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Stephanie Douglas

@stephtdouglas.bsky.social

519 followers 501 following 239 posts

Astronomer, Assistant Prof of Physics. She/her. (All opinions mine & don't represent employer; likes/RPs not endorsements; etc)

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Stephanie Douglas @stephtdouglas.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I definitely spent too long making these, but I'm excited to use them: name tags for celestial buddies so I can include them in a scaled Solar System walk 🌞🤓

Screenshot of two white pages. The left page has 9 tags outlined, while the right has two oversize and one regular. Each says "my name is planet name, if the Sun is the size of a basketball, then I'm this big:" followed by a circle of the appropriate size. Pluto, Charon, and Comet say "if the Sun is the size of a basketball, then I'm too small to see" plus an extra fact

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Stephanie Douglas @stephtdouglas.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

See this is what gets me. Astronomy has used machine learning for years now, it certainly has its uses. I'm skeptical that a generic LLM could produce trustworthy results in a few minutes, esp. when a tenured prof and their research group has been trying for YEARS. Why are they so credulous?

She wanted to understand how the spiral arms of a distant galaxy were moving. But isolating just that motion from other patterns imparted into her data by the spin and the geometry of that distant galaxy had thwarted her group for years. She asked ChatGPT, which resolved the problem in a few minutes. Now, her research group was planning to write several papers on the resulting data set, “the single best map of spiral arm kinematics ever—like, by a factor of 100.”

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Stephanie Douglas @stephtdouglas.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

How is "pointless" a reasonable substitution for "ok"?? This replacement happened automatically, last word of the email, and I'm lucky I saw it before I hit send. Completely changed the meaning of my email!