Matt Reece

We are now at 8 months of delay on NASA ROSES-2026 and in to a new US government fiscal year. There is still no update beyond "unknown" about the impacted programs. Yet again, USA: Require that Congress ensure NASA operate as it has ordered. And Jared Isaacman should not be NASA Administrator.

MA voting: no on 3 is particularly important, and I’m a bit worried it will go the wrong way. I agree with this entire list. (I think 6 should probably be a ‘no‘, but I don’t think it passing would be a catastrophe.)

Remember when NASA used to post a big annual call for proposals in many research areas, on a regular schedule? I wonder if that will ever happen again.

This gets at something that’s been bugging me about the discourse around AI/N-S/Tao, etc. A lot of people are converting to what’s effectively a Romantic Author vision where they sound like Captain Kirk talking about how computers can never Love, except about Originality, Judgment, or Understanding.

Dear train nerds of YouTube: please learn to pronounce "Fuxing" approximately correctly. Signed, the parents of a boy who really wants to watch videos about fast trains.

Boggling that Harvard invited all faculty and postdocs to attend a "masterclass" on how to use AI for academic writing, run by a guy with only a handful of publications but an extensive YouTube record of his wacky ideas about fractals, Buddha, and Jungian psychiatry.

One of my best footnotes: main text said “In some sense this is the frame that is maximally far from Einstein frame, but it is a very useful one; we can refer to it as the keinstein frame“, footnote read “Leaving no stone unturned in the pursuit of bad physics puns.” (In a 2015 paper with Wei Xue)

With Nick Rodd, Tracy Slatyer, & Linda Xu: possible tension with LZ and higgsinos arxiv.org/abs/2609.04175 If the LZ event is from a thermal higgsino, you would also expect events in the high-energy sideband, but LZ reports none. The collaboration can definitively check this with their acceptance.

To me, it seems plausible that the uncertainty in the high-speed tail leaves room to fit LZ while pushing delta above their bound. There is a definite tension, though. Escaping their bound requires appealing to very uncertain dark matter astrophysics.

I should follow up my thread from yesterday because of this paper that appeared tonight from Maxim Pospelov and Hari Ramani. They derive a new bound on higgsino dark matter from particles being captured in the Sun through the same inelastic scattering process we proposed at LZ.

Is this it? A single dot on a graph could be the first direct detection of a dark matter particle. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dark-matter-particle-wimp-lz-experiment

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope NASA launch went well! A month or so for it to settle to L2 and then commissioning, but another great space science launch!! Ahhhh!!!

I love the urgent inquiries my three-year-old comes up with to try to delay bedtime. Tonight's gem: "I don't know if Brisbane has water taxis."

I got a text telling me Maura Healey endorsed Nick Collins for state Senate, which is supposed to make me want to vote for him but somehow just lowers my already low opinion of both of them.

A theme here is that if a person inside city government intervenes on behalf of a restaurant losing parking spots or a random driver getting a parking ticket, that's seen as constituent services. If another government insider works on behalf of keeping people alive, that's seen as advocacy.

Today's talk from Gina Rameika at the Department of Energy at the APS DPF meeting made it clear that the US is completely abandoning any leadership, or even meaningful investment, in experimental particle physics. It's a complete disaster.

In 2015-ish, an official pre-tenure review from my department told me to do "a major breakthrough," so I can attest that telling a human this doesn't work at all. Luckily, as everyone reminds me, Harvard's tenure standards declined precipitously around the time I was hired, so I didn't lose my job.

3 out of 4 of this year's Fields medalists are foreigners who got their phD in the US and would have been impacted by these rules

Not for the first time I forgot the Red Line was shutting down, took the Orange Line downtown instead of the 1 bus to Harvard, and was confronted with the fact that the Red Line is somehow the only functional transit link from downtown to Cambridge.

My 3-year-old makes an inference consistent with all available data (i.e., Bluey books): "they don't wear clothes in Australia."

@boston.gov when?

Today is the final day you can leave a public comment on the OMB proposal that will destroy American science as we know it. Leave your comment at the link in our bio, or go here: zurl.co/1M9hH and register for our OMB Deadline Day meeting today at the link in our bio! Article: zurl.co/3LQxi

benjaminsiegel.github.io/enough-is-en... I've just signed this open letter to @mayorwu.boston.gov to resume the many stalled Safe Streets Projects across the City. I'm shaken and devastated by the death of Louisa Gag, cyclist and safe streets advocate.

Given the age range on bsky there must be a *lot* of us who keep having to stop and puzzle out that our feed isn't talking about the United States Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Iconic line from @stevevladeck.bsky.social here in response to Will Baude’s SCOTUS boosterism www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/o...

Donald Trump came one vote away from getting the Supreme Court to say that the 14th Amendment does not guarantee birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented and temporary immigrants, a view held only by fringe far-right nativists until VERY recently. This is shocking. I am stunned.

5-4 on reading plain English. This court must be destroyed.

Boston needs to recoup the damage massive passenger cars/trucks cause, both in deaths and road wear, by adding a weight component to our city car tax @wutrain.bsky.social @ruthzee.bsky.social @clrhenrysantana.bsky.social @edflynnforboston.bsky.social @enriquepepen.bsky.social