iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Therapist: The paper figure monster is not real, he can't hurt you. Paper figure monster:

Figure from a scientific paper. First row has two side-by-side color plots that are somewhat circular, second row is a row-wide 1D plot with somewhat horizontal lines. Taken together, the whole thing looks like a face.

Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

Dark matter's existence is not controversial and the evidence is overwhelming. We don't know what it is, but it's not just some weird speculation, it's really there. Also the big bang is not a point from which everything expanded, it's just the idea that the universe used to be real hot and dense.

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

Here are pictures of owls taken with a 127 mm (5") telescope and my phone camera. Those guys just hang out there all day. Next post night time pics.

Picture of a telescope (foreground) pointing towards the top of a tall tree (background) in daytime, with a red arrow to indicate more precisely where the telescope is pointing. At that location, there are branches and a dark shape, and it's hard to identify what that shape is due to distance.

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

The kind of paper I wish someone shared with me when I was learning GR and cosmology

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Yeah... I’m a physicist, not a coder, and I’ve wasted way too much time on broken Python envs or slow code in the past. Now, I can just ask the robot to fix it and move on to the science. Because of all the harm they cause, I hate how well LLMs work for some tasks.

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

I could've saved the Planck team a whole lot of trouble by just saving the COBE map in jpeg a bunch of times

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Reposted by Vincent MacKay

Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 22/01/2025

Devastating for scientists and their research, and everyone who benefits from that research. I’m not sure if everyone outside academia is aware that a delay or “pause” in grant funding often means the researchers themselves are lost from the field, along with their expertise.

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

This is one of the most incredible JWST pics so far imo

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Reposted by Vincent MacKay

Ethan Siegel @startswithabang.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

JWST fully solves the mystery of “Little Red Dots” How did those "Little Red Dot" galaxies get so bright and abundant so early on? It isn't just stars at work, but an active and _overmassive_ black hole, too. bigthink.com/starts-with-...

bigthink.com

JWST fully solves the mystery of "Little Red Dots"

The discovery of ultra-bright, ultra-distant galaxies was JWST's first big surprise. They didn't "break the Universe," and now we know why.

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

This is too good not to share in English too: Ravel's heiress is his brother's nurse's brother's second wife's daughter from another marriage. www.thetimes.com/world/europe...

The heiress deplored the way that she and her mother had been vilified for decades by the media over the unusual succession. With no descendants, Ravel left everything to his brother Édouard. The brother left the estate, worth some €400 million, to Jeanne Taverne, his nurse-housekeeper whose husband, Alexandre, a former miner and barber, was his driver.

After Jeanne’s death, the driver married Georgette Lerga, a manicurist, whose daughter by a previous marriage is Pen de Castel. The daughter became guardian of the Boléro millions when her mother died in 2012.

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Reposted by Vincent MacKay

Andy Witteman - Cnlastro @cnlastro.aurora.photography · 10/01/2025

Aurora progression! what a show it was :) #aurora #northernlights #alaska

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

I hope all the new bots that started following me in the past week will enjoy this picture of the moon that I took with my phone and a 127 mm telescope

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

If you start Wicked now, at 11:59:59 she'll go ooh aohaoooh

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Reposted by Vincent MacKay

Ethan Siegel @startswithabang.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

This weird JWST trick lets us “see” dark matter By using color inversion plus galaxy/cluster light models, scientists can find "excesses" of light. Remarkably, they help trace out where the dark matter is. bigthink.com/starts-with-...

bigthink.com

This weird JWST trick lets us "see" dark matter

It's not only the gravity from galaxies in a cluster that reveal dark matter, but the ejected, intracluster stars actually trace it out.

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

From least to most impressive: - partial lunar eclipse - comet - meteor shower - partial solar eclipse - northern lights - other planets through telescope - jupiter or saturn through scope - moon through scope - annular solar eclipse - milky way (in its own category:) - total solar eclipse

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Reposted by Vincent MacKay

Physghoul 👻 🎃 @physgal.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

35 years ago today a gunman walked into an engineering classroom at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, separated the women from the men and killed 14 of them. It was the ultimate manifestation of the gender-based bias and violence we still face in STEM today. We must never forget. 👩🏻‍🔬 🧪

Photos of the 14 victims of the Montreal massacre:

Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault and Annie Turcotte.

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

(future employers please don't read) this is very accurate

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Reposted by Vincent MacKay

Beatriz Campos Estrada, PhD @exobeatriz.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

People who use wavenumber instead of wavelength: who hurt you? 🪐✨️🔭

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

People talk about wickeds marketing budget, but the boys must be huge

NYT: Trump picks a guy named Vought for his cabinet

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Radio astronomer: The cup adds 5 kelvins to the system temperature...can we make it out of teflon? Maybe drill a few holes in it? And get rid of the water?

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Wake up babe, new pretzel shapes just dropped

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

What is common knowledge in you field but shocks outsider? Usually, the further things are, the smaller they appear...but if they're reaaally far, they start looking bigger again.

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Reposted by Vincent MacKay

Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 09/11/2024

Relatable but also: I’d like to talk a little bit about this headline, which is, in my opinion, an example of dysfunction in science reporting today. (Since there’s no alt text, headline reads: “This Black Hole Is Eating So Much Matter that It Defies Known Science”, from 404 Media) 🧵

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Vincent MacKay @vincentmackay.bsky.social · 06/09/2023

Haven't had time to read the paper (I have a ton of questions!) but this looks cool. First time I read "Baryon Acoustic Oscillation" in the singular form. Fun stuff!

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