The "paper" is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.06090 but its analysis is not really something that you'd get published in an astronomy journal [speaking as a former professional astronomer]

Very much agree, this is a fishing expedition where you can come to pretty much any conclusion.

1. the regions of sky that the signal might have come from are huge, and contain tons of stars. 2. he's basically just sifting through all the stars in a huge area of space and looking for ones with Sol like parameters.

That's not science, but that said, it doesn't mean we shouldn't have a look and listen at the star if it really is a great candidate.

When Kepler started returning data, so much of it was unexpected that at the very least now we have a star name that if future scientists are looking to compare their data set with other findings, they may see "oh this 2mass star was hypothesized to be the wow signal by a crank, but we just found X there!"

It's tricky of course, because it's hard for a normal person (I am assuming) to tell the difference between some dude who uploads a neat thing to arXiv and someone who stakes their career and livelihood on the science they produce.

Sorry to pry, but what does one do after a professional astronomy career?

You write Scala? (https://tpolecat.github.io)

In my case, I founded a company based on the algorithmic approaches I developed as an academic - www.blackfordanalysis.com

Folks who did their PhDs about the same time as me, and progressed through a couple of postdoc positions, are variously: science teachers, data scientists, product managers, quants, environmental analysts, software engineers, hardware engineers and industrial scientists.

In the UK, fewer than one in ten astronomers who take a first astronomy job post-PhD (usually called a postdoc) progress to a permanent faculty position. Those that do make the journey typically take about a decade and three to four fixed-term positions to get there.

All (two) of the astronomers I know became fat, lazy, well paid engineers with a wife, house and garden, picket fence, doing programming and engineering at a multinational company. Sigh, I had such high hopes.

Trick Soviet hackers into thinking your government lab is doing research on space based weapons.

From the labs I've worked in, I think the Russians would already know you weren't given the security of a lot of researchers' systems, maybe not national labs/NASA, but I even did some work at Goddard Space Flight Center and it was an ancient lab that definitely had live internet Ethernet wires here and there that systems were plugged into doing... stuff.

I did a lot of data processing, and about 1/4 of the year was grant proposals.

It's missing a link. The article directly references a paper, but gives no way to unambiguously locate it. That's not a source, it's an open invitation to research.