iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

This is exactly how we got the notion that you shouldn’t put a preposition at the end of a sentence. The next time someone suggests as much show them where this is at.

Consider the curiously persistent notion that sentences should not end with a preposition. The source of this stricture, and several other equally dubious ones, was one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life both in his native England and abroad. It is to Lowth we can trace many a pedant's most treasured notions: the belief that you must say different from rather than different to or different than, the idea that two negatives make a positive, the rule that you must not say "the heaviest of the two objects," but rather "the heavier," the distinction between shall and will, and the clearly nonsensical belief that between can apply only to two things and among to more than two. (By this reasoning, it would not be possible to say that St. Louis is between New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, but rather that it is among them, which would impart a quite different sense.) Perhaps the most remarkable and curiously enduring of Lowth's many beliefs was the conviction that sentences ought not to end with a preposition. But even he was not didactic about it. He recognized that ending a sentence with a preposition was idiomatic and common in both speech and informal writing. He suggested only that he thought it generally better and more graceful, not crucial, to place the preposition before its relative "in solemn and elevated" writing. Within a hundred years this had been converted from a piece of questionable advice into an immutable rule. In a remarkable outburst of literal-mindedness, nineteenth-century academies took it as read that the very name pre-position meant it must come before something-anything.
But then this was a period of the most resplendent silines,

Cover Art for the book “The Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Ooh thank you I will have to check that out too, sounds fun. Also if you are an Eleanor of Aquitaine fan this is a really good movie. It's quite old but a Katherine Hepburn classic.

Movie poster for 1968's "the Lion in Winter"

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

His son Henry I makes George R. R. Martin sound like Dr. Seuss.

In Rouen, Adeliza witnessed just how savage Henry could be. She may not have heard of what had happened when, in 1119, his bastard daughter Juliana's husband, Eustace de Pacy, had rebelled against him and unlawfully occupied the château of Ivry. To ensure his submission, the King demanded that hostages be exchanged, himself taking into custody the two daughters of Eustace and Juliana, with Eustace holding as pledge the son of the constable of Ivry. But Eustace, on malevolent advice, put out the boy's eyes and sent him, blinded, back to his father, who demanded

vengeance of the horrified King. Much moved by the constable's distress, Henry turned his granddaughters over to him and allowed him to put out their eyes and cut off the tips of their noses. "Thus innocent child-hood, alas, suffered for the sins of the fathers."" An incandescent Juliana took her husband's part, which led Henry to lay siege to her castle at Breteuil. She asked to meet with him, but attempted to shoot a crossbow bolt into his heart. In the end she had to surrender and seek forgiveness, before disappearing into the abbey of Fontevrault.
Now, in April 1124, Adeliza was present when Henry summoned three prisoners to appear before him. All were his vassals, and one, Luc de la Barré, had been his friend, but had circulated satirical songs against him.
Henry sentenced them all to have their eyes burned out and to perpetual imprisonment. Even when Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, interceded on behalf of the condemned knights, the King remained obdurate.
"They broke their faith, violated their oath of allegiance: and therefore they deserve death, or at least to be punished by the loss of a limb," he insisted. But when, on the public scaffold, the executioners seized Luc de la Barré to put his eyes out, he wrenched himself away and crashed his head against the wall, splitting it open and dying soon afterward. Adeliza was seeing another side to the man she had married.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Wow William the First got rid of the death penalty actually. But he replaced it with castration.

"Much Trouble"
95
long persevere in his short-lived attempt to learn English. Norman French was now established as the official language of the court, and would remain so until the fourteenth century.
William's rule was harsh but effective. He abolished capital punishment but replaced it with castration and mutilation. Small wonder that, after his death, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle applauded "the good order he kept in the land, so that a man of any substance could travel unmolested throughout the country with his bosom full of gold. No man dared to slay another, no matter what evil the other might have done to him. If a man lay with a woman against her will, he was forthwith condemned to forfeit those members with which he had disported himself." This was enlightened justice for women in an age that regarded them as chattels.
Nevertheless, added the chronicler, "a hard man was the King."

Copy of the portrait taken from William's corpse 435 years after his death.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

This is an era before standardized spelling, but good Lord researching Queen Adeliza must have been a nightmare as her name appeared nineteen different ways.

The chroniclers struggled with the young lady's name, giving it variously as Adeliza, Adelid(a), Adelicia, Adela, Adala, Adelaide, Adelheite, Adeline,
Adelina, Aeliz, Aethelice, Aleyda, Alice, Alicia, Aaliz and Adelidis. To Flemish and Provençal poets, she was Alise, Adelais or "Alix la Belle."

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Queens had their own lands and taxes for income, and often acted as regents for husbands and spouses away at war. Many had influence at court. A few successfully invaded England by themselves. To read a history that downplays their role is to read a history with a big chunk missing.

Margaret, Queen of Scots, Matilda's saintly mother.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

And yes I say series and not book. I read them out of order as I saw the second at @columbuslibrary.bsky.social and then read to the end and back again. The second and third were probably the best, though of course you don't have to read them all, or in any particular order.

Book cover for Queens series by Alison Weir

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

🧵This is a great series. Nominally about England's Medieval queens but keep in mind this is a time when when contemporary chroniclers often left women out, even if they had considerable political influence. So I would call it, a more inclusive history. A few highlights: #histbookchat #booksky💙📚

Book Cover of Queens of the Conquest by Alison Weir

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

#SPJ26 by the numbers: 🤠Members at the conference: 377 👥Members last year: 3,879 ⬆️Membership this year: 4,425 😱Percent increase: 14%

SPJ president talking about the previous year

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

And all my usual caveats. Funny aside- Me, reading the dedication: Oh wow her dad's last name is Law! I thought- she writes about law... and is a lawyer... that must be a pseudonym. My kid: Seriously?! Your initials are LAW & you're a lawyer! Me: yeah I guess it's the subliminal advertising. 😂

Disclaimers
• This is NOT an endorsement.
• I bought this book with my own money or I checked it out from the library.
• No one asked me to read this book.
• I do not know the author, and I got exactly $0 for reading it.
• Even if I liked the book, that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with everything the author says.
• A few sentences in a post is not going to do justice to a book several hundred pages long. This is just a few things I found interesting. I suggest reading the whole book yourself.
• Sorry, I can't review your book too. I have a job. I just love expanding my horizons and learning something new!

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Here are updated numbers on this thanks to the @deportationdata.bsky.social. The author argues that most Americans are now subject to warrantless government surveillance in order to further restrict the liberty of disfavored groups, even if that, again, conflicts with the Constitution.

278 MIGRATION AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP
of May 2025, Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) had detained 49,005 migrants. Of those, 21,250, or 43.4 percent, have no criminal record. Xet, the growth of federal government agencies intended to monitor non-citizens also affects US citizens. ICE has turned its panopticon-like domestic surveillance on Immigrants and citizens alike. A 2022 report by researchers at the Center for Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University showed that ICE has collected vast amounts of information into every aspect of the private lives of non-citizens and citizens by tapping digital records of local governments and by purchasing databases from private brokers. Among the highlights of the report's findings,
"ICE has scanned the driver's licenses of 1 in 3 people, has driver's license data of 3 of 4 adults, tracks the movement of drivers, and can locate 3 in 4 adults based on their utility records." All this information has been gathered with
out judicial, legislative, or public oversight." Immigration control, now fused with national security (especially after the 9/11 terror attacks), is hoovering up resources with scant attention to concerns about privacy, due process, and unintended consequences for those swept up in its dragnet.
As authority and management of migration shifted from one level of government to another, a recurring theme is the difficulty for the federal government to standardize immigration law and policy implementation across the realm in a nation as large as the US. S. Deborah Kang carefully analyzed the development of the federal immigration agency (formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service or "INS") which included Border Patrol that ballooned exponentially after federalization. She found as the INS increased in size and funding, parts of it were "unmoored from the oversight of Congress and the courts" because the agency and its personnel were responding to complex economic and soci…

ICE arrests by criminality, 2025 to 2026. Red is convicted criminals, green are those accused of a crime, blue are noncriminals. Among those convicted of a crime, the number one most common one is border crossing.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The very first federal immigration law was actually a restriction on black sailors entering southern ports to preserve slavery.

by interlocking federal and state statutes.® Even with the non-binary division eralism arrangements in migration were mainly operated by the states and the of labor that Mallon and LaCroix describe across multiple subject matters, fed.
area before the Civil War.
federal government did not make a concerted effort to enter that subject matte While the management of Black people's interstate mobility provoked dis agreement among states, there was little disagreement about banning the international slave trade. Long beforg the federal ban on the international siave trade in 1808, northern and southern states individually tried to end the trade with state laws. States had their own reasons for banning the business. Northeastern states were driven by an abhorrence of slavery and southern states worried about insurrections. Most people made a clear distinction between "slave trading and slaveholding" by the beginning of the nineteenth century. For example, South Carolina passed a law "preventing the importation of negros from any port or elsewhere" into the state on December 5, 1800. Virginia updated its previous 1778 law to "prevent the importation of slaves" in January 1801 after Gabriel's Rebellion in the summer of 1800, an uprising led by a literate enslaved black-smith? By the late eighteenth century, agreement on ending the international slave trade spanned both slave and free states and the federal government.° Nineteenth-century state-level migration laws illustrate how laws aimed at regulating international enslaved and free Black people could not be separated from laws restricting the domestic enslaved and free Black people on the move in interstate migration. A federal law passed in 1803 illustrates the dynamics in migration federalism when this law furthered state interests, so the states did not fight it. This law prohibited the master, captain, or anyone from bringing:
Any negro, mulatto, or other person of color, not being a native, a citizen, or registered …

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship" takes a deep dive into what "liberty" actually means in terms of the ability to stay or go & argues that at many points throughout history, the government offered incentives to some while restricting the movement of others based on race or origin.

He saw no conflict between his backing of the abolition of slavery and increasing European immigration because he believed that all people should be paid for their labor. Lincoln believed that the key to the nation's prosperity was labor that would be supplied by an infusion of European immigrants and that they would be drawn to the US because of the Homestead Acts' promises of attractive land in the west.34
Congress first responded to Lincoln's appeal by passing the Homestead Act on May 30, 1862. The act made citizens and intended citizens alike eligible, stating "any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States." The beneficiaries would each receive 160 acres of western public land if they made the land productive. In making property available not just to the native-born but also to foreign-born migrants, who merely expressed an intent to naturảlize, Congress intended to attract immigrants from overseas.
The requirement that eligible immigrants had to file an intent to naturalize excluded the Chinese and other non-white immigrants because the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to "free white persons" The Republican national platform in 1864 also extolled the virtues of immigration and endorsed a "liberal and just naturalization policy, which would encourage foreign immi-grants." The imperatives of preserving the Union and the northern economy and saving the territories and new states for free white labor eclipsed the Republican Party's initial nativist impulses. 35
Land reform was also what many African American southerners wanted, and Congress obliged by passing the Southern Homestead Act in 1867 to reinforce the 1862 Homestead law. Homesteading plans were central to Republicans' free labor beliefs, and federal land laws were featured in the par…

people as "equal participants in republican society"* Native Americans in the southeast lost their ability to stay in their territory because the white majority wanted Indian land to expand slavery, a goal that was shared by other states, the President, and the Congress.
The Removal Act of 1830 authorized President Jackson to trade land west of the Mississippi to Indians in exchange for their current land in the southeast and funded mass deportation. The executive branch already had the authority to conduct such an action, but the law secured funding. Expulsion of that many Indigenous people was beyond the Office of Indian Affairs' ordinary budget without additional funding. Thomas McKenney explained in 1828 that the office was using most of its funds for other things like food, clothing, and medicine for Indians' care. He suggested that Congress create funds "specifically, to defray the cost of the movement." The Removal Act of 1830 appropriated $500,000 for Indian deportation.35
The deportation of Native people of the five "Civilized Tribes" of the Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Cherokees in the 1830s required a scope and scale of financial and human resources that only the federal government could muster. The US government spent "about $75 million" to expel Native people; the equivalent amount today is "a trillion dollars." The money was not used to compensate Native people for their land or to facilitate their safe and comfortable travel. The federal funding was used to contract "with provi-sioners, steamboat captains, and other opportunistic Americans" in addition to
"purchasing munitions and supplies and mobilizing US troops and state militia to fight the seven-year war against Seminole families." The $75 million dollar price tag on Indian expulsion was close to the $80 million that the US government gained from selling Native lands which were then referred to as "public lands."36
As the US government flexed its administrative capacity, the mass …

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Racism is sometimes called the "original sin" of America and I think that's an apt metaphor here: when faced with the cognitive dissonance between the above and slaveholding, some founding fathers decided that this was actually rational if one group was subhuman.

68
MIGRATION AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP
"Victory in the War for Independence depended upon a united effort by thir teen colonies. What dictated the policy of men like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin was not an animus against Negroes, but a desire for strong national union in the effort against England"49 Horizontal federalism pressures, strategic
were doing, prevented wider inclusion of black soldiers.
competition, and awareness of the former colonies of what other former colonies By the Fall of 1775, some Black people were serving in New England units and Continental forces around Boston. General John Thomas, a brigade comman-der, said approvingly, "we have some Negros, but I look upon them as equally serviceable with other men ... many of them have proved themselves brave.
Despite the contributions of Black enlistees, newly arriving soldiers from slave. dominant former colonies objected to serving with Black recruits because they felt racially superior. One of the reasons New Englanders hesitated to draft Black forces more widely was out of consideration of "what the effect of the policy would have in other former colonies"5° The pressure to work together to defea the British led the northeastern areas to go along with the white supremads. demands from the south not to enlist more Black people or to place them in
non-combat positions.
Loud objections by the south temporarily precluded broader participation of Black people. After a British victory in Savannah in 1779 and as imperia forces threatened Charles Town, Washington's adviser John Laurens advised him to arm the enslaved if the revolutionaries were to have any chance to fight off the British. Laurens assured Washington if he could supply "3000 Black men" with guns from the Carolinas, he would be able to drive the British from Georgia and South Florida. Congress endorsed Laurens' plan and recommended that South Carolina and Georgia arm 3,000 Black men to be rewarded with $50 and freedom if they …

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Major changes in judicial precedent, state pressure to exclude certain immigrants, and the desire to use federal power against Native American tribes changed all this in the late 1800s. But why is it important to understand something that happened in the Arthur administration?

This picture isn't in the book I just wanted you to appreciate The mad sideburns here.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Some states even cared for newcomers quite well; recognizing their value as people and important drivers of the local economy.

New York's Castle Garden Landing Depot
Castle Garden represents the most elaborate state migrant-serving institutions designed mostly for benevolent purposes. Although the federally-run Ellis Island is far better known, the Castle Garden depot was an entirely New York operation.
It processed over eight million migrants from 1855 to 1890, when two of every thre foreign-born people to the US passed through its gates.® Annual rent for the facility was $12,000. The total number of staff at Castle Garden and that of the Marine Hospital at Staten Island was seventy-six officers and employees. Their yearly salaries totaled $82,894.®9 From 1876 to 1882, the eve of the federalization of migration, New York state taxpayers spent over one million dollars for insti tutions to care for migrants.
7° The facility was run not as a detention station, but
as "a protective charity foundation" to provide "safety from swindlers and confidence men, a hospitable reception for newcomers, practical advice and social services*? In designing Castle Garden, New York City chose a non-restrictionist route to managing migrants.
The impetus for the creation of Castle Garden was New York's goal of protecting migrants from scammers. New York lawmakers had long known through its investigations that organized gangs of "runners" would descend upon arriving

HA
140 MIGRATION AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP
a ban on state taxation of migrants even if these laws violated exclusive congres-
the Constitution.?
sional power to regulate interstate and international commerce as stipulated to The Passenger Cases, although not doctrinally dispositive because of the splin tered opinions, provided ample evidence of the strong motivations for states especially the slave states, to retain control over migration in both the nort east and south. The Court's very careful parsing of what constituted commerce and whether people or property were part of commerce is revealing. Construing people as "commerce" would have meant they would be subject to exclusive fed. eral congressional control and that position would be an anathema to slave and northeastern states. Thus, in their opinions, the proslavery justices argued tha ship passengers were "persons" and the antislavery justices argued they were
"commerce."
*5B California would try to impose taxes on the unwanted Chine immigrants after their arrival to skirt the Passenger Cases ruling which would be struck down by their state supreme court, illustrating the unsettled nature of federalism jurisprudence before the Civil War when courts struggled to draw a clean line between federal and state control over migration.
New York State Migration Institutions and Laws
In the nineteenth century, in addition to the northeastern states law siting poor, sick, and disabled people, the foreign arrivals also experienced a distinc tive kind of governmental power via institutions and procedures designed to care for them, not just to exclude and deport them. New York created a set of laws and institutions driven by merchants and industrialists. It was in these parties interest to see as many people landed as possible and they were not interested in exclusion. In "Protecting the Stranger: The Origins of Immigration Regulation in Nineteenth-Century New York," Brendan O'Malley reminds us that the total…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

A standard history textbook says immigration policy started in the late 1800s. It is, after all, federal law, and that's when the first major federal immigration laws passed. But the author argues that actually in antebellum America states controlled immigration and didn't want federal inference.

terms for the security of this specie of property it was in our power to make Pickney knew that slave interests had created a national government that wa stronger but with safeguards that the federal government could not interfere with the institution of slavery and that no region of the nation would be more
powerful than another. ®8
Imperial federalism with a division of labor between a central and satellite governments survived the transfer to the US Constitution. The Americans were accustomed to dividing power in this way and expected to continue even as var-lous groups expectations of the federal government changed. The slave states did not oppose the creation of a strong national government during the Constitution's drafting. Quite the opposite. Southerners "often required some kind a action by the federal government."' For example, enslavers had no objection federal power being deployed to retrieve people leing for freedom from one state to another as stipulated by the fugitive slave clause/ If US power could be harnessed in the service of slavery, the South had no objection,
Pertinent to migration laws and policies, the upshot of the numerous accommodations for slavery was that the 1787 Constitution guaranteed that in the federal system, slavery remained under local management, at least until
1808. James Oakes observed that this "federal consensus" ensured that for more than seventy-five years, "hardly anybody-North or South, proslavery or antislavery-doubted that the Constitution put slavery in the states beyond the reach of federal power. The many ways this federal consensus would play out in migration laws and policies were reflected in a number of Supreme Court decisions that would uphold the constitutionality of state restrictions on undesirable populations' interstate and international movements. This federal consensus would also influence the national judiciary's assessment of states and localities' directives restricting the ability of free and enslav…

the term of service which Drotected European servants, most Africans imported under the headright system arriving after the 1660s were likely enslaved for life!
When the supply of European servants steeply declined by the 1690s, the importation of African people became key to those wanting to acquire land ünder the headright system in Virginia. Headright was technically available only for servants but the local practice in Virginia was to also award land for slave importations. Since planters dominated the Assembly and Council, the practice was continued for a generation. In one year alone, in 1690, planters secured over 95,000 acres of land in the Piedmont region based on the importation of 1,900 headright system until 1699. Local concentrations of political power, not lea enslaved Africans. England did not stop the importation of Africans under the
stipulations, drove headright practices.'
Tay avemotions fou o limited number of vears were also a recruitment tor as were material benefits such as focilities for surveying and plotting 15 In 1771.
North Carolina attempted to pass a law that would have granted new settlers four-vear tax-free period upon their arrival. but the Crown vetoed i+ 16 Colonies like Massachusetts and Marvland not only paid for the voyage of colonists. but also offered food, land, and tools/supplies for new arrivals," Other inland colonies like Georgia were even more generous offering to cover the "payment of transportation charges, a supply of tools and provisions until the first harvest, and land grants rent free for 10 years? "The variety of material incentives varied across the colonies and attracted migrants not only from abroad but also set offa considerable inter-colonial migration as the English colonies both on the main. land and in the West Indies used similar inducements to compete for migrants.
The indentured servitude trade would undergo changes in source countries of arrivals and competition between colonies, but material incentiv…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

🧵 This is one of the best histories I have read. Immigration law can charitably be described as held together with band-aids and glue- this book is like oh yeah and it we made it out of popsicle sticks. A few highlights: @unlawfulentries.bsky.social #booksky 💙📚 #histbookchat #LawSky

Cover of "Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship" by Anna O. Law

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Me, sliding into a colleague's inbox with data at the same minute she emails me asking for the data.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This is fascinating. How do you use it? Like, how do you put in a picture and get a picture out? I'm not sure I get the readme.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

12/12 And all my usual caveats.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

11/ Very cool I did not know what Uhuru meant. Though DS9 is my favorite of the Trek series as it’s a little grittier. It still incorporates the wonder of exploration but not to the point of naïveté. Wow ironically TV execs almost dropped the ball until saved by Ball!

YOU ARE NOT SAFE IN SCIENCE
in which we consider going to space to escape ourselves
dom. As a Black physicist, I have been fed on both, and I have tried to grow the seeds that my ancestors passed on to me. The ancestors menld fv. I do too whenever I am able to escape into looking at the maverse throuch the lens of quantum fields. I am not the first to escape into the abstractions of space and time. If you've read this far, then you have joined me. We are not the first. We will not be the last.
When I was vounger. I knew I could be a scientist because I grew up watching LeVar Burton play one on television. As Geordi La Forge, chief engineer of the starship Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Burton gave us a brilliant, Black nerd. Because I saw this carly example, my child self never doubted that I had the freedom to be a professional nerd too. It was not a possibility that was, as it had been for Black generations before me, "Far Beyond the Stars"- the title of a powerful episode about twentieth-century anti-Black racism that aired during the sixth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. DS9, as many fans know it, was the first Trek series to feature a Black lead.
Avery Brooks's Benjamin Sisko broke barriers in what is to this day thelongest-running television drama with a Black man in the leading role. Like Burton's Lieutenant Commander La Forge, Captain Sisko taught Black children like me that not even the sky was the limit.
In this sense, representation has real material meaning: Trek has continuously pushed the boundaries of our imaginations for as long as it has existed. Burton's performance as Geordi La Forge has its
You Are Not safe In Science
origins in an earlier iteration of Trekathe froBlock perve Bur ton ever saw on television was Nichelle Nicholsa Lieutenant Noota Uhura in the original Star Trek series. This milestone was marked in the January 1967 issue of Ebony magazine, which also features a cover photograph of Nichols. In the photo, she's we…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

10/12 Amateur #astronomy photography fans, I found this section very helpful if you are thinking about doing this yourself.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

9/12 Meaning of life question – why did we break the rule of acronyms when we already had this NICE acronym?

Cosmic Energy
273
Atmosphere
HYdrogen, Helium, Carbon
Outer Crust
Tons,Electroh」
inner crust ions Superflud Neutrons
Outer Core
upercon ducting Irotons Uknawn
Inner Core
ปกkกงพฤ
Figure 17.2. Here's a figure that shows what we think a neutron star is like in its exterior layers. The inner core is unknown.
that is attached to the International Space Station. The Neutron Star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER's mandate is to gather data about neutron stars that allow us to, among other things, deduce the mass and radius of individual stars. Each nuclear model of neutron star interiors makes a distinct prediction of what the relationship between the mass and radius will be; with measurements from NICER, we can rule out models that don't fit its observations.
I initially became interested in this work because the intense gravitational power of neutron stars' high density suggests that they might collect dark matter. This is an idea that my former PhD stu-dent, now Dr. Nathan Rutherford, has pursued under my direction, in collaboration with Professor Anna Watts and Dr. Geert Raaijma-kers at the University of Amsterdam. So far, what our work shows is that all NICER data is consistent with the presence of dark matter, but we have been unable to demonstrate that we can use mass-radius relation measurements of neutron stars to prove that dark matter is inside. What this means in practice is that all data analyses should consider the possibility that dark matter is present, but it's unlikely that this will be the technique that identifies dark matter's exact field-theoretic properties (such as mass and standard-model interactions).

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

8/12 I was thinking this the whole time and it’s casually mentioned in just a line. If a black hole a centimeter across has as much matter as the Earth, & they are very hard to see, & we can’t see inside them, isn’t that a more logical explanation for dark matter than invisible particles?

THE EDGE OF SPACE-TIME
revived the possibility that there might be enough of them to explai
genuinely a dark absorber of light.
Ark matter Areaki this is the only dark-matter candidate that is To fa funar thing happened on the way to writing about dark matter for chapter 14. I started wondering how black holes fit into the way science communicators like me typically talk to the public abor the cosmic matter-energy pie chart. We usually show people some thing like Figure 14.1. On that chart, where do black holes belong?
This, it turns out, is not a straightforward question, Black holes aren't exactly matter or energy-we don't really know what's beyond the went horitan. Mavbe a mix of dark energy, dark matter, and vich. matter Or maybe black holes are dark matter themselves!
Asthe 2020s unfold, we are in an era of what Dr. Delilah Gates refers to in her dissertation as "the era of precision black hol imaging Using the circumference of the Earth as the aperture for a radio telescope, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration has for the first time delivered images of the event horizons of two supermassive black holes. The first, the black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87 (M87), was revealed in April 2019. In 2022, humanity was able to look at the edge of our own galaxy's interior, the event horizon of Sagittarius A*-aka Sgr A* (pronounced "SADGE-ay-star") - the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The images that we received, which you can see in Figure 15.1, exemplify the strong gravitational lensing I described earlier-and they look just like the computer simulations scientists had done for decades, based on theory alone.
Now; for the first time in the century since humans first started studying black holes, we are at a point where fundamental physical ideas about black holes are beginning to be tested with real data. As Daniel Harlow pointed out, we may not get to the point of fully testing our ideas, but we are increasingly able to make realistic state…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

7/12 Ooh I love Emmy Noether! Check out this book (and my review of it a few days ago) to learn more about this. I actually read both of these somewhat simultaneously and I felt like they helped me understand each other.

direction you rotate it in. Freamanns sotution also assumes the Copernican principle is correct, that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic on the largest scales. When I mentioned that idea in the last chapter, I didn't say it had anything to do with symmetries. But the universe looking the same no matter what direction we look in or what part we look at is a symmetrizing assumption that simplifies the equations a lot.
Symmetries can open doors. Mathematician Emmy Noether showed in the early twentieth century that the presence of certain types of symmetries arising in mathematical formulations of physical theories corresponded to conservation of observable physical phenomena like energy. Using Noether's theorem, we can make important connections. For instance, the theorem shows that there is a direct link between time-translation invariance—a symmetry of a system where the physics stays the same even if we change when we start measuring our time interval-and conservation of energy.
Absolute time isn't itself observable (or real, as you now know), but conservation of energy is directly observable. As a Jewish woman in early 1900s Germany, Noether ran into all kinds of social boundaries, yet her observation turned out to be one of the most important inall of twentieth-century physics. It helped provide insight into general relativity and eventually aided in the discovery and understanding of fundamental properties of particle physics.
Beyond Our Boundaries
Boundaries are often a good thing, but there are scenarios in which they are not. National and political borders are fictitious boundaries

Cover of Einstein‘s tutor: the story of Emmy Noether and the invention of modern physics by Lee Phillips

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

6/12 Though there are a few things that the book could have been explained better. For example, there’s a very detailed explanation about particle spin. But then they actually don’t spin? What?

THE EDGE OF SPACE-TIME
128
on the confirmation of your theory...?
experimental proof of directional quantization. We congratulate you card (pictured in Figure 82) telling him that he was right he
عبة/ عدم
Figure 8.2. The poster they se of Bor. On the left is the experimental outcome when the magnetic field is off —the particles randomly land along one line directly ahead of the detector. On the right is the outcome when the magnetic field is on —-they are deflected to two lines, one up and one down.
The lip shape comes from the fact that the magnetic field gets weaker farther away from its source, the magnets, which makes the lines bend together. A more constant magnetic field would produce two lines that never connect, one of spin-up particles and one of spin-down.
A Sequence of Peculiar Events
The results of the experiment were revolutionary, and also every. one involved initially misinterpreted them Only later did scientists understand that silver didn't have an outer electron with orbital angular momentum. So angular momentum had been detected, but not the kind that Stern and Gerlach thought. It wasn't until around 1926 that people understood what they had actually shown: Electrons have a quantum internal rotation that we now call spin. This spin doesn't manifest in the real world the same way a spinning figure skater does. Even so, it is real, with observational consequences, as Stern and Gerlach showed.
To really appreciate spin, it's useful to go back to the classical, Newtonian mechanistic picture of the world, and to our discussion of what we mean in classical physics when we talk about the "state
The Quantum Turn
of the system." Formally, the "state" of a system (such as a particle or a baseball) is given by two pleces of information: its position and as momentum. In classical Newtonian mechanics, both position and momentum are quantities that are simultaneously measured. Thes change with time. Think about what happened every time Brook In Dodpers star Jac…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

5/12 Lastly, I love the attitude that science is about questions and not answers. Physics isn’t just a regurgitation of facts. It’s a complex field that we are now just scratching the surface of understanding.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

4/12 Second, it’s awfully hard to find books with a global perspective. I thought this did a good job of branching out from solely American or European sources.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

2/12 Three things I really liked about this book. First, I have read many science books where are the author’s attitude is like: some people waste their time indulging in fiction about this subject, but I am actually furthering the knowledge of humanity! But Prescod-Weinstein has as much respect

THE EDGE OF SPACE-TIME
we get more advanced, over space-time). Speed is an example of a quantity that represents something changing with time; Speed i the rate at which an object's location is changing with time Speed is alba something that can change with time: If you increase the speed of your bike, you accelerate. If you slow down, you decelerate.
A differential equation is a set of rules that these changes have to follow. And you've probably heard of at least one before, the most famous differential equation in the world, also known as Newton's
second law: F = m x a, which says force (E) equals mass (m) times
acceleration (a). I just told you that acceleration is the change over time of speed, which again is the change in location over time, So the
a in F = m x a represents change. Put simply, if I know the value of
the force and how massive an object is, this equation tells me how 1 can calculate the acceleration. This is a real scenario: Sometimes we know the force, but we don't know the acceleration.
The formula has the power to go in the other direction too. It tells me that if I want to know the force, all I need to calculate it is the mass and how the speed is changing with time, its acceleration. While this is helpful, usually what I want to know is the location-and how that is changing with time. We want to know how a force affects where something is and when it is in that location. In other words, I want to know how force is creating motion and position in space. Newton's second law is a differential equation that helps us get there by giving us the acceleration when we know the force and mass.
If we know the acceleration, we have almost everything we need to
compute the location. Almost.
What we are missing are the boundary conditions, or the initial conditions. Even if we know the formula for F, if we want to use it to calculate information about position over time, we need more infor-mation. This is because the acceleration tells us how velocity-the …

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

🧵1/12 Enjoyed this @chanda.blacksky.app book about the universe. A few highlights: #astronomy 🔭 #booksky 💙📚

Cover of The Edge of Space-Time: particles, poetry, and the cosmic dream boogie by Chanda Prescott-Weinstein

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Wow, there really isn’t. I just went down a rabbit hole here. Maybe because biking isn’t as big in the US?

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

6/ And all my usual caveats. In the acknowledgments, the author thanks everyone who has contributed to open source projects, which I thought was neat. I should do that more, too!

This is NOT an endorsement.
• I bought this book with my own money or I checked it out from the library.
• No one asked me to read this book.
• I do not know the author, and I got exactly $0 for reading it.
• Even if I liked the book, that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with everything the author says.
• A few sentences in a post is not going to do justice to a book several hundred pages long. This is just a few things I found interesting. I suggest reading the whole book yourself.
• Sorry, I can't review your book too. I have a job. I just love expanding my horizons and learning something new!

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

5/ Noether’s personal life was as tragic as she was brilliant. She taught for decades without pay even after contributing vital research. She was forced to flee her home as Nazi forces purged Jewish academics.

required courses and no examinations in Germany, for example. Students were largely free to take whatever courses interested them and even to roam among universities; teachers had to compete for their attention.
The arrangement also reminds us of the class distinctions that were built into the system. Only those with private means could afford to be privatdozents, as the course fees were not enough to live on. While in some sense a meritocracy with a degree of academic freedom that would be unfamiliar in, say, the United States (even more so in recent years, the German university was also an elitist club.
The battle for Nother's habilitation echoed Klein's battle to bring Hilbert to Göttingen, with the baton now passed from Klein to Hilbert, although Klein remained in the race throughout. The differences in attitudes between professors in the humanities and the sciences would soon drive an official division: the faculties would formally split into two schools as a result of a series of conflicts, including those around Noether's habilitation. As might have been predicted, the faction that had opposed Hilbert's hiring at Göttingen would be the lead opposition against Noether's habilitation. The scientists and mathematicians would be dubious about allowing a woman to teach but would be more open to making an exception.
And an exception is what it would have to be. To avoid alarming the faculty and the Ministry of Education, Nother's supporters framed their request to allow Noether to habilitate as a request for a rare exception to the rule and most assuredly not as a request to change the rule itself. They were not asking that the doors be opened to female teachers.
They were arguing that Nother's singular talents and importance to mathematics made it imperative that she be allowed to teach.
The first try at habilitation occurred in July 1915.2 With Klein's and Hilbert's encouragement, Noether sent her recent paper "Fields and Systems of Rational Functions" to the Mat…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

4/6 the problem. This is a simplification but basically: Newtonian physics works over short spans. But space-time is curved and you have to account for that over astronomical distances. This is not in the book, but it reminded me of Iowa’s attempt to have perfectly square counties. So close.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

2/ @astrokatie.com: “Noether’s theorem is to theoretical physics what natural selection is to biology.” Her work paved the way for things as varied as quantum computing and the calculation of planetary orbits. She personally helped Einstein with the trickier bits of the math he needed.

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of the operating system, which lies beneath any number of application programs. Therefore the theorem cannot tell us what the sequel to the standard model is, but it can show us where to look.
According to astrophysicist Katie Mack, "Noether's theorem is to theoretical physics what natural selection is to biology "2 And some biologists are beginning to find insight in the theorem for their science.
I admire Mack's formulation. It perfectly captures how Noether's theorem sits underneath all of physics as an organizing principle that can inform us about what a reasonable theory might look like, no matter the details of the phenomenology under study.
One application of the theorem to biology is in the concept of scale symmetry. A system has scale symmetry if it looks the same at different scales. As you zoom in, the system remains unchanged.
Imagine sitting far above a planet and observing its continents with their jagged coastlines separated by seas, oceans, land bridges, canals, and so forth. Now imagine diving down for a closer look. You zero in on the edge of one of the continents, and after a while, you see a pattern that looks familiar: a set of land masses with jagged coastlines, separated by various bodies of water, land bridges, and so forth. You might think of these land masses as islands rather than continents. But at least on this planet, the pattern is eerily familiar. You've gotten closer, but everything
looks the same.
Now imagine diving down to take a closer look at one of these islands and discovering the same patte…

Einstein's Tutor
"force" is replaced by the properties of a curved space-time. The curvature of space-time is determined by the mass and energy-momentum contained within it. And here's where it gets really complicated: the curvature causes things to move, which in turn changes the curvature.
Also, the curvature of space-time itself contains its own contribution to the energy-momentum. This intricate interdependence is what makes the gravitational equations so hard to solve. The energy-momentum and the space-time curvature exist in a nonlinear relationship, each creating the other. In the pithy formulation of physicist and gravity expert John Wheeler, "Space-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to curve." It took someone with the mathematical talents of an Emmy Noether to untangle this web.
Noether had broken through Hilbert's wall. She was able to show Klein and Hilbert that they were not as confused as they might have thought. They hadn't been able to find a local energy law, because there could not be one.
By proving its exact equivalence with the symmetry of time translation, Noether's theorem serves as the definition of energy, a concept that, until
* tended to attract ad hoc and imprecise descriptions. sey was a Turkish mathematician and physicist who car-damental research in mathematical physics on the applica-
16 According

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

🧵1/6 Really enjoyed this @badphysicist.bsky.social book about a mathematician and her influential work. (Thank you @dingdingpeng.the100.ci for recommending!) A few highlights: #booksky #astronomy

Book cover for Einstein’s tutor: the story of Emily Noether and the invention of modern physics by Lee Phillips

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

This dataset features 26 different versions of "Philadelphia." The city of Brotherly Love. And... spell check.

Many ways of spelling Philadelphia in a dataset

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I could not believe how incredibly low it is and this picture is from January!

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Save this chart for the family reunion, things will be less confusing. Essentially: you go by your closest relative. For example Kid III and Child III are 2nd cousins as they share great-grandparents. Kid III and Child IV are 2nd cousins once removed. “Removed” just means different generation.

Chart showing how to tell apart cousin relationships. Siblings share parents. Cousins share grandparents. Second cousins share great-grandparents, etc.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

7/14 Plus, if San Diego had a net international migration of -74.7% in 2025, and immigrants were taking other people’s rentals, then why did average overall rent stay pretty flat from $2,261 in January of 2025 to $2,266 in May of 2026? (based on the numbers they cited)

Text says Rents in major metro areas have dropped significantly from their Biden-era peaks. In many cities, these declines mean hundreds of dollars back into family budgets every month — relief that was impossible under policies that flooded communities with millions of new arrivals.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

4/ But the biggest immigration surge (which they link to as well) is in 2023 and 2024: In fact, the number of immigrants was lowest in 2021 exactly when rents rose the most. www.census.gov/newsroom/blo...

Estimates of Foreign-born immigration and benchmark data by categories 2015-2025

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

3/ The biggest problem with this press release is that it’s comparing two different things. According to the numbers that they link to, the biggest rent growth was in 2021 and 2022: www.apartmentlist.com/research/nat...

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

2/14 This White House press release claims lower rent is a product of its immigration policy. But... is it?

Text says [EXTERNAL] President Trump Drives Down Rents by Ending Open Borders Disaster

Good afternoon,

President Donald J. Trump’s decisive enforcement of America’s immigration laws is producing real results for hardworking families — including the nation’s 46 million renters. Rents are falling sharply across the country for the first time in years as the record surge in illegal immigration has been reversed.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

From the #IRE26 "Mining the Epstein Files" panel: @jkbjournalist.bsky.social: Case started 2006. 2007 lead prosecutor later quit & met w/ Epstein on friendly terms. Even now I get at least one email/week from potential victims. Epstein abused them first, then they were abused by the Justice system

Picture from panel "Mining the Epstein files" at the 2026 Investigative Reporters and editor's conference. From left to right: Khadeeja Safdar
Enterprise Reporter, The Wall Street Journal, Steve Eder
Investigative Reporter, The New York Times, Julie K Brown
Investigative Reporter, The Miami Herald

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

The Smithsonian museums are open until 11 PM this weekend! Yesterday we walked ~5.5 miles around DC & saw: 🕺 Hamilton’s outfit. Okay Hamilton’s Broadway outfit 📰 Ben Franklin’s printing press 🐑 the original Lamb Chop puppet 🌙 moon rocks 🏒Miracle gloves 🤠 and a whole lot more #IRE26

Picture outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History along with the Washington Monument and the moon

In front of Ben Franklin’s first printing press with Telemundo coworkers

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

6/7 They have the paper cutter of the Baltimore Afro-American, one of the most widely circulated black newspapers on the East Coast. John H. Murphy Sr., a formerly enslaved person, founded the paper in 1892 and they used this machine to trim stacks of papers for 70 years.

Picture of the paper cutter of the Baltimore Afro-American.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

5/7 They had quite a few excerpts from Provincial Freedom, edited by the first African American woman to publish and edit a newspaper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary.

Picture of Mary Ann Shadd Cary and where she published

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