rjme.bsky.social
Father, husband, scientist, Kiwi diaspora returnee, prof @ U of Auckland - opinions mine. "Astrophysics - it's like a barfight with God" @reasther on the other place. Blog: excursionset.com He/him.
2,098 posts
3,137 followers
346 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
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It's still BS if it is sucked out of my grant tho.
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Seems reasonable.
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See Hobson's Pledge's enthusiasm for Ngata, for example...
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Yeah, but good enough for Christchurch I guess. www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainmen...
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Closed replies to this. It was an off the cuff comment about an election in a distant place (although one where I once lived) and it's gone a little bananas.
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Anyway, long story short, Peters deserves a moment in the sun. Lovely work, and just truly coming into its own 60 years after it was done and 30 years after its author passed away... I blogged on it... 8/8
excursionset.com/blog/2025/06...
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Lot of chankonabe in his future to get him into fighting trim, by the look of him...
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But...
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Thus dat. Spotify / Apple Music makes it easier to be eclectic too - gone are the days when having imports was a sign of being serious about things. (Apropos of which my younger is playing a gig in Wellington tonight; I was never even a 100th as cool as my kids)
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Either way -- for the kids it's "old people's music", along with Nirvana, Radiohead and REM
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Biden and Trump still old enough to be my Dad.
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LOTR was, what, nine hours?
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Not to my knowledge but the demand for Rubbermaid merch was possibly a little niche, so it may not have been an issue.
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DMed a gift link
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Blows on fingers. Looks modestly down.
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Also now that I think about it Matt Ruff's Fool on the Hill has a character called the Rubbermaid (a possessed sexdoll) which is a trademark. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fool_on...
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Not exactly the same, but this is quite funny www.washingtonpost.com/archive/life...
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Smart enough to block trolls and windbags.
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First place rankings.
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Heartbreaking. Despite all his efforts.
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Wow. If that holds up.
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PPS If you do decide to try one of these calculations, do let me know...
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Photos on a CV? Is that a thing in New Zealand? (I see a lot of them in applications from students from India and East Asia?)
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PS I once saw a meme with someone dancing a cat toy in front of a cute kitten while three grumpy full sized cats look on, labelled "Prof", "New student" and "Current students" respectively. That's me, but I am TRYING to change. And if you can find the meme, I'd love a copy..
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But I have enough hobbies so will throw this out into the world as it stands. (I need to not have so many side projects, LOL) 13/13
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But if I had this paper to referee I would have rejected it, because it is currently incomplete -- but it is published, and Nuclear Physics B was once a serious journal. But Sabine is right that it won't die easily, because people keep on ideas like this long after they should stop. 12/N
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So there ARE some nice problems here -- add stochastic unresolved sources to a CMB analysis and constrain this component assuming an exact temperature fit, and do the polarisation fits with this included 11/N
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Or a 0.001 variation in temperature in the overall CMB -- which would stick out like a sore thumb in any CMB analysis, but you could compute it. 10/N
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However if you buy this, then you have a 1% component of the (apparent) CMB with a huge amount of Poisson noise at small angular scales -- and where the variation in the primary CMB is low because of Silk damping; this would be a 10% variation over 15 pixels (\sqrt{N}) in a 1% component 9/N
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Thirdly, the paper expects around 6 early-type galaxies per Planck pixel claiming that this component of the (apparent) CMB which would be seen as a continuous source by Planck (but maybe less so by Stage 4 ground based -- also a crosscheck?) 8/N
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The second problem is that the paper itself makes only one mention of the polarisation of the CMB but the polarisation and temperature variations in the CMB are exquisitely correlated -- the dust contribution would not obviously be polarised, so the <TT>, <EE> and <ET> would be out of whack 7/N
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The first problem is that the dust will be at a range of temperatures and redshifts but the CMB is an almost perfect black body (Sabine actually has a plot of the FIRAS data in the video) -- an "approximate" black body added to the CMB would likely break this and you could calculate bounds 6/N
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In fairness, Sabine says "I expect there will soon be some criticism of this result, but I think it won't be easy to get rid of" -- which is sort of true, but I think in the sense that you can't easily kill a zombie, because it is already dead. I see three big problems... 5/N
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Anyway, my reason for writing this thread is that the paper was highlighted by @hossenfelder.bsky.social -- I am not sure I have time to write on it, but do have some thoughts about things to look at and it will get a lot of attention 4/N www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFgw...
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Which, it has to be said, one of the authors would love, since they are a big MONDian and the single biggest problem for MOND is probably that the CMB power spectrum is a good fit to the predictions of cold dark matter. 3/N
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The supposed mechanism is that early star formation (z~15 to 20) heats up dust to temps similar to the early CMB (~40-55 Kelvins in this era) and which will then redshift down to 2.7K along with the CMB at z=0. If true, this would void all LambdaCDM constraints from the CMB 2/N
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Seriously tho. Our taxes pay for this performative crap.
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I'd bin any cover letter that didn't have a ligature on the a and e in the vitæ. Saves time.
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Anyway, long story short, Peters deserves a moment in the sun. Lovely work, and just truly coming into its own 60 years after it was done and 30 years after its author passed away... I blogged on it... 8/8
excursionset.com/blog/2025/06...
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Oddly, when I first looked for him I got confused -- turns out there was a Peter Phillips at Washington University, a near double palindrome for Philip Peters at the University of Washington -- who veered off into research in ESP and 9/11 "trutherism". Not the same guy, I was happy to learn. 7/N
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The prediction that gravitational waves exist is a key outcome of general relativity, which is of course the work of Einstein -- but Peters played a vital role by actually quantifying their impact on physical systems and he has left a surprisingly small "google trail" 6/N
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However, the real impact of the work is only becoming fully clear today -- citations have skyrocketed since the first actual detections of gravitational waves 5/N