James

Paper day! arxiv.org/abs/2610.31860 There was a paper 18 years ago suggesting that other civilizations might deliberately modulate the pulsations of their periodic host stars to encode a signal as a beacon. In this paper I thoroughly test that idea by improving the physics & looking for candidates.

It probably won't shock you to find that I come up empty: no beacons are detected with any statistical significance. IMO, this idea from Learned was a pretty interesting one that warranted a deeper study, and we never know if we don't look! Might as well spend some of our braincells on such things.

Paper day! arxiv.org/abs/2610.31860 There was a paper 18 years ago suggesting that other civilizations might deliberately modulate the pulsations of their periodic host stars to encode a signal as a beacon. In this paper I thoroughly test that idea by improving the physics & looking for candidates.

My dad was a DJ in Paris in the 60s at a famous nightclub. There are a number of books about the place that are hard to find, written in French. I wanted to translate them but didn't want to take pictures of every page one by one. Thus I created piffler, the page riffler: github.com/guillochon/p...

Pretty simple to use: take a video of yourself flipping page by page through the book you wish to digitize (spending ~1s per spread). Then, pass that video into piffler and...voila! An OCR'd PDF of the book. The code itself does not use an LLM, all traditional image processing algorithms.

The new "green" white dwarf really fascinated my kids, and in that same paper they note that there are WDs that are other exotic colors. Here's what those colors look like.

For a decade now I have been maintaining a Google Spreadsheet tracking Physics GRE/application fees. This sheet was curated by hand by me; it was always dependent on folks sending me information via e-mail. Today I am officially migrating that effort to a new site gre.astrocrash.net

The site now uses AI agents to validate the info in the rows, while still also relying upon the community to provide policy updates (especially in cases where the visible policy online does not match department policy). I am still in the loop on edits, but this removes a ton of tedium for me.

My wife bought a set of food containers of different sizes, so of course I’ve been playing with Matryoshka nesting doll sequences this weekend: guillochon.github.io/matryoshka-s... Interestingly I think only the trivial case is noted in the OEIS; there’s a number of variants that are unexplored.

Been tackling OEIS sequences the past several days. There are ~400k sequences now, so finding the ones to go after is tricky. So I built a graph visualization of all of the nodes/relations using Cosmos. Really impressive software, ~60fps on a massively complicated graph.

A very minor math breakthrough teaser: 38456, 2490634, 550112272

starseti.astrocrash.net I redid the search of Hippke/Learned from 10+ years ago for *all* variable stars from ZTF, ASAS-SN, TESS, and Kepler. I also redid the physics; my conclusion is that Cepheids (the orig. Cepheid Internet paper) are not feasible, but RR-Lyrae stars are. Civs need to be ~KII.

I run a bunch of processing on these stars in stages to try and filter out astrophysical or instrumental issues that could mimic a real signal, including the beating signals Hippke originally associated with the Kepler RR Lyrae they studied. I also try to extract binary sequences from modulation.

I'm convinced that progress on mathematically adjacent scientific publications will be *dominated* by AI, starting roughly now with the release of Fable 5.1. This includes astronomy, physics, etc. It runs absolute circles in speed and accuracy around any human.