iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

As a college teacher my job would be far easier if AI disappeared. Trying to decide if what I’m reading came from the student or Gemini is taking up way too much of my time.

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Reposted by Dave Kary

Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

1/11 #JWST has revealed something unprecedented about Neptune. For the first time we have spectra of three small inner moons (Larissa, Galatea, Proteus) and the rings. 🔭 Their composition is unique in the outer Solar System.⚛️🧪 www.caltech.edu/about/news/n... #planetsci #Astronomy #Science

$Diagram showing the proposed origin of Neptune’s present-day small inner moons and rings. An earlier system of large moons is shattered when Triton, a captured Kuiper Belt object, arrives. The breakup exposes clay minerals from the deep interiors of those ancient bodies; a small fraction of the resulting debris later reaccretes into the moons and rings we see today. Credit: R. Davis$

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Being a fan is plenty good enough (especially if you sing along sometimes).

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

I guess we’re the same age. I picked quasar, quark, street hockey, folkie, strike-slip (especially since moving to California)

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

The same folks who are developing tariffs on cold fronts are working on it.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

You too! I’m spending the morning taking advantage of the wonderful healthcare system here in the land of the very expensive (minor foot injury)

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Reposted by Dave Kary

Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born #OTD in 1646. He was one of the great polymaths of the age, and is best known for discovering differential and integral calculus independently of Isaac Newton. 🧪 🧮 Image: Wellcome Collection

An etching of Leibniz, seated for a portrait. He is wearing a ruffled collar and a curly wig that reaches below his shoulders.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

Solstice -Santa Barbara style.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

You mean you’re not on the list?

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

In hockey this would be a 2 minute minor for delay of game. I’m not sure of the rules in basketball.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Well, 2 of them are dead, so maybe it’s accurate?

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

You mean it was all just a SNO job?

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

California Community College teacher here. It’s interesting seeing the CSU administration’s view here, since I suspect a lot of CSU teachers are going to be pushing to stop accepting our online classes because it’s so hard to control Ai usage in those classes.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

How many trucks will you be using?

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

3 decades? Ok, guess we’ll do that kitchen renovation after all.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

I’m not going to mess with a guard like that.

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Reposted by Dave Kary

James Davenport @jradavenport.com · 28/04/2026

I feel like we’re willing to make Pluto a planet again, at least provisionally, if they’re willing to fund astrophysics. I’d say $100 billion/year is reasonable But if you keep cutting our budgets, I swear we’ll keep eliminating them. Hope you like a three planet solar system!

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Listening to music from when I was a kid in the 70s is like folks in the 70s listening to Al Jolson and Bessie Smith.

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Reposted by Dave Kary

Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Thought for the day: Earth is 10^30 times as dense as an averaged-out sample of the universe. That is, gravity has amplified the density of our planet by a factor of thousand billion billion billion. Without that amplification, we would not be here. 🧪🔭

This illustration summarises the almost 14-billion-year long history of our Universe. It shows the main events that occurred between the initial phase of the cosmos, where its properties were almost uniform and punctuated only by tiny fluctuations, to the rich variety of cosmic structure that we observe today: stars and galaxies.

The series of panels on the right side of the illustration zooms into the cosmic large-scale structure to reveal first a cluster of galaxies, then a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy, and finally, the Solar System.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

We’ve been looking in the wrong places all these years

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

After 6 years of swimming in a 20 m pool 50 meters feels like a long way to go.

Looking down the length of a 50 m outdoor pool.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Will they be accelerated to 0.99999c?

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Reposted by Dave Kary

Physghoul 👻 🎃 @physgal.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

As a physics teacher, this is the part of student AI use that worries me. (Not all of us have decided that things are different this time.) 🎢 🍎 Ref: ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

The strange thing is that we already know this. We have always known this. Every physics textbook ever written comes with exercises at the end of each chapter, and every physics professor who has ever stood in front of a lecture hall has said the same thing: you cannot learn physics by watching someone else do it. You have to pick up the pencil. You have to attempt the problem. You have to get it wrong, sit with the wrongness, and figure out where your reasoning broke. Reading the solution manual and nodding along feels like understanding. It is not understanding. Every student who has tried to coast through a problem set by reading the solutions and then bombed the exam knows this in their bones. We have centuries of accumulated pedagogical wisdom telling us that the attempt, including the failed attempt, is where the learning lives. And yet, somehow, when it comes to Al agents, we've collectively decided that maybe this time it's different. That maybe nodding at Claude's output is a substitute for doing the calculation yourself. It isn't. We knew that before LLMs existed. We seem to have forgotten it the moment they became convenient.

Centuries of pedagogy, defeated by a chat window.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

It’s for later export to the US.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Ah so that’s what that noise was

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

We’ve certainly bought into it.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

I think his main contribution was some work on granular materials that had useful industrial applications.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

Unfortunately I am getting to the point where if I see an especially cool astronomy or other nature photo my first reaction is to wonder if it’s AI generated. The fact that some clearly are fake doesn’t help.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

Would you like a little red light with your moon?

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Also, while many AI answers are slop, the most common way I catch them is that they’re too good. My students are gen-ed non majors so they shouldn’t be giving graduate level responses.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

I completely agree with the problem here, but I also understand why they use AI tools. At this point, it is so damned easy to plug a question into a chatbot and get an answer that it takes a major effort of will not to do that.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

California resident here. We accept your offer.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

So which large crater here is youngest? Me! Me!

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

I read a large part of Assembling California to my daughter as bedtime stories.

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Dave Kary @davekary.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

Why wouldn’t you want to watch an angry old man yelling at the camera?

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