Per the reconciled versions of the appropriations bills out of congress, science funding will almost remain flat from the previous year (very slight decrease, plus the inflation penalty) Not great, but still a big relief given what could have happened 🧪 cen.acs.org/policy/resea...

Learned that even more people have the flu Biiig wave

Test EDITED post (edited)

First edited post on bluesky?

I generally find it strange how little people seem to value... things they read being true and correct For people active online, there's a record of their takes/statements/predictions sometimes going back many years. Seems to be no correlation at all between a strong record + their reach

I regret to inform you all that the most-effective social network for academic scientists is LinkedIn, and has been for a while

1/ Second preprint of 2026: "Silicon-on-sapphire metasurfaces generate arrays of dark and bright traps for neutral atoms" arxiv.org/abs/2601.01038 💡🧪 We designed and fabricated metasurface from silicon-on-sapphire wafers, that convert a Gaussian beam into arrays of complex optical traps for atoms

Rewatched the beginning of Stranger Things and it's just a lot better than what it became by the end Gritty and earnest and nostalgic

The number of people I know with the flu is 😬 Makes me want to stay out of the office for a week

Reposting three optics tools/applets recently posted on my group website: katsgroup.ece.wisc.edu/tools (best viewed in desktop): 🧪💡 1. Unit converter for wavelength, etc., that names the wavelength range + shows color 2. Blackbody radiation calculator 3. Spectral distribution range comparator

We had one paper posted on arXiv today, and another one coming tomorrow. If we extrapolate this trend to the end of the year, I can retire

1/ New preprint: "Anti-reflection coatings for highly anisotropic materials in the mid infrared" arxiv.org/abs/2601.00558 💡🧪 We have been developing materials with some of the largest optical birefringence -- in some cases with Δn > 2 in the mid infrared. With a Δn, making AR coatings is nontrivial

My encyclopedias circa age 5-9, which I was sufficiently attached to that we lugged them across the Atlantic

Some thoughts about what types of feeds are missing on Bluesky

Found my dog on google streetview (on a walk), and google blurred out the tip of his nose like it does human faces

2026 is off to a rocky start, but on the flip side I did submit two preprints to arXiv

Already soiling the sterling reputation of the FIFA peace prize

Thanks to LLMs, my own artisan em dashes look cringe to me, and I don't like it

arXiv's explanation about why they ask for tex/latex source files is a little sassy info.arxiv.org/help/faq/why...

A few UV fluorescent organisms from an accidental night hike yesterday in the Oakland Hills. I’ll have an article out about UV Fluorescence in the SF Bay Area in the next issue of Bay Nature Magazine. #UVF #fluorescence

Gmail giving 1 Gb of free email storage when the norm at the time was like 20 Mb was an experience

It's just a bit of age, and not even that much, but it's a little weird to be able to vividly remember and having understood in real time a quarter century of history

Happy upcoming 2026 =)

Quarter century in the books, huh

The concept of pre-2023 text and images being valuable because they are untouched by generative AI is interesting and depressing Like pre-1945 steel, lead, glass, etc., pre-industrial ice cores (and air), old-growth timber What are other examples of valuable pre-contamination materials and items?

Driving a car with no backup camera in 2025 is kind of stressful-- I have lost a lot of that skill Wonder how quickly driving skills in general will go away with self-driving cars...

I'm assuming it doesn't make much financial sense for Samsung or whoever to spend time making a full-frame camera with all their computational imaging tricks, but it would be cool

I kind of don't feel like doing this over the holidays, but it's probably important that OSTP gets serious and thoughtful responses to this RFI So I'm working on it now. Deadline is tomorrow night

Manhattan from the air almost looks like a cartoon, it's so dense

🧪 ⚛️ There is a Request for Information from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy about how to advance the American scientific enterprise. The public comment period expires 12/26, so now's the time to have your say! nanoscale.blogspot.com/2025/12/publ...

Annoying that the first ship of this boondoggle is supposed to be named after the coolest ship in star trek

Hacks (on HBO) is very good

The Chiefs stadium is moving to Wyandotte County? Why? www.kansascity.com/news/local/a...

As a communication strategy, I feel like universities celebrating research expenditures is strange

Not great that Slack doesn't seem to have an export feature that also exports images/files/etc, even from public channels

I feel like I regularly miss Bluesky posts from people I follow and want to hear from, especially from very different time zones The Following feed is chronological, so time zones are an issue The Discover feed is for other things entirely There's a zoo of other feeds, all with deficiencies

The common garden snail is very impressive under black light. Seen on a neighborhood walk last night #UVfluorescence #snail #glow

My lingual bar (permanent metal retainer behind my bottom teeth) failed on Friday after 25 years of service Pretty impressive piece of engineering to last a quarter century

Cool thread. More people should do this kind of introspection (talking to myself as much as to anyone else)

Happy Winter Solstice! Beer can, pinhole camera photos of the Summer to Winter Solstice (2024) and the Winter to Summer Solstice (2025). You never know quite what you're going to get with these photos, set the beer can pointing towards the sun at hopefully the correct angle and wait 6 months!

I can imagine at least one buddy comedy and one romantic comedy based on the premise that two people who speak different languages become very close using real-time translation, and then for some reason the translation fails and they have to re-learn to understand each other

I genuinely do not have a theory of mind for someone with this little shame www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/u...

As someone working in #imaging and #optics, I have no notes. xkcd.com/3182/

I don't have much knowledge of our antitrust policies and practices, but the iRobot/Roomba bankruptcy is a bad outcome for the country and, as a result, my mental model is updating toward being more distrustful of antitrust efforts (For whatever that's worth, which is not very much)

Go to sleep to one mass shooting, wake up to another...

Damn, looks like a mass shooting at Brown www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

The lack of good US-made robot vacuums does not inspire confidence in our capacity to make drones or most other autonomous vehicles At least we have waymo

I can never remember what exactly chutney is -- all I can think of is chimney

I was on a DARPA project with a program officer who came from industry and didn't go to grad school One day the program officer told us that before working at DARPA, he thought universities were inefficient, but now was shocked at how much we and other university performers got done for so little $

NSF has an RFI out for a new initiative called "Tech Labs" 🧪 www.nsf.gov/news/nsf-ann...