Sam Van Kooten

Remember this? Another #FunFact is that the solar wind gushing from each of the "eyes" in this image was streaming at over 370 miles per second! This super-fast solar wind is called a high speed stream. 💨

Say cheese! 📸 Today, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the Sun "smiling." Seen in ultraviolet light, these dark patches on the Sun are known as coronal holes and are regions where fast solar wind gushes out into space.

@merrdiff I did something along those lines here: github.com/svank/modeling… No overleaf integration (nor did I include the .tex file in the repo, since it's accessible on arxiv), but it has code, data, and a notebook that generates all the paper figures.

Astrotwitter: anyone have a good example of a GitHub repo that accompanies a publication, primarily to enable reproducing the manuscript (via magical Overleaf GitHub syncing), figures, and other key results?

They finally re-launch Jupyter and that starts 150 Chrome tabs reloading

They tried rebooting and now the nation waits as three months of OS updates decide to install...

Image being the person who ran `conda update --all` right before the press conference and now the plotting code doesn't work

(It was scheduled for release on arXiv today, but was held up in the moderation queue and will be published Monday.)

I had the honor of being a coauthor on this ground-breaking work slated to be released today, the first published study of Moosinesq convection (an important extension of the Bousinesq approximation, with applications to moosive stars): github.com/evanhanders/mo…

the dumbest way to solve a maze? simulate a gas of thousands of particles diffusing from the start point, until one particle reaches the exit. trace back the winning particle

And it might be possible that fortune cookies know more than I've given them credit for. "Finally," indeed!

I'll be defending my dissertation this Friday! Let me know if you'd like a zoom link for the public talk at 2pm MT.

Cleaning up my thesis drafts after getting comments from @solarstellar

@NatlParkService At Volcanoes NP, despite having been open to the public for over a century, the design of the natural features hasn't yet been finalized, so the park is subject to unannounced closures for intermittent construction projects.

Badly describe the last park you visited. #NationalParkService

Perseverance is in contact with NASA right now, even though everyone knows regulations require all devices to remain in airplane mode for the duration of the flight. I hope it will at least stow its sample tray table during landing

Ok, last camembert update today (V1.5): better resolution and I re-ordered the slices to have delicious metaphors on the right and literal descriptions on the left (with some ambiguous ones at the bottom). A few fun additions: Pi chart in Irish and Disc Graph in Icelandic.

@ZakSwartz @RebeccaRHelm Yeah, sorry, just trying to make an astronomy joke. I did a double take when I read the post starting "This is how stars are born" and then it wasn't about space! :D

It's amazing that this star-formation mechanism can be studied in the lab! Does anyone know its IMF?

When it comes to typesetting math, "we have it vastly easier than any previous stage of civilization". I thought this was an interesting read. practicallyefficient.com/2017/10/13/fro…

@AliciaAarnio Thanks!