iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

Outside reviewers are reviewers from academic institutions outside the NSF (postdocs, professors, researchers), who have been instrumental in providing comprehensive reviews of NSF proposals in "review panels" that produce formal written evaluations for each proposal used in funding decisions.

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

National Science Foundation significantly downgrades the review process of its proposals... 🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Presentation slides are undergoing an AI transformation as we speak. Whether it's a good thing is another matter, but having lived through the transparency -> ppt transition, I am optimistic.

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

It's a great productivity tool for research, and coding and writing, especially. Is it great for generating new ideas? Yes, in the sense that it can summarize existing ideas and in the process of reviewing these new ideas can be generated.

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

I disagree with a significant fraction of this article, but still it's an interesting and thought-stimulating read on an issue I've been grappling with... www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d... 🧪

currentaffairs.org

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself

Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

ESA/Webb picture of the month - image of interacting dwarf galaxies NGC 4490 and NGC 4485. Interaction between these galaxies led to a recent starburst and formation of star clusters. 🔭 esawebb.org/images/potm2...

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

Schrödinger's plates: the plates are simultaneously whole and broken and we won't know their true state until we open the cabinet... ) p.s. This month marks the 90th anniversary of Schrödinger's famous thought experiment involving cat in a chamber.

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

A fantastic image by @ajamesmccarthy.bsky.social cosmicbackground.io/pages/ea_int... 🧪🔭

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

I think the statement/argument is not so much about the present, but about the future and Python is just an example. Can be any programming language.

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

Food for thought/discussion. 🧪

Francois Chollet's post saying "The most powerful scientific instrument of the 21st century isn't the electron microscope or the particle collider. It's the algorithm.

Today, a scientist in biology, physics, chemistry etc. is more likely to be debugging a Python script than to be running a wet lab. Going forward, the biggest breakthroughs will be mostly software achievements, like AlphaFold."

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Aurora over lake Michigan tonight. In the background are Castor, Pollux, Jupiter, and Procyon. 🔭

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 06/11/2025

Metric Tip xkcd.com/3164/

Comic. PERSON 1 with white hat: How tall are you? PERSON 2: 5ft 24cm [caption] When switching to metric, make the process easier by doing it in steps.

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

(Adler) Planetarium eclipse... 🔭

Rising sun eclipsed by the Adler Planetarium dome.

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

"Beyond Hubble": a workshop aimed to trigger cross discussions between observers and theorists on our current understanding on galaxy morphology and kinematics, with an emphasis on revisiting the Hubble Sequence in the modern-day galaxy formation framework. sites.google.com/cam.ac.uk/be... 🔭

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

Congratulations! Great and even race! It was a fantastic day...

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Peter Coles 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇮🇪 @telescoper.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

So how much of the £2356 you charge per paper goes to these "essential" peer reviewers?

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Astronomy Picture of the Day 🪐 @apod.shinyakato.dev · 28/08/2025

🔭 Galaxies, Stars, and Dust Image Credit & Copyright: Robert Eder apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25082...

$This well-composed telescopic field of view covers over a Full Moon on the sky toward the high-flying constellation Pegasus. Of course the brighter stars show diffraction spikes, the commonly seen effect of internal supports in reflecting telescopes, and lie well within our own Milky Way galaxy. The faint but pervasive clouds of interstellar dust ride above the galactic plane and dimly reflect the Milky Way's starlight. Known as galactic cirrus or integrated flux nebulae they are associated with the Milky Way's molecular clouds. In fact, the diffuse cloud cataloged as MBM 54, less than a thousand light-years distant, fills the scene. The galaxy seemingly tangled in the dusty cloud is the striking spiral galaxy NGC 7497. It's some 60 million light-years away, though. Seen almost edge-on near the center of the field, NGC 7497's own spiral arms and dust lanes echo the colors of stars and dust in our own Milky Way.$

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Jasmine 🌌🔭 @astrojaz.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

a BEAUTIFUL image of spiral galaxy ngc 1068 that uses combined data from hubble, jwst, AND chandra telescopes!!!! 🌌

A spiral galaxy viewed face-on, with its tightly packed golden arms and faint purple clouds spiraling around a hazy core.

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

More seriously, this passage demonstrates just how deeply Newton was committed to the corpuscular view of things...

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

Seemed like a perfect description of setting up initial conditions for cosmological N-body simulations... 😆

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

I used this from the Opticks in my PhD thesis: it seems probable to me that God in the Beginning form'd Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable Particles of such Sizes and Figures and with such other Properties and in such Proportion to Space as most conduced to the End for which he form'd them

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Peter Coles 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇮🇪 @telescoper.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

Reading a section of Newton's "Opticks", I think he should have enlisted ChatGPT to help him with his spelling.

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

I also think that most of the atoms in our bodies (definitely, oxygen, carbon, etc.) were inside stars in the past, and actually not one, but several different stars.

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Here is a mid-infrared image of the same galaxy. The emission in this image is produced by the warm dust and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). 🔭

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

A new fantastic image of M82 by JWST NIRCam, showing a biconical outflow of gas and dust from this starbursting galaxy. 🔭🧪 esawebb.org/images/potm2...

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Alex Ji @alexji.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

I have completed my contributions to this field thank you

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NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory @rubinobservatory.org · 23/06/2025

Want to instead explore the Virgo Cluster as captured by Rubin at full resolution? Head to our Skyviewer and enjoy some cosmic joyscrolling! There's so much to explore and discover ✨ #RubinFirstLook #CaptureTheCosmos 🔭🧪 ➡️ skyviewer.app

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

In case you've been contemplating moving elsewhere in our Galaxy... bsky.app/profile/phdc...

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Space Telescope Science Institute @stsci.edu · 02/06/2025

NEW: Astronomers used Hubble to re-examined the prediction that the Milky Way galaxy will eventually collide with the Andromeda galaxy. They find there is only a fifty-fifty chance the two galaxies will smash together within the next 10 billion years: bit.ly/3YzymOx 🔭 🧪

A three-panel image, two at the top, and one stretched across the bottom. At top left, two spiral galaxies are widely separated against the black background of space. At top right, two face-on spiral galaxies are close together. Their spiral arms appear stretched toward each other. At bottom, two spiral galaxies have collided, resulting in a broad X-shaped patch of milky white. Mottled clouds of dark brown dust are superimposed.

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Nicely Nicely Jones @nicelynicelyjones.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

The science paper publication industry gives millions in revenues to the publishers, but is created for free by the experts. The value-add of publication (what people pay for) is much less than that of peer-review and editorial (which they don't). It is ripe for disruption. Hopefully like this.

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

not yet sure whether this is useful at all, but an interesting concept: each arXiv paper is a star and the nearest stars are papers on related topics: soarxiv.org It only has papers up to April 2025 rn (if you lose your cursor, hit Esc to recover it). 🔭

soarxiv.org

soarXiv - the universe of science

soarXiv is a visual exploration of the arXiv, a repository of scientific papers. It is a tool for exploring the arXiv in a new way, and for finding new papers to read.

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

If your next European adventure does not pan out, Illinois has alternatives to offer...

A google map with a path through the state of Illinois with 7 towns with the same names as major European cities (Paris, Vienna, Athens, Berlin, Rome, Milan, Geneva, IL).

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Francesca Lazzeri @francescalazzeri.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Happy Sunday blue sky! 3 GitHub Repos to learn more about #AI and #ML 1. Neural Networks: Zero to Hero from Andrej Karpathy. lnkd.in/erA-Gerp 2. Machine Learning Andrew Ng’s lectures lnkd.in/ebtWemWD 3. Deep Learning Specialization - Andrew Ng’s lectures & practice problems lnkd.in/e2RECCSQ

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 04/02/2025

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take. thebullshitmachines.com

thebullshitmachines.com

INTRODUCTION

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

The authors of the quoted paper showed that if the transition to the true vacuum state occurs the Universe will collapse into black hole...

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Andrey Kravtsov @grumpy1.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

A reminder from @astrokatie.com at the end of her "Picture an Astronomer" talk at UChicago tonight that no matter what you see in the news, things can get MUCH worse if the Higgs field tunnels to its true vacuum state... 🧪🔭

A quote from Coleman & De Luccia (1980) paper about how their result that the transition of the Higgs field to its true vacuum state will collapse will end all hope for our Universe.

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Ava Polzin @avapolzin.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

If our kick-off celebration (incl. a talk from @highzclouds.bsky.social) on Jan. 30 isn't sufficient diversion, come hear Dara Norman talk about global scale astronomy from the Windy City on Feb. 3! Free for the public in person and also streamed online! More at pictureanastronomer.github.io 🔭🧪👩‍🔬

Flyer describing the details of Dara Norman's public lecture at the University of Chicago. Held on February 3 in person and online, her talk is titled "Seeing Southern Stars and Galaxies from the Windy City"

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