iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

DNA results are in 47% Australian Cattle Dog 34% Super mutt 13% American Pitt Bull 5% German Shepard 100% good girl. #dogsky

Our super mutt Spark sitting on a raised platform. She is mostly white with brown pointy ears and a brown patch over one eye.

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

if any supernova go off in my pixel, I get to name them!

A certificate certifying that I have adopted a pixel from the Nancy Grace Roman telescope.

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

New puppy figured out how stairs work. Much like the scene in Jurassic Park when the velociraptors figured out doors, nowhere is safe now...

A 4.5 month old white puppy (with brown ears and eye patch) interrupting my computering with her cuteness

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

With BranchedRate, we can now approximate the CNO-I and II cycles with only 5 nuclei (including p and α) instead of 11! Details here: pynucastro.github.io/pynucastro/b... In this plot, the dotted line is the approximate / reduced network. It matches the full CNO I/II net really well.

$mass fractions vs time for H burning via CNO comparing a full net and an approximation to CNO burning. For ~ 10^15 s, the H mass fraction does not change much, but then it abruptly drops and He builds up to X(He4) ~ 1. The C12, N14, and O16 tracks follow each other well.$

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

One week with the new puppy. She's making herself at home in the papasan chair that survives from my postdoc years...

A small terrier puppy perched up on a Hawaiian print papasan chair

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

I hope astrophysical quantities are rotationally invariant

The second and third editions of Allen Astrophysical Quantities. The orientation of the title on the spine is flipped from one to the next

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

@drturkmac.bsky.social today there were 4 toucans. They're going for the bananas.

A colorful toucan perched on a banana tree

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Spotted a herd of capybara on the roadside

A group of about 10 capybara grazing on grass on the side of a road

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

I would watch a world cup played by capybaras

A vending machine called World Capys featuring stuffed capybara toys dressed in world cup country colors

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

so do I get residuals or something?

output from "are you in the weights" for me (Michael Zingale) showing that I am in most of the LLM models.

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

4 min exposure with my phone in Wyoming

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

explosive He burning sampling the uncertainties in rates from the StarLib library. This is done with pynucastro (pynucastro.github.io) integrating a simple He/C burning network. Notice that at the end we enter NSE, and the spread in mass fractions collapses to the NSE abundance. #astrocode

$a plot showing mass fractions vs time. He is abundant initially and S is abundant at the end. Shaded regions show the uncertainty in the abundances due to rate uncertainties.$

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Look who's 15 today!! My profile pic is from when we adopted her at 6 mos.

A black dog with gray around her muzzle and a pink scarf around her neck

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Brought the pup into the office today, before the storm arrives on Monday (both snow and start of semester)

A black, senior dog laying on a rolled floor. Eyes are closed.

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

No, that was the pre-nap treat. Now I need the post-nap treat. Then I can take a nap.

A senior dog (pit mix with a white stripe running between the eyes) sitting and staring at the camera with a quilt draped over her back.

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Apparently the search filters in Amazon when looking at TVs really let you zero in on the voltage you want ;)

check boxes from amazon.com allowing you to specify the voltage. The 3 options are:

* up to 118 V
* 120 to 120 V
* 121 V & above

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

pynucastro can now plot the nuclear partition functions from @rauscherthomas.bsky.social 's work: pynucastro.github.io/pynucastro/n... #astrocode ne20 = pyna.Nucleus("ne20") ne20.partition_function.plot()

nuclear partition function of Ne20 vs. temperature. It is 1 up to a few x 10**9 K and then rapidly increases to > 1.e6 at 1.e11 K.

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

What do you mean the clocks changed? Dinner time is dinner time.

A black dog with a white stripe on her nose and great muzzle, wearing an orange banana, giving an unimpressed look about waiting an hour more for dinner

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

I'm seeing a 2x speed up with python 3.14 compared to earlier (in our CI tests for pynucastro):

A screenshot of the GitHub actions showing timings to run the python tests with python versions 3.10 to 3.14. Most versions take ~ 30 minutes, but python 3.14 takes 15 minutes

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

we show this plot of binding energy / nucleon a lot in Stars class, but ever wonder how to make it? Here's a notebook that uses pynucastro: zingale.github.io/stars/notebo... #astro

A plot of binding energy per nucleon, showing a curve that stars at 0 MeV at mass number 1 and increases steeply to > 8 MeV / nucleon in the iron-group and then slowly declines for heavy A

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

I like my plot of equipotentials a lot, but I can never shake the fact that @sabinastro.bsky.social calls it the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle plot... zingale.github.io/stars/notebo...

a plot of equipotentials in a binary star system, showing the Roche lobes and Lagrange points. The green color scheme makes it look like a teenage mutant ninja turtle...

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

14 years ago we adopted our pup Luna. Such a good girl!

A close up of a mostly black dog with a white stripe between the eyes and a lot of gray on the muzzle and paws. She is looking somewhat toward the camera

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

new in pynucastro -- you can now color nuclei by abundance and rates by reaction rate strength easily: pynucastro.github.io/pynucastro/p... combined with the ability to read simulation data from a plot file via yt, this makes it easy to show reaction flow in simulations. #astro

a reaction network visualization showing the nuclei (represented as nodes) connected by rates (represented by edges). The color of the nodes indicates the abundance -- here He4 is the most abundant. The color of the edges represents the reaction rate strength, with 3 He4 -> C12 being one of the strongest rates.

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

If you see this, post a video game that transports you to your childhood.

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

meme updated to reflect the google AI generated search answers

A simpsons image of radioactive man in a sea of radioactive sludge with "protective" goggles. It usually says "my eyes! the goggles, they do nothing", but now says "my search! the google, they do nothing."

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

lode runner (Apple ][) (image from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lode_Ru...)

A screenshot of Lode Runner on the Apple ][ computer, showing a blue maze like structure with someone running through it.

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

I hope you pointed out that one of them is actually a space station (image: NASA/Cassini / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute)

Saturn's moon Mimas which looks an awful lot like the Death Star

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Michael Zingale @michaelzingale.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

I've seen the approximation that for electron pressure, when the matter is partially degenerate, you can approximate the pressure as below (with a claim that it is ~ 2% accurate). Does anyone know a reference for this? #astro

electron pressure is the square root of the sum of the squares of the ideal and degenerate pressures

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