are informative.

About the Author

Michelle Ainsworth holds an MA in History and she is currently researching the cultural history of stage magic in the United States. She is a humanist and lives in New York City.

The first breakthrough in finding prime numbers for over 25 years has mathematicians celebrating, with hopes that the techniques behind the new proof could further advance other areas of maths

I can’t resist helping wild animals, and the local squirrels are hoarding nuts for the winter. But it’s only the best for the squirrels around Botany Pond (there are three), who get very expensive pecans ($5.99 per pound). Over the past weeks, I’ve convinced them that I am not only not dangerous, but also a dispenser of nuts.  First they learned to take them from my hand, and now they’re crawling up my leg to take them. They bury nearly all of them, but that’s okay; they’ll need them in winter.

No, I haven’t been hurt, and I love the feel of their little claws as they put their hands on my fingers to gently take a nut. This one got at least four pecans today.

Photo by Marie:

AI models have safeguards in place to prevent them creating dangerous or illegal output, but a range of jailbreaks have been found to evade them. Now researchers show that writing backwards can trick AI models into revealing bomb-making instructions.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the most powerful organization of American academics, issued a statement a while back ditching its previous opposition to boycotts of universities. Such boycotts were no longer, said the AAUP, violations of academic freedom.  Although their statement didn’t mention Israel, it was clear that their statement was meant to put the AAUP’s imprimatur on boycotts of Israeli institutions and academics.  It was wrongheaded and reprehensible.

But wait! There’s more! Now the AAUP has issued a new policy (pdf here) that it’s okay to use DEI statements to evaluate candidates for hiring, retention, tenure, and promotion. DEI statements, they say, are closely connected to academic freedom (academic freedom is the right of faculty to teach whatever they want, within reasonable limits, and to work on whatever they want):

The Association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure views the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) criteria in faculty recruitment, promotion, and retention within this broader vision of higher education for the public good. Since the 1990s, many universities and colleges have instituted policies that use DEI criteria in faculty evaluation for appointment, reappointment, tenure, and promotion, including the use of statements that invite or require faculty members to address their skills, competencies, and achievements regarding DEI in teaching, research, and service.2 Such criteria are one instrument among many that may contribute to evaluating the full range of faculty skills and achievements within a diverse community of students and scholars.

Some critics contend that such policies run afoul of the principles of academic freedom. Specifically, they have characterized DEI statements as “ideological screening tools” and “political litmus tests.” From this perspective, DEI statements are sometimes thought to constitute unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination and a threat to faculty members’ academic freedom because they allegedly require candidates to adopt or act upon a set of moral and political views. This committee rejects the notion that the use of DEI criteria for faculty evaluation is categorically incompatible with academic freedom. To the contrary, when implemented appropriately in accordance with sound standards of faculty governance, DEI criteria—including DEI statements—can be a valuable component in the efforts to recruit, hire, and retain a diverse faculty with a breadth of skills needed for excellence in teaching, research, and service.

This is misguided because it okays ideological litmus tests that are the real purpose of DEI statements. Everyone in academia knows that, regardless of what the AAUP says, if you submit a statement saying that you will treat all students equally and fairly, regardless of race, your application or promotion goes into the dumpster.  And this is regardless of whether the DEI standards were confected by “faculty governance.”  And if you want to recruit, hire, and retain a “diverse faculty” (and of course they mean “racially diverse”), you can simply broaden your search, putting some emphasis on minority candidates and thus getting more of them into your pool. But you don’t have to hire or promote them on the basis of race, a move that is probably illegal but hasn’t yet been tested in the courts. Deemphasizing merit in favor of ethnicity—or fealty to a certain ideology—is never a good thing to do.

Anyway, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (the familiar FIRE), has issued a pretty splenetic statement criticizing the AAUP for its new stand. The article is called “The AAUP continues to back away from academic freedom,” and it’s on the mark.  As Special Counsel Robert Shibley writes:

The AAUP insists academic boycotts and DEI hiring criteria won’t threaten academic freedom — as long as everyone is always super careful.

In its latest statement, the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure notes that “some critics” (Hey, that’s us!) contend the use of DEI criteria and mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring and evaluation can

run afoul of the principles of academic freedom. Specifically, they have characterized DEI statements as ‘ideological screening tools’ and ‘political litmus tests.’ From this perspective, DEI statements are sometimes thought to constitute unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination and a threat to faculty members’ academic freedom because they allegedly require candidates to adopt or act upon a set of moral and political views.

With the exception of the word “allegedly,” this is a pretty fair description of the main problem with mandatory DEI statements.

FIRE is careful to consider each such policy individually, as not every statement requirement is the same. But in general, when employees or job applicants are required to pledge or prove their allegiance to a school’s interpretation of DEI concepts, we object precisely because ensuring that allegiance is the stated goal of the policy. From the perspective of the policy authors, that’s not a bug, it’s the key feature.

Shibley adds this:

Schools adopting DEI requirements want to filter out people who don’t or can’t agree to act upon the institution’s specific set of views in the classroom and in their service work. If colleges and universities didn’t care whether applicants agreed with their conception of DEI, why would they bother to ask applicants to demonstrate that agreement?

. . . . FIRE isn’t alone in our observation that these policies can operate as ideological filters — many faculty think they do, too. A 2022 FIRE survey found faculty were almost evenly split on whether DEI statements in hiring were a justifiable requirement for a university job (50%) or are an ideological litmus test that violates academic freedom (50%). While that’s bad on its own, a whopping 90% of conservative faculty, the group most likely to dissent from prevailing campus views on DEI, viewed such statements as political litmus tests. The Washington Post’s Editorial Board cited the survey in an op-ed arguing that “[w]hatever their original intent, the use of DEI statements has too often resulted in self-censorship and ideological policing.”

So are these critics right? The AAUP’s answer is a firm “not necessarily.”

The statements are, of course, political litmus tests. Berkeley used them by giving numerical rankings to three aspects of the statements (past involvement in DEI, philosophy of DEI, and a candidate’s plans to advance DEI), and simply throwing away those statements whose scores weren’t high enough—that is, “progressive” enough.  They didn’t even consider academic merit. And that is an ideological litmus test. Those tests are illegal.

Shibley finishes by excoriating the AAUP:

The AAUP’s transformation into just another political organization is highly discouraging. America needs an AAUP that is willing to go to the mat to defend professors even when they have something unpopular to say. More than members of any other profession, academics have reason to understand that they may someday be the first to grasp an unsuspected and perhaps unwelcome truth. Since 1915, the AAUP has been the traditional first stop for those who find themselves facing trouble for doing so. If the organization continues on its current course, it is hard to imagine that remaining true for much longer.

Finally, over at my colleague Brian Leiter’s website, he also takes issue with the AAUP policy and quotes his earlier opposition as well as some from a professor from Bates College:

Oh how the mighty have fallen; Committee A of the AAUP used to be a reliable defender of academic freedom, but since its capture by the enemies of academic freedom, it has been going downhill fast.   The latest absurd statement in defense of “diversity statements” reflects pretty clearly the influence of UC Davis law professor Brian Soucek (a member of Committee A), whose mistaken views we have discussed many times before (see especially).   Let me quote the appropriately scathing comments of Professor Tyler Harper (Bates College) from Twitter:

The AAUP statement insisting that mandatory DEI statements are compatible with academic freedom—and not political litmus tests—is ridiculous. DEI is not a neutral framework dropped from the sky, it’s an ideology about which reasonable people—including people of color—disagree.  I have benefited from and support affirmative action, and there are some things that fall under the rubric of DEI that I agree with. But pretending that DEI is not a political perspective or framework—when only people of one political persuasion support DEI—is a flagrant lie.  Evaluating a professor’s teaching with respect to their adherence to a DEI framework is a clear violation of academic freedom. DEI is not some bland affirmation that diversity is important and all people deserve accessible education. It’s a specific set of ideas.

Professor Harper adds:  “Recent events should have made clear that professors, particularly those of us on the left, must defend academic freedom without compromise, even when we disagree with how others use that freedom. When academic freedom is softened, we are always the ones who end up losing.”

Leiter adds:

DEI is an extramural social goal, just as much as being pro-America in MAGA-land is.  Committee A is dead.  We are fortunate that both FIRE and the Academic Freedom Alliance are actually still defending academic freedom.   I would encourage all readers to resign their membership in the AAUP.  It’s a disgrace.

Well, I’ve never been a member, so I couldn’t resign, but I would if I were a member.  The AAUP is indeed a disgrace, capitulating first to anti-Israel sentiment and now to those who want academics to show fealty to the tenets of progressivism.

Some day someone is going to challenge diversity statements in court. That hasn’t yet happened because someone with that kind of “standing” would lose any chance to be hired or promoted. But if some day some brave person does object, and can prove that he or she was hurt by an inadequate DEI statement, the case will work its way up to the Supreme Court, which will rule that DEI statements are illegal.

h/t: Greg Mayer

Unistellar’s new Odyssey Pro telescope offers access to deep-sky astrophotography in a small portable package.

Access to the night sky has never been simpler. The last half decade has seen a revolution in backyard astronomy, as ‘smartscopes’—telescopes controlled by smartphone applications—have come to the fore. These offer an easy entry into basic deep sky astrophotography even from bright urban skies, albeit at a higher price point versus traditional telescopes on the market. We’ve reviewed units from Vaonis and Unistellar before, as well as wrote commentary on the rise of the whole smartscope movement. Now, Unistellar has a new entry on the market in 2024: the Odyssey Pro.

The Odyssey Pro is lightweight, at 14.3-pounds (65 kilograms) assembled plus carbon fiber tripod. The telescope sets up quickly, with the tube and base securing to the top ring of the tripod.

Specifications for the Odyssey Pro

The telescope at the heart of the system is an 85mm aperture reflector with an f/3.9 320mm focal length. The image sensor (in place of where the secondary mirror would be on a traditional telescope) is a 4.2 megapixel camera. The turret on the side of the tube houses an electronic eyepiece incorporating Nikon’s Eyepiece Technology, providing an enhanced view. The addition of the eyepiece turret is the key difference between the Odyssey and Odyssey Pro.

Smartscopes find and aim at targets using a method known as ‘plate-solving’ in tandem with satellite GPS. This involves looking at segments of the sky, and comparing the star pattern with a known database. You can see this in action as the scope slews from one part of the sky to the next on startup. Unlike, Vaonis’s Stellina, Unistellar’s telescopes give you a live view during the slewing process, and allow users to manually slew around the sky in a virtual joy stick mode, a nice, hands-on touch.

Three views of the new Unistellar phone app controller in action.

The new app interface for Unistellar is updated as well… I was surprised to actually find all of my old eVscope images in the cloud memory, from years back. The unit is USB-C charged, and offers about five hours of use in the field. The Odyssey Pro has 64Gb (gigabytes) of internal storage memory.

The company offers a free backpack with each purchase. The Odyssey Pro runs for $3,999 USD, and the company frequently offers discount sales.

Odyssey Pro Versus the eVScope

The Odyssey Pro is smaller (85mm aperture, versus 112mm) than the eVscope, but similar in operation. The Odyssey features auto focus technology: no more Bahtinov mask manual focusing like with the eVscope. We also got to try out the smart solar filter for the unit. The filter clicks magnetically in place of the front of the telescope. I’d keep a close eye on the unit when using it this way during public observing, as curious hands could easily snag or pull the filter off during observation. While there’s no danger of blinding a viewer, a few seconds of unfiltered Sun could easily damage the telescope. The unit easily found and slewed to the Sun, then focused and color corrected the image.

The Odyssey Pro set up for solar observing.

What we like- Like the Unistellar eVScope, the Odyssey Pro just works as advertised: set it down, power it up, and you’re slewing to targets within minutes.

What we don’t like-The newer app seems a bit ‘balky,’ and I needed a cold boot the telescope during a few sessions to get things up and running again… also, it seems very sensitive to any vibration during enhanced imaging mode, even on solid concrete.

The telescope will wifi bond with the app in the field without a dedicated internet connection. This is a must for using it at a remote spot.

Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS through the Odyssey Pro.

But the real magic happens when you engage the enhanced vision mode. This initiates a process where the scope starts to stare at a target, stacking and cleaning up the image. The longer it runs, the brighter and sharper the image gets. Unistellar’s new method is known as ‘Vivid Vision’ and compares and refines images versus the user database to validate what the telescope is seeing. Color correction for stars and validation also uses Gaia’s latest DR3 catalog.

First Night Out

Our first night out with the Odyssey Pro saw us showing off about a dozen deep sky objects to a small group under the bright lights of downtown Bristol, Tennessee. Ironically, while you can view the Moon and planets with the Odyssey Pro, its relatively wide (33.6 x 45’, a little larger than a Full Moon) field of view really shines when viewing deep-sky nebulae and clusters.

Four deep-sky images of three different star clusters, taken with the Odyssey Pro in an urban environment. The Bottom Line

Are smartscopes worth the price? I’d say the Odyssey Pro (or any smartscope) has three key advantages:

-Finding objects: the whole plate-solving slewing method really puts me out of a job… and that’s probably a good thing. Rather than spending time star-hopping and studying star charts to find an object, the Odyssey Pro simply goes there and centers the target in the field.

-Imaging from urban sites: The Odyssey Pro puts fainter objects in reach of urban viewers.

-Use for public outreach: At a star party, folks can gather around and watch as the view emerges. No more queuing up to the eyepiece, refocusing for every user, or explaining how to look through a telescope. I can spend more time talking about space and what we’re seeing, rather than fussing with gear.

Also, Unistellar is alone in building an amazing science community around its worldwide network of smartscopes. Users are now tracking asteroids, following comets and even generating exoplanet light curves and more, all in real campaigns to contribute to science, all from their own backyards.

Be sure to give the Odyssey Pro a try, as a great introduction to smartscope astronomy.

The post Review: Unistellar’s New Odyssey Pro Smart Telescope appeared first on Universe Today.

Today we have some photographs by Lou Jost of the recent Aurora Borealis that was visible from the U.S.  Lou’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Although Lou works in Ecuador as a biologist, he was visiting the U.S. and saw this as lagniappe:

The earth has just moved through one of the strongest solar storms of the last century, and on Oct 10 this produced one of the most spectacular displays of aurora borealis ever seen in the midwest US. There were  even reports of aurora borealis as far south as Mexico and Puerto Rico!

I was visiting my brother that night in southern Wisconsin near the Illinois border. He saw the NASA aurora forecast and we decided to head out to a dark spot to see what we could see. We had heard that mostly it would be invisible to the naked eye and we would need to use a telephone camera to see the colors. But even while we were driving the car to our dark spot, we began to see faint moving bands of light in the sky,

When we got to the dark spot we were astonished to see deep red lights mixed with pale teal green stripes. I thought the aurora was always just green but I now know that especially powerful solar storms make reds and purples and blues too. We saw all those colors, pulsing and re-grouping into stripes and swirls. I had never seen aurora borealis in my whole life, so I was deeply surprised by this display. It was captured by many observers around the country but I think what we saw in Wisconsin was as stunning and colorful as anywhere.

The attached photos are unedited straight-off-the-telephone handheld shots taken by Paul Jost and Ayesha Abbassi; the hooded head in one of the photos is me. The bright light on the lower left corner of one shot is the half-moon, blurred by camera movement.  I am sure this would have been visible from dark areas outside of Chicago, and maybe even from the Chicago lakeshore looking out at the darker skies above Lake Michigan. The aurora changes very quickly and it is necessary to watch the aurora forecast, which is based on actual solar activity measurements made from a space satellite, and it has a 35 minute lead time.

There are many good websites that discuss the complex causes of the aurora. I learned that the red we saw was very unusual and probably caused by oxygen excitation hundreds of kilometers above the earth, while greens are caused  by a different oxygen energy level emission lower in the atmosphere.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/-articles-aps-v8-i1-c9.htm

https://www.theaurorazone.com/about-the-aurora/the-science-of-the-northern-lights/the-northern-lights-colours/

https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronomy/northern-lights/colours-of-northern-lights.asp