Benjamin Pope @fringetracker Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Benjamin Pope

@fringetracker

4,288

Followers

3,509

Following

942

Media

42,787

Statuses

Astronomer - he/him

Meanjin

https://t.co/qq0hRMaDre

Joined December 2012

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

Pinned Tweet

@fringetracker

Benjamin Pope

15 days

Australian students - come do a PhD/Masters with me on stats/AI in physical sciences at @MQSciEng ! If you're interested in imaging, stars & planets, or weird data, Jax & Bayes, this is for you. Applications for 2025 close 31 October:

Research scholarships

Apply for the Research Training Program (RTP) scholarship or the Macquarie Research Excellence Scholarship Program (MQRES) for domestic graduate researchers.

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Last Seen Profiles

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@fringetracker

Benjamin Pope

2 years

this is why US companies want healthcare to be tied to employment: you can use it for strikebreaking

@TheNewSchool

The New School

2 years

As announced on Monday, we have made the difficult decision to stop paying wages and premiums for healthcare benefits for employees who are striking. Up to this point, we have continued to compensate our faculty and staff who have chosen to exercise their right to strike.

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Benjamin Pope

11 months

A good day to contemplate the war crimes we could stop right now

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

There is water trapped in my train window and it is the most beautiful physics toy

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

Got confused about a git command, I now feel really attacked by Google

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Benjamin Pope

4 years

Very sad to hear from her daughter that Arianna Wright Rosenbluth, the pioneering physicist and computer scientist who wrote the first Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm, has passed away at 93. Journalists - this is worth an obituary.

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Benjamin Pope

9 months

His Dark Materials, very abridged

@joewintergreen

Joe Wintergreen

@joewintergreen

10 months

pissed off about dust. i'll vacuum my house and wipe everything down and air it out and do it all again and 20 minutes later there is still dust. how do i kill dust

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

@eff_hey the production is bad but the consumption... the consumption is very good

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

why did they call it 'ethical AI' and not just 'principled component analysis'

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Benjamin Pope

5 months

Has any other country fumbled soft power as hard as Australia has with international students

@beneltham

Ben Eltham

5 months

I can't believe I have to write this, but educating international students is actually a good thing for Australia

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Benjamin Pope

6 years

Oh wow - matplotlib, NumPy and pandas, essential scientific infrastructure used by millions, are each maintained by fewer than half a dozen people (from @kellecruz lecture)

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Benjamin Pope

8 years

@LauraLambert8 Hi! As a team, we won't be interviewed by the Mail. We know it's not your fault, but we must ethically boycott that hateful publication.

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

@DougJBalloon

@dril

Listen here Nomb Nuts

10 years

drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,

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Benjamin Pope

2 months

@focusfronting Does he know the Iliad and Odyssey are different

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Benjamin Pope

4 years

I'm very excited to say I have accepted a tenure-track position at @stsci , starting later this year. After eight years developing techniques for space telescopes, I'm looking forward to being in Baltimore at the dawn of the next era of space astronomy.

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

Best way to prove this wrong is to refrain from using healthcare for strikebreaking. Your move @TheNewSchool

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

Why do I do astronomy

@ox_sci

Ox Sci

7 years

Spider drinks graphene, spins web that can hold the weight of a human

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Benjamin Pope

5 years

why do they call it stellar astrophysics and not the HR department

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

Why did they call it condensed matter physics and not dielectrical materialism

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Benjamin Pope

4 months

@AustralianJA The student is Palestinian, very good at what she does, and entitled to wear what she likes

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

Every political journalist in Australia writes with the implicit premise that the ALP is completely captured by fossil fuel interests, but with the explicit premise that the ALP are very sad about this and doing their best and the Greens are bullies for saying it out loud

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@murpharoo

Katharine Murphy

2 years

Australia can’t blow another decade of climate action – it’s up to Labor and the Greens given the Coalition has opted out of a core responsibility of a governing party. Here’s my column #auspol

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

funny how space exploration is a justification for terrible billionaires to do whatever they like, but not a justification to publicly fund space science properly

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

@rup31 so glad to be back home where this particular human rights abuse isn't one of the ones we do

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Benjamin Pope

5 years

figure 1 in this may be the best ever figure

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

a) did we not know this already and b) is it really a bad thing if I'm not retweeting nazis much

@G_S_Bhogal

Gurwinder

7 years

A study found that on Twitter, the left and right are generally isolated from each other, with retweets rarely leaving each group's bubble.

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

Finding it hard to imagine astronomy is actually pointless when every society in human history has sought to understand the night

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Benjamin Pope

6 months

Unbeatable Guardian lede, no notes

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

@maosbot Quicker to take on and off imo

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Benjamin Pope

1 year

In my professional opinion, the dark matter is likely to extend well beyond Yorkshire

@guardianscience

Guardian Science

@guardianscience

1 year

Scientists seek out source of dark matter in Yorkshire

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

@schmidtim incredible dedication to physical chemistry, when their colleagues could be sampling organic chemistry in any number of establishments

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

The exception is physics, which is almost but not quite universally a pebblecrete monstrosity from the sixties

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

numerical linear algebra is just putting transposes in until the answer looks right

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Benjamin Pope

11 months

Happy to say that, effective January, I've been promoted to Senior Lecturer at UQ.

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Benjamin Pope

5 years

sharks are several times older than the Pleiades

@whereisyvette

Yvette Cendes

5 years

Pro outreach tip: when in doubt, I put things in the context of if sharks are older (the first ones evolved ~450 million years ago). Saturn’s rings for example are just 100 million years old, meaning sharks are MUCH older. 🦈🦈🦈

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

Absolutely aghast to read about the awful, untimely passing of my friend, astronomer Matt Willson. Such a lovely, smart guy, killed in the most wasteful circumstances. A sick world that would allow this to happen

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

one big reason for staying in academia is so you don't have to make weird posts on LinkedIn and you *can* make silly posts on Twitter

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Benjamin Pope

8 years

The @BalliolOxford #UniversityChallenge team are so grateful for all your support!

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Benjamin Pope

10 months

From talking to my students about why many don’t attend class, the reasons reported are mainly very long commutes and competing paid work obligations - both of which are consequences of the housing crisis.

@peter_tulip

Peter Tulip

10 months

There is astronomical demand for high-density student housing near our universities and enormous fees that could finance it. But heritage preservation and density limits make this illegal. So students hot-bed and sleep in cars. 1/3

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Benjamin Pope

4 years

Very happy to say I've received a Discovery Early Career Research Award from the ARC - I will be moving up to Brisbane to start as a Lecturer at UQ in January!

@ARC_Tracker

ARC Tracker

4 years

#DE21 announcement: Outcomes announced for Discovery Early Career Researcher Award 2021! See

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Benjamin Pope

1 month

I'm beyond excited to say that I'll be joining @MQSciEng in February 2025 as an Associate Professor in Statistical Data Science, starting a research group in Astrostatistics.

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

turns out if you have a file in .gitignore by accident you can absolutely pwn your mentions on twitter

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

had to explain not having a permanent job to undergrads today and they were appalled, nice to get a reality check

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Benjamin Pope

8 years

Thesis submitted!

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Benjamin Pope

4 years

The MCMC algorithm is absolutely pivotal in science and Rosenbluth’s contribution was long-overlooked:

@fringetracker

Benjamin Pope

6 years

Though in her case she was a coauthor, on the Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller & Teller paper introducing Metropolis-Hastings MCMC, Arianna Wright Rosenbluth did all of the programming. Metropolis managed the computer. Should be known as Rosenbluth-Teller(-Hastings)

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

Big oof in Martin Rees' excellent ARA&A autobiographical note...

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

Doctor

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

@justinandkimsma @JackO_May @Cambridge_ACS I don't really see what this has to do with structural racism

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Benjamin Pope

1 year

@themaxburns @GOP Using Achilles (hella gay) and Cillian Murphy (hella left wing) as the chad masculinity icons is 🤡

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

All the tweets about astronomy PhD and Hubble acceptances just making me think how every year, it’s harder for the incoming cohort.

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Benjamin Pope

1 year

@Ben_Davison1 @vanbadham As a green it would really own me if you built tons of housing in the inner city, I promise I would hate that and not be happy about it

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

Might be the worst ad I have ever seen: Starlink is polluting these dark skies

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

@justinandkimsma @JackO_May @Cambridge_ACS Or maybe it has something to do with the history of colonialism & ongoing oppression🤔

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Benjamin Pope

8 years

@StopFundingHate It was a team decision! And we are big supporters of your movement. Surprised this has gone so big but glad to make a dent.

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

@AnnastaciaMP @CoPCarroll More kids in gaol longer - this is the opposite of progress.

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Benjamin Pope

21 days

On arXiv today: our accepted @NatureAstronomy Perspective piece on the status & future of radio studies of stars & exoplanets, led by @AstroJoeC . I'm so excited about the future of this field in the era of the @SKAO .

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

@nytimes there is no such thing as a postdoctoral student

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Benjamin Pope

5 years

tip for postdocs: try pointing your telescope straight at the sun so it can burn out just like you

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Benjamin Pope

4 years

@WHS_Carpet Home office already enthusiastically embraces “purge the alien” so they won’t have to change much

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

@justinandkimsma @JackO_May @Cambridge_ACS Very upsetting, but it doesn't really have any bearing on the issue of racism

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

Every time I walk past the sign for the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics I wonder what my department has to do with the Soviet Union

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

Update: on hard deceleration the wave takes and from this I conclude that nonlinear PDEs are pretty

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Benjamin Pope

11 months

who is now the living nobel peace prize winner who has killed the most people

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Benjamin Pope

6 years

For #IndigenousPeoplesDay2018 , if you're in North America, consider checking out this excellent resource, a map of traditional territories of the First Nations: . In Manhattan, we are in Lenapehoking, the homelands of the Lenape people.

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Benjamin Pope

8 years

Modern four quadrant graph for politics

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

@eilatg there are some very particular scholarships out there...

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Benjamin Pope

7 months

@economeager Literally my number 1 and it feels laser targeted - but I wonder if everyone who reads it feels that way because of how much he respects the reader

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Benjamin Pope

5 years

@dcexaminer @SuzanneVenker not sure that's what degrees are for

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

What would stop them from just as a one off giving Jocelyn Bell Burnell an additional Nobel for 1974

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Benjamin Pope

5 years

Thread about our new discovery - possibly the first radio detection of an exoplanet, using @LOFAR and HARPS-N!

@AstroJoeC

Joe Callingham

5 years

Very excited to announce our detection of a star-planet interaction for the first time at low radio frequencies around a "boring star" is now published in @NatureAstronomy . Here is the best artist impression (thanks to @DanielleFuts ) of what we have seen:

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

One year to the day. #UniversityChallenge

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

Astronomer with AstraZeneca

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

Submitted my DPhil thesis 6 years ago today...

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

Fully vaccinated with the safe and effective Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine!

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Benjamin Pope

1 year

This is ruinous to tertiary education. We have chronically low attendance at uni - and from asking students in my classes, the biggest reason they report is needing to work full time to afford to live in Brisbane.

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

Really excited to be working with some great students at UQ, using tree rings as an observatory to study extreme cosmic events from thousands of years ago.

@UQscience

UQ Science

3 years

#UQ 's Dr Benjamin Pope ( @fringetracker ) has been honoured with the inaugural Big Questions Institute UQ Fellowship, allowing him to explore the idea that tree rings may have recoded information that could help predict harmful solar activity in the future:

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

Seems the Sun don't like us, but we don't buy the Sun so we just found out from clippings. Nasty tabloids are really desperate for respect!

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

why do we put so much emphasis on centrifugal force not being a thing in early physics education, when it just makes it harder to teach about inertial forces / GR later on?

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

@justinandkimsma @JackO_May @Cambridge_ACS I wish you were right. But colonialism is ongoing both here and abroad. State violence, poverty, educational exclusion, it's still awful.

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

Pretty exciting to see my name in print for the first time at my local bookshop @avidreader4101 today!

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Benjamin Pope

11 months

@jakezward what did this contribute to society

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Benjamin Pope

5 months

Imagine you write this pretty normal OUP book and then open your phone this morning

@mattkatz00

Matt Katz

6 months

Dep. Commissioner Daughtry says he found "a book on terrorism" at Columbia. (The book is not a how-to book, but a history written by a renowned British historian.)

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

My most irrationally strongly held opinion: scientific papers should all be written in first person plural active voice (irrespective of number of authors, because the plural is inclusive of the reader).

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Benjamin Pope

4 years

absolutely mind-melting

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

For non astronomers - Tim de Zeeuw for a decade led the European Southern Observatory, the world’s largest international observatory consortium

@WeekbladMare

Mare

2 years

English version: Removed astronomer is professor of theoretical astronomy Tim de Zeeuw

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Benjamin Pope

4 years

@JossBlandHawtho I wrote the page ;)

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

@RocketLab Oh god why would you do this to us astronomers

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Benjamin Pope

6 years

grant me the serenity to accept the code I cannot change, the courage to change the code I should, and the wisdom to know the difference

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Benjamin Pope

8 years

I beg to inform the @Telegraph I bought this blazer myself

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Benjamin Pope

3 years

I have never once wanted to download a citation as a .bib file, and wish every journal would just have the copy to clipboard / plaintext in browser bib entry instead

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

If King Island leaves Tasmania is that #Briexit ?

@KJBar

Karen Barlow

7 years

Vic Premier @DanielAndrewsMP 'more than happy' to claim King Island - and its cheese - if it secedes from Tasmania

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

Number of people getting covid at exo4 rather dampening my enthusiasm for upcoming travel

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Benjamin Pope

6 years

Authors say this gap in the main sequence - which cuts right across in colour, not just at one spectral type - corresponds to a discontinuous change in stellar radius between partially and fully convective M dwarfs

@arXiver

arXiver

6 years

A Gap in the Lower Main Sequence Revealed by Gaia Data Release 2 [SSA]

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Benjamin Pope

4 years

Finally moving to Brisbane today to start the job at @UQscience . Who wants to be friends in Brisbane?

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Benjamin Pope

4 years

this is the best thing I've watched in quite a while - @garyyounge on current protests and broader context

@DoubleDownNews

Double Down News

@DoubleDownNews

4 years

Black Lives Matter & The Question of Violence @garyyounge Watch full film:

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Benjamin Pope

5 years

tfw your values are universal

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

Claiming priority in astronomy…

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

Very excited to have our paper on arXiv today, about extreme radiation events in the tree ring radiocarbon record, with @UQscience students @QYZing , @SharUtma , and @J0rdanDennis ; the @ECHOES_14C team; @mathewjowens ; and Ulf Büntgen from @CamUniGeography .

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Modelling Cosmic Radiation Events in the Tree-ring Radiocarbon Record

Annually-resolved measurements of the radiocarbon content in tree-rings have revealed rare sharp rises in carbon-14 production. These 'Miyake events' are likely produced by rare increases in...

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Benjamin Pope

8 years

"Get back to me when your website isn’t a roiling rat-king of Nazis."

@natashamitchell

Natasha Mitchell (she/her) 💉💉💉💉 💉

@natashamitchell

8 years

Searing.

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

Because you can only have an integer number of pieces of fish, in small servings of bouillabaisse you can get pretty variable composition. This is why they call it Poisson noise

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Benjamin Pope

7 years

If I'd known this one would get so big I'd have taken more video... here is the whole one I took for the deceleration

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Benjamin Pope

2 years

New profile pic thanks to @UQscience

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