iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

This is a JWST image of the Spanish Dancer, with a random matplotlib colour map.

Blue background, orange outer bands matching the weather map hurricane symbol, green dpirals and purple and white central core.

gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Canada is doing renos to our Parliament buildings. No tacky ballroom, just preserving a beautiful old building. Canada has taste.

The eternal flame burning in front of Canada's peace tower, with a construction crane and buildings covered in scaffolds.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Piri the pirate cat during the eclipse. It was only partial here, not much darkness but the animals felt it.

4 pictures of Piri, a black and white cat during the eclipse.

He's Piri the pirate cat with a grey-black patch over his left eye and large patches on his sides.

The pictures on the left he's facing the sun, but looking at a fence.

He was spooked at the start of the eclipse, but settled down and towards the end came over for head scratches.

He often lies facing the sun at sunset.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Trumpet vine with a message for someone.

A red painted wooden fence is the background to this trumpet vine bloom.

The green leaves of the vine leaf from the top right to the centre of the image.

A large bud about to open sticks out like a middle finger, with smaller buds for the remaining fingers and thumb.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

The Jodrell Bank funding cut comes as radio telescopes are revealing the secrets of our universe. Binary pulsars revealing nanohertz gravitational waves, images of black holes and other marvels.

The giant Lovell radio telescope, at an angle of ~30 degrees looking into the void, with a bust of Copernicus.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Super excited, mpmath multi-precision has my waveform generator working and creating plausible waves. Good times.

A 3x3 grid of matplotlib plots of waveforms, amplitude around 1e-21m.

Waves are the matplotlib default blue colour for the series plotted.

The waves rise in amplitude and frequency.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

termux appreciation post. I have my blume/ matplotlib image display working in termux. Low resolution matplotlib in termux is going to be fun.

Screenshot of termux displaying images.

3 low resolution, 256 colour terminal images, stacked above each other.

purple and red petunias.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

The Ottawa University curly-whirly. Fun to ride up and down. More curly-whirlies please.

Two way bike path with a lovely S-bend.

Enter slowly and be ready to back-pedal 180 degrees to keep the inside pedal up.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

It's a medium that wobbles, as we know from the Pulsar Timing Array and the LIGO detections. The magnitude of these waves is believed to drop off inversely with distance. Much of the time you can ignore the wobbles of space time, and General Relativity works really well.

Visualisations of the Milky Way rotation curve, using data from the Gaia mission.

Observations are binned into a grid based on distance from the galactic centre and tangential velocity.

The lower plot has Sgr A* as the galactic centre, the upper has it twice as far away.

Both show the flat asymptote, but there's also a good stream of stars leaving the galaxy.

shows the classic flat asymptote.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Here's a mosaic of stills from the gif. Each circle is from a band of dust at a given distance - a few hundred to 20000 parsecs. There is a great paper about the rings here: arxiv.org/pdf/2302.02383

4x4 grid of images from successive days of Swift observatory observations of GRB221009A.
Each shows a bright centre, with a number of concentric, brighter rings.
We are seeing X-rays emitted by dust in our galaxy as the gamma-ray burst hit the dust.
The images are essentially the same, just each day a little larger, as there has been time for the light to travel a longer path to us. A moon-dog of a gamma-ray burst if you like.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

November 23rd, more snow, chilling out...

Intrepid petunia with a coat of snow.

Wilted purple flower, hangs it's head.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

November 19th, hanging on to the snowball.

Wilted and frozen petunia around a ball of snow, hosepipe reel in background.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

November 16th and still going strong.

Same as 2 days ago, petunia living the life.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Still going strong, November 14

Purple and white petunia surviving to mid November

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Still pretty November 12th

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

Petunia snow watch update.

Purple petunia flower hanging in there against the snow.
Five petals in a trumpet white inside, now with an added dusting of snow.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

Petunia meets snow, November 9th.

Purple petunia flower, from a stray seedling by a green hosepipe reel.

First snowflakes of the winter on the leaves of the plant.

Petunias in November

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

Had to wait four years for this beauty to flower:

Orange/red trumpet vine flower, with more buds opening.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

First bloom, a good sign for later today?

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Renée Amilcar says reduced LRT service is cool because it's not overcrowded. The 14 runs from Tunney's to St Laurent, the same route and it is now regularly packed out, because it's no longer worth switching to the LRT.

Number 14 bus packed to the gunnels because we won't pay 0.01% of the cost of the LRT to run the trains.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

Three books about the Universe, what do the three authors have in common?

Three books, three authors.
Geometry of the Universe, Colin Rourke
Relativity, Albert Einstein
The Nature of the Universe, Fred Hoyle.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

Dollar Store globe gets it right.

Dollar Star Globe labels the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

It's my happy day, first snow of the season.

Snow Hill with Snow Man sign saying North Pole, pointing roughly in the direction of the poke star.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

Here's a picture of the blueshift region. Everything arrives highly blue-shifted at the de Sitter Horizon.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

It is a model that Einstein considered. It has no overall expansion, it exhibits redshift as well as blue shift -- new galaxies arriving in our visible universe. Here's what the redshift v distance relation looks like in de Sitter Space:

plot of redshift on x axis against distance on y-axis shows we should expect to see a relationship between redshift and distance, but it is not a simple linear relation

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

2nd hand 127mm. It's good for Jupiter's moons, Saturn's rings and our moon too. I have a raspberry pi with a camera ready to attach, if the clouds ever disappear. Pointing it at Polaris might be a good place to start.

Telescope held together by rubber bands in shed.
On a tripod, with an equatorial mount.

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

I only have one trick, random matplotlib colormaps with random JWST filters. Here's a mosaic of sombreros:

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

JWST image of the day: Sombrero Galaxy Messier 104

Sombrero galaxy image from JWST with random matplotlib colormap

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gotu @gotu.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

It's winter 8 months of the year in Ottawa, here's a November 21st viola:

A yellow viola flower, hanging from a basket, with seed pods too.

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