A. Leistra
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aleistra.bsky.social
A. Leistra
@aleistra.bsky.social
250 followers 290 following 230 posts
Queer, data scientist, recovering astronomer, general geek. She/her.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by A. Leistra
williamthomas.bsky.social
The Democrats on the House Science Committee have set up a website to collect stories from fired federal employees, anonymously if desired democrats-science.house.gov/sciencefirings
Were you fired by President Trump? | House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
democrats-science.house.gov
February 18, 2025 at 11:09 PM
aleistra.bsky.social
I've been finding the feeds here incredibly useful for minimizing doomscrolling. Skip Following and go for birds or astronomy or Star Trek. I can engage with stuff that brings joy without the unrelenting immersion in the disaster that is the world today
February 7, 2025 at 11:54 PM
aleistra.bsky.social
Dolly Parton.
brendelbored.bsky.social Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · Jan 23
If they looked you square in the eye and said without a hint of humor or irony “fuck you, I will never respect you”, which celebrity would it hurt the most to hear it from?
January 23, 2025 at 11:44 PM
Reposted by A. Leistra
blueinkalchemist.bsky.social
Happy Hogswatch, my friends.
December 24, 2024 at 5:48 PM
Reposted by A. Leistra
oliviawaite.com
Mine was opted in and I *definitely* wouldn’t have chosen this — chronology is what makes conversations comprehensible and I scorn whoever made this change
acab.dad John Breen @acab.dad · Nov 29
Fwiw, go check your settings. There’s a good chance you were “opted in” to this new sorting by default
hypervisible.blacksky.app Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · Nov 29
Why are companies like this.
November 29, 2024 at 8:33 PM
Reposted by A. Leistra
sarahedo.bsky.social
💻 Remember, if you're on a Mac, you can clean up your desktop by having screenshots sent to another folder:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location whatever-the-pwd-of-folder-is

(then do killall SystemUIServer)
November 25, 2024 at 12:38 AM
Reposted by A. Leistra
clairewillett.bsky.social
lots of new followers today so I’m bumping this petition! 6,607 right now, would love to get to 7500 by Monday. it’s fuck Nancy Mace o’clock this weekend
The people who make women's restrooms unsafe are people like Nancy Mace, who are banking on the silent complicity of other cisgender women to support the lie that the majority of us feel safer and more comfortable with trans people pushed out of our spaces. The end goal of trans bathroom bans is not limited to who uses which bathroom; it is a way to test the public's compliance with eradicating trans and nonbinary people from public spaces altogether. In the wake of the recent presidential election loss, it seems clear that it is also a test of the moral backbone of the Democratic Party, and whether we will choose to abandon our progressive values for the sake of expedience and permit more Nex Benedicts to suffer.
November 24, 2024 at 4:43 AM
Reposted by A. Leistra
democracyblue.bsky.social
November 23, 2024 at 2:34 PM
Reposted by A. Leistra
maxberger.bsky.social
Update: We’re up to about 64 members of Congress, including 14 Senators, on Bluesky.

One notable addition: @repraskin.bsky.social.

We’re still waiting on Schumer, Bernie, and Warren. But, lots of progress!

go.bsky.app/F78vyQi
November 21, 2024 at 1:13 PM
Reposted by A. Leistra
petridishes.bsky.social
I guess it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president wapo.st/3UqHWRM
The Washington Post is not bothering to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and the founder and executive chairman of Amazon and Amazon Web Services, also owns The Post.) We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president. It is time we got back to those “roots,” I’m told! Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean, and certainly there were no Post subscribers. But if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them. Let me tell you something. I am having a baby (It’s a boy!), and he is expected on Jan. 6, 2025 (It’s a … Proud Boy?). This is either slightly funny or not at all funny. This whole election, I have been lurching around, increasingly heavily pregnant, nauseated, unwieldy, full of the commingled hopes and terrors that come every time you are on the verge of introducing a new person to the world. Well, that world will look very different, depending on the outcome of November’s election, and I care which world my kid gets born into. I also live here myself. And I happen to care about the people who are already here, in this world. Come to think of it, I have a lot of reasons for caring how the election goes. I think it should be obvious that this is not an election for sitting out. The case for Donald Trump is “I erroneously think the economy used to be better? I know that he has made many ominous-sounding threats about mass deportations, going after his political enemies, shutting down the speech of those who disagree with him (especially media outlets), and that he wants to make things worse for almost every category of person — people with wombs, immigrants, transgender people, journalists, protesters, people of color — but … maybe he’ll forget.” “But maybe he’ll forget” is not enough to hang a country on! Embarrassingly enough, I like this country. But everything good about it has been the product of centuries of people who had no reason to hope for better but chose to believe that better things were possible, clawing their way uphill — protesting, marching, voting, and, yes, doing the work of journalism — to build this fragile thing called democracy. But to be fragile is not the same as to be perishable, as G.K. Chesterton wrote. Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it. Trust is like that, too, as newspapers know. I’m just a humor columnist. I only know what’s happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there’s no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear. That’s what our readers deserve and expect: that we are saying what we really think, reporting what we really see; that if we think Trump should not return to the White House and Harris would make a fine president, we’re going to be able to say so. That’s why I, the humor columnist, am endorsing Kamala Harris by myself!
October 26, 2024 at 10:50 PM
Reposted by A. Leistra
rahaeli.bsky.social
Reskeet if you are in the United States and are, in fact, like "oh my gosh, I will die if I don't have health care" politicalwire.com/2024/10/17/b...
Bonus Quote of the Day
“No one in the United States is like ‘Oh my gosh, I will die if I don’t have health care.'"-- Virginia U.S. Senate candidate Hung Cao (R), in an interview.
politicalwire.com
October 18, 2024 at 10:44 PM
aleistra.bsky.social
Universal screening for dyslexia in first grade, and training all public school teachers in how to teach dyslexic kids
checkwithscience.com 𝕁: Ask your doctor if Abolishing the Senate is right for you! @checkwithscience.com · Oct 5
what offbeat but actually useful cause would you hurl your money at if you were an eccentric billionaire
tft.io James Felix Black @tft.io · Oct 4
And I would also rewild the Great Plains. That’s at least a crackpot idea commensurate with the scale of the billionaire problem.
October 5, 2024 at 9:44 PM
aleistra.bsky.social
Apparently it's National Poetry Day. My choice is also by Ford: reactormag.com/sonnet-again... . Read the first couple comments for the origin story.
October 3, 2024 at 10:51 PM
Reposted by A. Leistra
matociquala.bsky.social
Happy 100th birthday to Jimmy Carter. I hope he gets his wish to vote for Harris.

wapo.st/4emzjQf
As Jimmy Carter nears 100, he is buoyed by Harris’s run for president
As Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday approaches on Oct. 1, he is talking more and delighting in the momentum behind Vice President Kamala Harris, his family said.
wapo.st
October 1, 2024 at 11:16 AM
aleistra.bsky.social
Truth.
Chalkboard sign reading "Me: This escape room is hard. Friend: This is a bookstore" with an arrow pointing to a bookstore
September 16, 2024 at 11:43 PM
aleistra.bsky.social
Screenshot showing my Bluesky user number (about 1,100,000).
September 16, 2024 at 11:41 PM
aleistra.bsky.social
If you see this, post egrets: 🪶
Two Great Egrets (large white wading birds), one with wispy breeding plumes, and four Roseate Spoonbills (pink and white wading birds) nesting in a tree
September 12, 2024 at 2:09 AM
aleistra.bsky.social
Somehow when Kiddo wanted to watch the Simpsons tonight I forgot that James Earl Jones read The Raven on the original Treehouse of Horror (S2E3) so I'm reminding all of you instead.
September 12, 2024 at 2:01 AM
aleistra.bsky.social
I am "still somewhat surprised when I clean out my pen cup and find gigabytes" years old.
A 16GB microSD card on a fingertip.
June 5, 2024 at 12:56 PM
Reposted by A. Leistra
wintersweet.bsky.social
Apologies to Garry Trudeau and the gods of typography

#uspol
an edit of the Doonesbury cartoon about Watergate figure former US Attorney General John Mitchell, except this time it says "Guilty!" 34 times
May 30, 2024 at 9:36 PM
Reposted by A. Leistra
stsci.edu
Jane Rigby, NASA senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, will be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The 19 recipients will be awarded the medals at a ceremony in the White House later today. 🔭 🧪
Biden to award Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19, including Pelosi and Ledecky
President Biden will give the nation’s highest civilian honor Friday to former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh a...
www.washingtonpost.com
May 3, 2024 at 1:19 PM
aleistra.bsky.social
Ran into a great example of Simpson's Paradox at work. Explaining it to non-technical people is really tough - there really don't seem to be any natural examples for them to compare with.
April 26, 2024 at 7:48 PM
Reposted by A. Leistra
purrinink.bsky.social
🐈‍⬛🖤
February 8, 2024 at 2:01 PM
aleistra.bsky.social
Very funny, birdiegame.
A close up view of a prickly pear cactus, with a small part of a bird with brown and white feathers perched on top.
December 4, 2023 at 12:29 PM
aleistra.bsky.social
Happy National Pie for Breakfast Day!
November 24, 2023 at 3:53 PM