• To be MAD or not to be MAD: problematic naming conventions in astronomy

    Last week’s blog post was entitled To be MAD or not to be MAD. In it, my colleague Doosoo Yoon did a good job of discussing two models used to describe the accretion disks of matter flowing onto a black hole. These models started a discussion in our research group meeting this week for a different reason: the names of the two models MAD and SANE are pretty ableist. As Doosoo pointed out, MAD stands for Magnetically Arrested Disk and SANE stands for Standard And Normal Evolution. Now the MAD model which was created first, about 20 years ago, has a simple acronym and is widely used in the astronomy…

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