Julia Milton
Working on telescopes, quantum sensing, and disaster response. UMich and MIT alum. Views my own.
- I can’t tell the difference between the “best dressed” and the “worst dressed” at any Met Gala, and I’m tired of pretending I can
- Watching architectural digest videos of people who keep saying that spending leisure time with friends and family in their $12M house is what life is all about, and why isn’t everyone embracing the meaning of life like that? Well for starters, we are indentured to the department of education,
- Reposted by Julia MiltonNo surprise that Trump’s proposed NASA budget aligns perfectly with Musk’s interests, not the public good. We would never have gotten to the moon or be talking about Mars without NASA’s science mission — and should not let Trump/Musk jeopardize America’s future leadership.
- I have a strongly held belief that society at large is lying to me about dreading jury duty. You DON’T want paid time off work to investigate a mystery? Come on.
- would you enter the shoe cavern
- Reposted by Julia Milton
- I’m part of a team at JPL that is building the first quantum sensor for measuring gravity from space. It will use ultra-cold clouds of rubidium atoms, laser cooled to temperatures where they behave like waves, to measure the gravity gradient of Earth. science.nasa.gov/directorates...
- Pleased to report that the used car dealership/ kebab skewer-making facility near my house has expanded its operations and is now also a late night shisha cafe
- This is an unmitigated foreign policy disaster
- Reposted by Julia MiltonNOAA just announced a long list of datasets that are going away🧪⚒️🌊: www.nesdis.noaa.gov/about/docume... Download what you need asap and send comments to: ncei.info@noaa.gov
- Academic institutions have their endowments in part to weather rainy days, and it’s pouring. “What point is there in having a massive endowment if it requires your school to become some sort of state-approved adjunct?”
- Direct subsidies to our oligarch in chief to build a “subscription model” of missile defense is crazy work. www.reuters.com/business/aer...
- Every time I go to the doctor I am reminded of my status as a microcelebrity at the local teaching hospital for almost dying of a medieval disease in 2022… blessed
- 36,000 people in LA today standing up to oligarchy and authoritarianism.
- The proposed budget that the administration may be able to force into reality if the federal budgeting process is delayed would destroy science at NASA. Me and 1000s of others would lose our jobs and our life’s work. An extinction event for space science in the US. arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...
- When you remember mid-transatlantic voyage that you forgot to carry Madame Zeroni up the mountain and now you and your family are cursed for always and eternity
- It’s not “reducing wasteful federal spending”. It’s eviscerating key functions of our government so that they can be privatized in short order by oligarchs.
- Pitbull’s reign as Mr. Worldwide constitutes an illegitimate regime, as he promoted himself to that position without a mandate from the people after being Mr 305 (basically city councilman) without any experience at the regional, state, or national levels. In this essay I will
- Thinking about the random man who slid into my DMs once via a GitHub pull request on an open source tutorial I made on MCMC… hope you’re doing well king
- Labor unions representing federal employees (including NASA) have filed suit for a temporary restraining order against OPM. A hearing is set for 3 pm ET. The suit seeks to block the firings of civil servants - which are supposed to be carried out by end of day. www.courtlistener.com/docket/69634...
- Firing civil servants and dismantling the functions of government isn’t returning power to the people. It’s re-consolidating this power in the hands of a few oligarchs with zero public accountability. Your tax dollars are still getting spent, but now the people who use them don’t work for you.
- Los Angeles urban planners: we are going to make our extensive highway system out of not asphalt, but grey concrete that turns into a reflective slip-and-slide in the rain. But the lane markers? Well, the lane markers we will make a shade of grey indistinguishable from the concrete
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- 1776: we’re making a system of checks and balances to prevent another monarchy from acting without accountability 2025: our unelected god emperor is shutting down the public service because he needs more money for his personal rocket ship
- The world's richest man could end hunger. He "fed USAID through the wood chipper." He could cure disease. He cut cancer funding. He’s dismantling the public service to serve himself. Agencies should fight this with everything they have, complying easily now won't spare you later tinyurl.com/29xkajx5
- Reposted by Julia MiltonThis is what amounts to an ILLEGAL & indiscriminate funding cut for research centers everywhere. It will mean shuttering labs across the country, layoffs in red & blue states, and derailing lifesaving research on everything from cancer to opioid addiction. We all need to speak out to save lives.
- Student I tutor told me he found “a historical document from the last century”. It is a paper written in 1998.
- We downlinked optical data from over 11 million miles away at 42 Mbps, 10-100x faster than an RF system of comparable SWaP. The hybrid system enables future science missions to return vast amounts of data about our universe via high speed optical link, and critical telemetry over the stable RF link.
- They said MAN could not live on bread alone. They did not say woman.
- "Our odds of finding life elsewhere are increasing". Samples returned from asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission contain amino acids and ancient brines, indicating conditions for life were present across much of the early Solar System. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/s...
- I’m staying in a zero-indexed hotel. The lobby is the zeroth floor. Rare and deeply unsettling. Most hotels in the US are one-indexed (the correct indexing)
- Thinking about M87 - a black hole that is larger than our solar system, 70 times larger than the fictional supermassive black hole Gargantua in Interstellar - and the fact that they could only take a picture of it by using a telescope array effectively the size of the whole Earth.
- Giving a presentation this afternoon at SPIE Photonics West on our hybrid RF/ Optical ground station, which demonstrated the first ever co-located, simultaneous RF and laser communications by downlinking data (cat videos) from Psyche's DSOC payload in deep space. Come by!
- Reposted by Julia MiltonIf you’re a federal employee, you should know this is a lie. Congress hasn’t appropriated these monies and so it’s literally not there to be spent. Also, federal agencies are limited by law to a max $25K payout in the case of restructuring.
- BREAKING 🚨 🚨 🚨 President Donald Trump's administration is set to offer every single federal worker the chance to take a "deferred resignation" with a severance package of roughly eight months of pay and benefits. www.nbcnews.com/politics/whi...
- Parking garage guy said he’d be right back with my car and then turned around and just ascended?
- Man approached me on the street in a way that was alarming but thankfully he was not trying to rob or harass me but, rather, the common third option: to attempt to sell me a live dungeness crab. Just goes to show
- i love vermont but its the season of the sticks and i sawr gyer mawm she forgot that i exis
- Halting new grants and loans that support universities, public labs, and other non-commercial research - while continuing to issue new contracts to private firms - blatantly undermines the science and research capabilities of the public sector and funnels the money straight into corporate interests.
- Learning a decent amount of Turkish from soap operas about the Ottoman sultans, but all I can say is stuff like "my janissaries grow restless to march upon Vienna" and "prepare the fleet"
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- Reposted by Julia MiltonHere's an e-mail that just went out to NASA agency wide. 🔭
