This statement is, I think, dangerously wrong: "costs can be saved by building fewer antennas or reducing computing power, for example. “Not all of those will kill science cases, but rather may delay them.”
Many parts of the SKA science case have already been watered down, but the PR continues unabated.
But if it is gutted further before construction gets underway its impact in critical areas used to justify its construction will be significantly and seriously diminished.
On top of that, the SKA leadership SHOULD have seen this coming. But when key people spoke in New Zealand in February we were repeatedly reassured that everything was on track.
Two different conclusions might follow from these facts, but neither of them smells good.
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Speaking as an astrophysicist, O'Connor is dead wrong here. Almost no astronomers regularly refer to the Pleiades with its Messier number; it's a double gotcha -- you think you have caught someone, but you've actually caught yourself...
The Messier catalogue was drawn up (surprise, surprise) by a guy called Messier (Charles Messier, in fact) in the 1770s. He loved hunting for comets, and comets are little fuzzy blobs in the sky. So he made a list of other little fuzzy blobs in the sky that are NOT comets /2
There are 100 or so "Messier objects" and they include most of the biggest little fuzzy blobs in the Northern half of the sky (he lived in France, remember). It includes objects ranging from star clusters like the Pleiades, a bunch of young, bright stars in our own galaxy /3
On top of everything else, many young people do not "choose" conversion therapy, they have it forced upon them, and it does real harm. By skating over this, Elers has critically misrepresented the issue.
I have a deep commitment to academic freedom, but for me this raises issues of competence as much as content. Elers' column goes out of its way to mock a young person who has taken a public stance on a challenging topic
I'll use my academic freedom to say that I find this sort of drive-by (he could have made whatever point he has without bagging an individual whose comments received little prominence) combined with a misrepresentation of the facts to be at odds with the duty of care...
The smoke from a continent scale fire disaster has crossed the sea -- New Zealand Twitter is flooded with images of orange skies above the South Island, and the smoke shows clearly in this view from space... 1/N