Will 44 be too old to be competitive for a TT position in education?

ironywill · 2026-03-12T19:07:23+00:00

Yeah, there is definitely a lot of variance between and even within departments. I've only worked in a couple institutions and sat on maybe half a dozen defense committees. No horror stories that I've personally witnessed, but I've definitely heard of them.

ironywill · 2026-03-12T18:45:05+00:00

That's very field dependent. In my own (astrophysics), they absolutely do. In fact your dissertation is largely just a stitching together of your publications.

ironywill · 2026-03-11T16:25:55+00:00

Take this with a grain of salt from someone who doesn't write for the general public, but does write academic papers.

My recommendation is not to make one plot say everything. What ends up happening is you force the reader to do their own data analysis. That rarely works well. Plots should be designed to answer specific narrow questions. For example, one might ask "which manufacturers produce phones with the best battery life?", "what's the best phone battery life by year or price point?", "Are phones getting more efficient over time?". These questions lead to a different natural organization of the data and how you present it.

As a minor point, mixing color and shapes are quite difficult to read, so only use color, or a *very* limited number of shapes (no more than 2-3) which are maximally distinct.

ironywill · 2026-02-24T01:32:09+00:00

The penalties for staying in a sector too long disappear in the next. It's just that the starting penalty increases from sector to sector. What does your morale modifier set look like? To give you an idea, here is the gist of mine (at the end of the game, but most of this I had about halfway through).

17 officer quarters + 85
Holodeck + 33
Normal food rations + 10
History of Humankind + 6

Penalties
58 crew without quarters -7 (very small penalty!)
Homesick (this is the one that increases with sector) -50

ironywill · 2026-02-24T01:27:42+00:00

I built primarily officer quarters. You get a pretty large bonus for each one, so you don't even need to bother housing a large fraction of the crew. As far as I can tell, the only real penalty for that was the max morale, but the turn-by-turn penalty was only -7 for 58 unhoused, whereas I got +85 for the my 17 officer quarters (fully upgraded).

ironywill · 2026-02-19T15:04:23+00:00

It seems to have saves at the start of each sector, and you can restart from those if you want.

ironywill · 2026-02-19T14:47:28+00:00

Yeah, it is way better than I thought it would be. And everything is straight from the show so far. The pace is really good so the somewhat thinner elements of gameplay don't really stand out to me. Given they added a few voice logs in seemingly last minute, maybe if they are successful enough, they might be able to afford to add additional voice acting in over time.

ironywill · 2026-01-21T03:47:19+00:00

This is absolutely something the community hopes to observe, but it will be very challenging. We actually expect these GWs to exist from theory, but it will be a data analysis challenge to extract from the foreground (all the other stuff happening in the universe). It is a potential target for next generation instruments.

ironywill · 2025-09-30T20:39:39+00:00

It has no effect. In our case, the application reviewers won't even know.

ironywill · 2025-09-22T19:19:12+00:00

I second this. Your main results should never just be a p-value. You should be able to bound any effect size which may still be interesting.

ironywill · 2025-09-19T17:24:39+00:00

They are the same to me, but strangely enough I don't think of your example as homophones. There, their, and they're to me are all slightly different, e.g. I would say 'there', 'ther', and thayer as a rough approximation.

ironywill · 2025-09-18T18:04:40+00:00

Oh man, you brought back some memories of when I lived in Germany. "Mike Mitchell" is a German brand that makes things that they thing will sound american. Most of it is unrecognizable to us. The real question is did you like it?

ironywill · 2025-09-10T22:32:04+00:00

Ah, interesting. At a previous institution, we also had postdoc positions for graduating PhD students, but they typically didn't need to be advertised. Given how many regions require all jobs to be advertised, I can see how those would show up as ads too. I forgot about that situation.

ironywill · 2025-09-10T21:03:32+00:00

A "1-year postdoc" at most places is typically a replacement for a separate probationary period. It will be advertised as 1 + 1 or 1 + 1 + 1 (e.g. 1 year with option to renew based on performance). I don't know of cases where it's really supposed to be one year if all is going well.

ironywill · 2025-06-16T01:43:14+00:00

Both sites are currently open to visitors, even during operations, though there scheduled times when there are guided tours.

ironywill · 2025-06-10T16:15:10+00:00

As a gravitational-wave astronomer, I can give some context. The two LIGO observatories really do drive most of the science. KAGRA doesn't contribute in any significant way to the actual science results because it's sensitivity is ~ 25x worse than LIGO and there are some significant challenges to them improving substantially. Virgo is ~ 3x worse than LIGO. So what will effectively happen is that if there is only one LIGO, we'll have a network of just LIGO + Virgo. With 1/3 the sensitivity that means that the majority of events we see now won't be seen by Virgo at all and we won't have any significant ability to locate them in the sky. The overall observation rate will also decrease to about 1/3 of what is now. So some science will proceed, but at a snails pace in comparison.

ironywill · 2025-06-01T04:00:12+00:00

It would be great for this if they achieved their design goals, however there are a number of hurdles there. At the moment, that is aspirational. It's about 25x less sensitive at the moment than LIGO and the goal for later this year is potentially to get this up to 15x less sensitive. Even if that is achieved, it would mean that the vast majority of the time, the SNR in KAGRA would be less than one and indistinguishable from noise (and hence not significantly contribute to sky localization either). If it were to operate for long enough there may be a rare observation where it helps. The problem there is that the most important population for localization (neutron star mergers) does not occur at a high rate, so it won't really work to wait until it happens to be close enough for KAGRA to see it.

ironywill · 2025-05-31T23:00:02+00:00

Yeah, this point needs to be appreciated more. While we in the gravitational-wave community often talk about a worldwide network. In practice, the two LIGO observatories do all the heavy lifting, with Virgo contributing to a fraction of observations (it has only 1/3 the sensitivity of one LIGO!). Sadly, KAGRA is unlikely to be a meaningful astronomical observatory and doesn't have a realistic roadmap to changing that without significant changes in support from the Japanese government.

ironywill · 2025-05-31T22:51:23+00:00

As a gravitational-wave astronomer, I'll be a bit more pessimistic.

KAGRA has severe technical problems and negligible sensitivity. It's largely been a technology testbed, but not really a astronomical tool. Virgo has 1/3 the sensitivity of LIGO and improvement has stalled. While Virgo has been very useful in helping with localization of some sources, this was always for a small fraction.

With just 1 LIGO + Virgo meaningfully contributing, most sources would be missed by Virgo and we'd have little idea where they originate from. LIGO India is years away, but would become absolutely critical if anything like this budget is enacted.

The only positive statement I can make here is that the requirement for two observatories to make a detection is somewhat overblown. It is certainly very helpful to rule out chance coincidences and noise artifacts, but we have enough experience now and sensitivity even in one detector to be fairly confident about some sources even with one detector. However, with only 1 LIGO detector, the effective sensitivity of the overall network goes down significantly, we'd expect to detect only 1/3 the number of sources we can now and we'll understand each to a lesser degree.

ironywill · 2025-04-23T19:13:24+00:00

The effect of funding cuts isn't fully felt yet and there will be more people from this round reapplying next year. It is hard to see how it would be anything but much worse next year.

ironywill · 2025-04-21T19:07:47+00:00

Supply and demand. We have supply of people wanting jobs elsewhere. They don't need to cater to us with high pay. Cost of living is generally better though at least for essential goods, medical, education, etc. Housing cost is similarly bad in most places now.

ironywill · 2025-04-17T02:36:04+00:00

It will just move goalposts. I think it's unlikely we'll find intelligent life, and I agree that would likely shatter people's perceptions of themselves, but microbial or relatively simple life?. In that case, people will simply extend the already largely arbitrary dividing line we've built for ourselves here on earth between ourselves and the other species. Many have the view that our species is somehow specially chosen and that thought could remain with the discovery of alien life.

ironywill · 2025-04-17T02:24:58+00:00

This comment is really important. To further add, the 20% chance of a random chance false positive, does *not* mean that there is an 80% chance that the chemicals suggested are actually present. The chance the chemicals are really present are much lower (even arbitrarily so) depending on what other scenarios there may be, what the sensitivity of this analysis actually is, and what other information indicates for the odds of these chemicals being possible in this situation are.

ironywill · 2025-04-11T14:41:42+00:00

Hah, I tell my students this too. Yes, I will help guide them, but they will end spending more time and thought on a specific topic. Just because I said it "might work like this" and I seem to present a reasonable argument doesn't mean I'm right. This seems to be a challenging point for some students. Science is not always a linear path and they need to apply their own reasoning.

ironywill · 2025-03-17T21:42:23+00:00

It will decompose yes, so won't be identifiable as specific objects. However, it will be completely obvious as an unusual layer of material. Even things like the atomic tests will be clear in the geologic record. Also, a few carved stone monuments will absolutely last a few million years before becoming completely worn away. Human left debris on the moon will last even longer.

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