iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

This was a pleasure to write and to work with @amrikm.bsky.social as editor. One correction: The cover image is by me, with data from Paula Koelemeijer. 😉 🧪⚛️🪨🌍

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I am in academia only because and till the time it is fun for me. For some people, the thrill of competition may be fun, but all I want to do is sit down with like-minded people and work on interesting problems. Not to beat someone else, but because those problems are interesting to us. [1/2] 🧪⚛️

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Burr Ito @ututuy.org · 21/08/2026

A dark sky place deep in the Spanish #Pyrenees. From here you can see the south face of the Vignemale, a 3298 m peak, illuminated by a setting moon. Near the center of the image is the Andromeda Galaxy, much farther than any other star in the pic. Towards the left is Perseus' double cluster. 🔭 🧪 1/3

A rocky mountain at night with a starry night sky as a background.
This is a 30" exposure at f2.8, ISO3200, with a 2.8 mm lens.

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The Earth's magnetic field is generated by vigorous convection in the outer core through a process called the geodynamo. We simulate this process on big supercomputers and can reproduce a lot of the features of the Earth's magnetic field! 🧪⚛️⚒️⛰️🌏

Picture shows the Earth's surface as transparent and cut-out from 0 to 90 deg longitude. Inside is shown convecting outer core colored with temperature. The whole picture has magnetic field lines going through tracing roughly a dipole on the outside and complex shapes inside the outer core where dynamo generation takes place.

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AGU (American Geophysical Union) @agu.org · 24/07/2026

⚠️🌉 NEW! The AGU26 Postdoctoral Travel Grant is now open, helping cover costs of attending #AGU26 in San Francisco this December. 🗓️ Apply for this grant by 12 August: spklr.io/63325EPCHR #Postdoc #Grant #ScienceFunding

Graphic promoting AGU26 Post-Doctorate Travel Grants

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

#AGU2026 : If you are a geo/space-science software developer or user or have thoughts to share on open source tools and FAIR data, interdisciplinary conscientious use of AI/ML/LLMs, please consider submitting an abstract to our AGU 2026 session SY029: agu.confex.com/agu/agu26/pr... 🧪⚛️ ⚒️🪨

agu.confex.com

Open Source Tools for the Earth & Space Sciences: Breaking Discipline Silos to Accelerate Discovery

Despite being a cornerstone of modern scientific research, open-source software development and adoption often remain siloed within individual disciplines. A package or workflow designed for one disci...

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

A short storm and rain shower today.

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

I don't understand this rush to do it right away *AFTER* you're tenured. Isn't that the time when you relax and do research at your own pace? 🧪⚛️

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Microsoft be like "come explore copilot on Windows!!" And then it can't do a simple task of creating calendar events out of Outlook emails - something Gmail has been doing for ages now.

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

I (co-)advised a grad student who has since graduated and has been an independent researcher for a few years now. I was struggling with a problem and reached out to her for advice. Needless to say, her advice allowed me to solve the problem. The circle is now complete and I couldn't be happier. ⚛️🧪😀😀

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

I miss when proposal evaluations for NASA/NSF took place in person. It made us spend a lot more time per proposal and we had more time to think things through. At times, we would even come back and completely re-evaluate some proposals from scratch because we had that time. I hope it comes back. 🧪⚛️

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Reviewing a journal manuscript where the figures are at the end is a nightmare.⚛️🧪

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

The constant need to write competitive grant applications, to support the large number of temporary workers is a huge waste of time for everyone involved, as most of them will not get funded. Most of us want to spend that time doing actual research. This was never sustainable in the long run. 🤷

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Alex Elizabeth Byrne McMillan @undeniablyalex.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

YOU’RE LISTENING TO SISYPHUS FM, THE HOME OF NON-STOP ROCK

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

While giving feedback to a student on her poster, I was complimenting a plot she made because it looked really nice and reminded me of a similar one I had made. She told me that her plot "is exactly inspired by your paper". 😭😭 This means so much. I consider myself successful in academia. ⚛️🧪

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Oh noo ... folks in Baltimore, please keep an eye out!

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Dear PDS, sometimes I need the actual data in a human form instead of a flood of metadata ...

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Anna Wilson @annapwilson.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

If anyone knows of any weird little 1-month fellowships or library residencies taking applications for research in the humanities to take place in the coming year (26-27), please let me know!

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 11/04/2026

And that massive expansion in raw power has basically been filled with terrible software. software is like a gas that expands to fill the size of available computation

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

I was rejected for grad school by Johns Hopkins University and the University of Toronto. Sabine Stanley, who I had applied to at UofT, subsequently moved to JHU and I became a postdoc in her group after grad school. 😂

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Sarah O @erniebufflo.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

I was raised by a weirdo so I have been concerned for most of my life that we're wasting a finite resource (helium) in fucking BALLOONS, when it's crucial to medical technology.

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Our university has decided it will soon start charging us for computing time. We used to at least pretend that academia was about the pursuit of truth and not just about the 💵💵. 🧪⚛️

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

I assumed people just have one called "myenv". No, just me? Okay ... 😅🧪⚛️

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

I submit a proposal to simulate some processes and then later infer what the detected observable would be. Proposal was declined. Review: Weakness: Proposal did not show that the signals would be detectable ... How am I supposed to know the result before having done the science ... ? 😱⚛️🧪

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Jérémy Rekier @jrekier.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Ever noticed how there are more days between spring and fall than between the fall and spring (in the northern hemisphere)? That is due to the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit. I talk about it and do the math in this blog post ⚛️ 🧪 jrekier.github.io/bit-blog/pos...

jrekier.github.io

Keeping time between the equinoxes

I compute the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit based on the observation that there are more days between spring and fall than between fall and spring.

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

Great news indeed. But I'm still always confused why disgraced faculty are not fired outright? 🧪⚛️

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

Research scientists have no shot at having a permanent position, ever. But at my university, we're now required to send annual reports of our activity in order to be evaluated. For what exactly? Just to be able to keep our jobs? 🧪⚛️

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Kalamazoo Astronomical Society @kzooastro.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

Mercury was only 50 arcminutes (0.8°) above a very young waxing crescent Moon this evening. KAS member Pete Mumbower captured this image from his home in Vicksburg, MI.

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Incredible, using Tikz to animate precession and nutation of the Earth! ⚛️🧪

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

Ha, I was one of the reviewers for this, nice to see it out! Really good work indeed! 🧪⚛️

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

An advice for young folks learning to code. Please get comfortable coding the old school way, looking up solutions on stackoverflow etc before you start getting AI assist. You can trust AI with menial tasks but not with critical code components. It is nowhere even close to the human brain. 🧪⚛️

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Me, from Baltimore: "It's going to be cold on the weekend" My partner: *laughs in Ottawa*

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

I'm tired of the rhetoric around the "young academic", the age old saying that after 30+x, you have no research potential left. Some of us, especially ones who are first generation in academia, need a few years to even fully understand the "rules of the game". (1/3)

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

PSA: if you're writing a numerical simulation paper, please add the initial and boundary conditions as clear separate equations or at least bullet point sentences. It is incredibly hard to decipher them if they're written in vague language inside a paragraph somewhere. ⚛️🧪

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

I know it's a difficult time for funding right now. But should we change how it is structured in general? Very few sectors outside academia would hire you and tell you "please go find money for your own salary. Good luck!" #academia 🧪⚛️

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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 27/09/2025

Saturn, rising behind its largest moon Titan. This scene is a composite of images taken by the Cassini spacecraft on 31 March 2005. At the time, Cassini was 7,000 km from Titan and 1.2 million km from Saturn. Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI/Ian Regan/Val Klavans

In the foreground is Saturn's giant moon Titan, its hazy, peach-coloured atmosphere extending into space. Behind is Saturn itself, its upper hemisphere crossed by the shadows of its vast ring system.

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Australian Antarctic Program Partnership @antarctic.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

🌀The stratospheric polar vortex is a belt of high-speed cyclonic winds around 12-20km high over the poles. When temperatures in the stratosphere – which contains the ozone layer – start rising in the southern spring, the ozone hole over the Antarctic grows. 2025 ozone: @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

Being in #academia means having constant FOMO about what people are working on. 🧪⚛️

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

First proposal as PI submitted! 🥳🎉 Wish me luck! 🧪⚛️

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Royal Observatory of Belgium @orb-ksb.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

☀🌕 On September 7, there will be a #totallunareclipse. However, totality will only be visible in Belgium between 20:17 (moonrise) and 20:53 (end of totality), local time in Uccle. For better observation, find a place with a clear horizon between east and south-east. robinfo.oma.be/en/as...

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

The Europa clipper is on its way to investigate the ice shell and ocean of the Jovian moon Europa. Here's what the interior of Europa looks like as we know today. Values of layer depth estimates taken from Vance et al., 2018. 🧪⚛️ #EuropaClipper #PlanetaryScience #FluidDynamics

A picture showing the interior layers of Jupiter's moon Europa. It shows an inner core, on top of which is a hot mantle, an ocean overlying it and finally covered by ice. The surface texture is also included showing crisscross "chaos" terrains, craters etc.

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

I just learned that one of the most brilliant science minds I ever met during my PhD "quit" academia. I say it in quotes because I really hate that language. It keeps so many people feeling guilty about want to leave a system that does not value their skills, experience and knowledge. 🧪⚛️ (1/n)

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Ankit Barik @astrodoc.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

WTAF?! Can we just not?! The only people I would like to chat with about a paper are the authors. Keep your dirty AI hands off it.

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Sarah Hörst @planetdr.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

In case you were wondering what it was like at home tonight…very similar to this

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