Every time I use a shampoo vacuum, I come away impressed with how much dirt can be invisibly stored in carpet

Very soon we're going to need thoughtful and impactful legislation on AI that properly weighs both the huge promise (and already existing utility) and the huge potential harms to many areas of human endeavor and society Doesn't feel like our political system is up to that task...

Preliminary assessment, but dreadful

1/ New preprint: "Cool windows: simultaneously engineering high visible transparency and strong solar rejection", led by Yeonghoon Jin arxiv.org/abs/2603.03771 💡🧪 The goal was to design window films that are highly transparent across the visible but reduce solar heating as much as possible

Good analysis and reporting on the Anthropic/DoD/DoW/OpenAI thing www.understandingai.org/p/the-pentag... Comes from Timothy Lee's excellent and measured newsletter (to which I subscribe, but this post is freely available anyway)

Always a bit disappointing when a proposal gets the highest possible evaluation but still not awarded.. Fortunately this one was very small, so not much harm done

I am going to write this up in excruciating detail on my Substack on Friday, but here's my working outline of the argument for now. SCOTUS, tariffs, IEEPA, and the legislative veto: we're all looking for the guy who did this... blog.mattglassman.net/the-court-th...

National Science Board meeting starts in 20 mins—I'll try to follow along and do some live coverage. Open session will discuss merit review and changes to agency management/decision-making.

Is there any headline that ends in a question mark that doesn't follow Betteridge's law?

Is there an econ term for something valuable, but that can't be realistically bought/sold because the moment it is sold, it loses a ton of value (due to the value being from authenticity / credibility / independence) That's what we need an open social network to be, and bluesky is a good shot at it

Well, it took 10 months, but I'm glad the Supreme Court agrees

LLM-based models/agents need much better functionality to explicitly credit their knowledge/thinking/code/etc I know it's far from trivial for something baked into the model vs explicitly accessed via a search call, but I wish more time and attention was spent on figuring this out

It's a combination of the chaos at the federal level and an expanding range of university responsibilities due to becoming more senior + senior folks retiring... ...but, over the last year, I've done way less science and mentorship than I would've want to, and way more admin/budgeting/proposals

Apparently the forecast for tonight is between 0 and 12 inches of snow, which is quite the range

Create a what?

I'm on a faculty search committee this year, somehow for the first time in my career It's a ton of work!

Breakfast phase diagram based on the fun idea by @moultano.bsky.social

You can place pancakes, crepes, and scrambled eggs on a simplex where the variables are the ratios between milk, eggs, and flour, (with another small axis for baking soda.) We have explored too little of this manifold. More breakfasts can exist than we have known.

Highly anecdotal, but: Starting to hear some people getting their NSF CAREERS selected for award (not yet through the contracting process though) Haven't heard about any other NSF proposals being selected, yet

Arrived in the US 30 years to the day 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Today has already been a wake-up-early-and-start-emailing-from-bed kind of day

This is the first time that I’ve seen an actual, mechanistic explanation for how the shingles vaccine may protect against dementia. Very interesting! If you’re in your 50s, definitely get your vaccine. profbubak.substack.com/p/how-the-sh...

I am worried that the multitasking and context switching takes away a lot of the benefit, but it's still fun to have claude code whirring away in the background as I do other work

Apparently Bruker sells an FTIR specifically for analyzing wine "quickly analyzes must, fermenting must, and finished wine in one easy measurement" www.bruker.com/en/products-...

Just recently became aware of these cuts to physics research in the UK. Sigh www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Got a few of these now from Wiley, doesn't seem to be a one-off bug Feels like a very odd decision from these journals?

I follow one of my favorite pickle-makers on linkedin, and occasionally see awards they win for their pickles. A nice diversion

Our little cluster of optics & photonics researchers

Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs xkcd.com/3204/

The mobile email app shows "99+" for the number of unread emails Which is quaint, give that the actual number is 5167

No gerrymandering >> both sides gerrymander >> one side gerrymanders There is no hypocrisy in strongly preferring no gerrymandering overall (a collective-action problem that can be solved by national legislation), but also preferring that both sides gerrymanders to one side gerrymandering

Hearing a bit more news about federal funding gears turning, now that there's a budget Haven't heard anything on my own submissions so far, but good to see some overall movement

It's remarkable how extra bureaucracy/process slows down work, how much extra mental overhead it can add... and even smart, well-meaning administrators don't see it I think it's because if you're steeped in the process, you don't see the mental overhead needed for a non-admin to understand it

Long shot, but we just found a big black Labrador (?) with no collar Parkwood hills neighborhood in Madison, WI If you know of someone missing their dog please let me know

An ad about ads (and lack thereof), but honestly very funny

I don't understand why windows file management is still so bad that you need third-party tools to do things like.. search quickly, or find the biggest files and folders

By tomorrow, a grant proposal will have been pending one full year. Hoping that things will start moving now that there's a proper budget

For a little while it looked like bluesky was starting to gain users, but now it is back to treading water bskycharts.edavis.dev/bluesky-year...

Raynaud's in a very cold winter is a pain, but heated mittens (mittens, not gloves) address like 2/3rds of the problem

The only times I look at prices of precious metals is when I need to budget or buy some for research, and... wtf?

UW-Madison apparently has a measles case and they sent out an all-campus email essentially initiating contact tracing (explicitly listing potential exposures places and times) I don't think I even saw this level of detail during covid

A little besides the point in yesterday's special election in texas, but it really sucks that the political equilibrium is to carve our district shapes like this for partisan gain

Our dog has a strong and quite consistent personality (with limited agency), but it's pretty different from what we would consider a human personality.. anthropomorphizing doesn't quite work even though it's very tempting I wonder how long before you can have such a discussion about AI agents

This is sad www.nbclosangeles.com/entertainmen...

If you are applying to a faculty position in a highly selective search, I would recommend making sure you correctly spell the name of the university to which you are applying

Due to pile driving right next to our building, my office is shaking so much that I feel like I am in a massage chair I don't want to know what is happening to my equipment in the lab.....

Without commenting on the new OpenAI tool (haven't tried) or the underlying post, I think "load-bearing frictions" have been important across the board, and are under a lot of strain now Detailed description of experiment, detailed email, long reference letter, etc -- all convey care & effort

I don't understand the point of the doomsday clock (these days) Basically just saying, "the vibes, they are bad", no?

Between this and blocking faculty from assigning readings from Plato, Texas is seriously risking the reputations of its excellent public universities..

Haven't seen a clear outline of what departments have been funded already vs what is awaiting (and therefore could be part of a partial gov't shutdown starting Jan 30) This is the primary source: www.congress.gov/crs-appropri... Organize and formatted with the help of claude + checked by eye