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mellosouls

Better to use non-gated sites, plenty of coverage around eg.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/dark-energy-might-no...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/04/biggest-ever...

Etc

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They also found a better headline.

NYT's headline is sensationalistic in the sense that astronomers didn't get anything wrong. Ten years ago, when I was in grad school, all my group did was study models with a dynamic dark energy component because it was a very common opinion among cosmologists that LCDM won't be the final answer, even though it fit the data best, because there are theoretical problems with it. If there are no observations that rule out a cosmological constant, you cannot justify introducing new parameters, so what we did is trying to figure out if and by how much certain future surveys (we were focused mostly on Euclid) could see a difference between LCDM and your favorite dynamic dark energy model.

So while this is a very exciting development, it's not like astronomers world wide are now in despair that they got something wrong. I've been out of academia for a while now, but I bet it's a welcome and overdue change in our view on the universe.

Appreciated. NY Times, although not unique in this way, is not a link I'm clicking for astronomy news...

Speaking of the coverage of STEM stuff in NYT, here's another recent example.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/technology/prevent-cybera...

> His job involves developing a piece of open-source database software known as PostgreSQL, whose details would probably bore you to tears if I could explain them correctly, which I can’t.

Wow. Being proud of being ignorant is generally something I associate with modern MAGA republicans, not journalists. But then again, this is the NYTimes, a hotbed of nepotism over talent.

IMHO, that doesn't read like pride in ignorance. I suspect most NYTimes readers aren't looking for a deep dive on PostgreSQL internals, myself included. He does get into the context surrounding xz Utils and their relevance to the world at large a few paragraphs later.

> But a few weeks later, while running some more tests at home, he noticed that an application called SSH, which is used to log into computers remotely, was using more processing power than normal. He traced the issue to a set of data compression tools called xz Utils, and wondered if it was related to the earlier errors he’d seen.

> (Don’t worry if these names are Greek to you. All you really need to know is that these are all small pieces of the Linux operating system, which is probably the most important piece of open-source software in the world. The vast majority of the world’s servers — including those used by banks, hospitals, governments and Fortune 500 companies — run on Linux, which makes its security a matter of global importance.)

I think this does a good job to indicate the general level of his audience.

I don't read pride. I read honesty and humility.

I'm an engineer, I can't explain the cellular energy generation pathways in eukaryotes. Someone can, most of us would find it boring, and I can't explain it. I'm not proud of it, I just recognize my limits of my knowledge and don't pretend to know more.

You're an engineer, not a journalist. If you were a journalist and don't know how to write about something, learn. That would literally be your job.

Did the journalist not successfully write about the events that transpired? The goal of the piece is to document the event, not the software.

And certainly not an unrelated piece of software.

Then cut out all the baloney and stick to the facts. That's the problem with Gen-Z, you were never taught how to read a newspaper, just tweets and tiktoks. We're screwed.

Did you respond to the right comment? You seem way out of line for this thread.

I would offer instead that it is just cheap pandering to the reader while excusing the authors lack of qualifications.

Fair enough - newspaper coverage can only give so much detail.

But as a physicist and long-time reader I have come to really appreciate the high quality of the articles by this NYT reporter (Dennis Overbye) on physics and related disciplines.

I like that the Ars article has a nice historical explainer for those of us who don't follow universal expansion closely enough but enjoy reading the history again every so often. And good for sharing w/ the kids.

As usual, Ars Technica's coverage is much better. Thanks for the link!

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