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Ethan Siegel Profile picture
Ethan Siegel
@StartsWithABang
"Some blogger who doesn’t even write a single paper in a decade." #Cosmology Science writer, astrophysicist, author, communicator. He/him or they/them.
Jun 30, 2022 • 22 tweets • 5 min read
Earlier this month, I traveled by air for the first time during the pandemic.

Even though I'm "healthy" by all accounts, I live with at least one highly vulnerable person, and it's very important to me to not bring #covid into my house.

Here's what I've learned since. 🧵

(1/n) First: if you're someone who cares about #covid safety, you will wear a mask every time you're indoors, period.

But not all masks are equal, and not all indoor environments are equally safe/dangerous.

I know you know this, but I'm going to go in depth here. Hang tight!

(2/n)
Jun 27, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
In 2020, in the USA:

1-out-of-4200 expectant mothers died from complications in childbirth.
For black women, that rose to 1-in-1800.
For women over 40, the number is 1-in-930.

Pregnant women need more reproductive freedoms and more protections, not more restrictions. (Source: cdc.gov/nchs/data/hest…
)
May 30, 2022 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Every time Memorial Day comes around, it makes me think about how lucky I am.
Lucky that I live in a country at a time where I didn't have to go and fight in a war. Lucky that military service was open to me, but optional for me.

Thread: 1/12 Lucky that I never had to go, scared but brave, into a kill-or-be-killed, high-pressure situation where some of my best friends wouldn't be coming back.
I've lived a life, so far, where I've gotten to choose a peaceful existence.

2/12
Feb 1, 2022 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
What I love about this animation, which maps out galaxy clusters in a large region of sky as a function of redshift/distance/lookback time, is that you can see the sponge-like large-scale structure, where clusters themselves are clustered together.

(Thread) For some of these clusters, they really are part of a larger structure. Due to gravity, they will eventually infall into one another, merging together to produce and even larger cluster.

For a long time, we thought that most clusters located near one another would do this.
(2/n)
Jul 27, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Hot take:

Avi Loeb, a plasma physicist, has made meaningful contributions in exactly two sub-fields:

-the first stars, which rely on plasmas,
-and the turbulent environments around black holes, which rely on plasmas.

He is otherwise a prolific, but low-quality scientist.

1/3 I started grad school in 2001 and first read a Loeb paper in 2002.

I was flabbergasted at how bad it was.

Like he was:
-outside of his field,
-didn't care about those in that field,
-and didn't do his most basic homework to find out.

Those who corrected him were ignored.

2/3
May 24, 2021 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
A little thread on the WSJ "bombshell" piece on three workers from the Wuhan Institute for Virology coming down with COVID-19-like-symptoms in November of 2019.

Is this a smoking gun for the "lab leak" conspiracy theory? No.

Is it right to keep calling it a conspiracy? Yes. 1/N Let me make a bold statement that I'm sure you'll have a field day with: this is "9/11 was an inside job" but for COVID-19.

(2/N)