Just one more week to visit the interactive House of Melo exhibit at the Enoch Pratt Free Library Central Branch! Celebrate Baltimore's own Carmelo Anthony, his storied basketball career and his lasting impact on the city and the game. The exhibit is open through January 16. https://loom.ly/mz0yfd0

Any Baltimoreans know where I can get this wallpaper? (Seen in Catalog Coffee)

arxiv.org/abs/2601.02484 Yes, it's that Schwartz -- QFT textbook author -- writing a paper wherein "All calculations, numerical analysis, and manuscript preparation were performed by Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, working under physicist supervision."

🚀 The Roman Research Nexus is now LIVE! 🚀 A new cloud-based platform built to help the community prepare for—and fully exploit—data taken with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. A thread 🧵 1/5 #AAS247 #RomanResearchNexus #Nexus #NexusLaunch 🔭☄️

Timeline cleanse except instead of a cat it's the fact that there exists a city in New Mexico named Truth or Consequences. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_o...

Well that certainly was a Ravens–Steelers game.

In a study following 23 million people age 18-59 (pretty young) for 4 years…despite the fact that the ones who got the COVID vaccine were overall older and sicker at baseline, they not only had 74% lower risk of dying from COVID than the unvaccinated but 25% lower risk of dying from any other cause!

Seriously, don't do this. Not a good look when my first thought is "whoa they have four first author papers" and then I have to correct that with "wait no, they have one first author paper and three in prep."

To include some numbers here, StackOverflow in Dec 2025 had 3862 new questions. The last time SO had this few questions was in *Aug 2008*, the first full month that SO was in operations! In its peak month (March 2014), SO had 207,493 new questions!

the life and death of Stack overflow Data from data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflo...

Make America War Pigs Again

Maybe your 2026 resolution should be to move to Baltimore

"Now What?" by John J Hopfield is a beautiful read for researchers at all career stages, and especially so for those who wish not to simply solve problems, but rather identify and solve a PROBLEM -- a kind of the deepest question. pni.princeton.edu/sites/g/file...

For their anti-immigrant, white nationalist post about 100 million deportations, DHS stole the artwork of a non-white foreigner: Japanese illustrator Hiroshi Nagai. Apparently no white Americans were available to design an image. View Nagai's work here: hiroshinagai.com/contents.html

Here's a really easy New Year's Resolution: If you're sick with something contagious, you will stay home if your circumstances allow. If you can't stay home, you will mask around others until there is no possibility you are contagious. By making these choices, you will literally save lives.

“The federal government spent $7.6 trillion in the first 11 months of calendar year 2025, approximately $248 billion higher by November of 2025 compared to the same month in 2024,” [the Cato Institute] report said.

From @noirlabastro.bsky.social: This image reveals details in the outskirts of the Orion Nebula. The white-blue spots are clouds of gaseous iron ‘bullets’ being propelled at supersonic speeds from a region of massive star formation. #astronomy 📷: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA

this is what the internet is for

Finally saw Sinners. 8.5/10 Incredible film; acting, soundtrack, screenwriting, all extraordinarily directed and executed. Subversive, touching, and comedic at just the right times.

astro-software-lore.org/article/STSc... Some juicy #AstroSci Python lore! H/t to Karl Gordon for sharing this.

Reposting with alt text because I felt it too important no to share

The next edition of the NLP+CSS will be at ACL 2026! It includes an open-ended shared task (work with the Opioid Industry Documents Archive) with travel grants as prizes!

arxiv.org/abs/2512.14575 A useful paper to raise whenever people rehash arguments from 2022 about how LLMs are stochastic parrots and can't do anything new or facilitate discovery. New proof of an open problem in mathematics

What you have to understand about millennials is that we grew up with "Head On: apply directly to the forehead" and we've never recovered from that

In my case, this painstaking labor in the process through which the science gets done. Science isn't measuring stuff in a lab. It's thinking deeply, extracting the heart of idea from the soup of thoughts running through my mind, molding it, and finding a way to communicate that idea to others.

Jenny Wong-Leung [...] warns that the findings show democratic nations risk losing “hard-won, long-term advantages in cutting-edge science and research” in a range of essential sectors [.] www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Flu A this year is wild. Schools in Baltimore are half empty. Both my kids and I have/had 104-105 fever. Take care of yourselves out there!

The anti-Semitic mass shooting in Australia will cause a national conversation and policy change. We know this because the 1996 Port Arthur massacre led to significant restrictions on guns. The shooting at Brown will do nothing. We know this because it occurred on the anniversary of Sandy Hook.

First snowy day in Baltimore!

arxiv.org/abs/2512.09174 New satellites in a compact dwarf group, discovered in HI, down to 10^6 M_HI/M_sun. Very interesting to study these satellite systems surrounding LMC-like hosts!

I love when people train transformers to do math problems, because the outcomes illustrated so succinctly how transformers identify patterns and where and why they are making mistakes

Garamond, Baskerville, and Nunito semibold.

I'm happy to report that "Scenario 2" won't be necessary, as NASA has just communicated to us that SciX funding will continue in 2026 (albeit at a reduced level). Therefore, we will not be forcing astronomers to leave ADS, but rather develop a plan that allows a longer transition.

In the era of LLMs, what does learning look like? What happens when are overconfident in our understanding due to AI sycophancy? Is it even useful to use LLMs for education without outsourcing our thinking? New blog post: jwuphysics.github.io/blog/2025/12...

In the era of LLMs, what does learning look like? What happens when are overconfident in our understanding due to AI sycophancy? Is it even useful to use LLMs for education without outsourcing our thinking? New blog post: jwuphysics.github.io/blog/2025/12...

Ever wished that galaxy spectral energy distribution fitting actually made use of galaxy morphology? See the ML4PS paper/poster led by Mikaeel Yunus at NeurIPS tomorrow! Also check out the paper on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2512.05078!

A note on learning physics ⚛️ for starting PhD students: At the risk of saying something completely useless because everyone has it worked out There is no magic trick, your classmates *may* be faster than you, but they are still studying as long as they need to and you are quite capable of the same

Ken Liu's The Literomancer just about broke me

1/ 🌀 New paper alert! We introduce Dingo-T1, a flexible transformer-based deep learning model for gravitational-wave (GW) data analysis. It adapts to different detector & frequency settings, improving inference efficiency and flexibility 🚀 #AI #MachineLearning #Physics #Astronomy #AcademicSky

How do people productively use Discord for collaborations? It's pure chaos to me. Am I just old?

actually gemini is kinda good

AI + Lean proof of a version of Erdos problem #124. NOT the full solution, which has evaded mathematicians for 30 years, but an impressive and elegant proof nonetheless. www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread...

Okay so now Lidl also has holiday drip? I'm intrigued

Headed to NeurIPS just for the workshops; give me a shout if you want to chat and you're interested in scientific ML/AI and interpretability!

Out of curiosity I decided to try and run the numbers on how much Netflix you can watch for the energy cost of a ChatGPT prompt As far as I can tell it's between 5.1 and 10.2 seconds, depending on which end of the 2019 IEA Netflix energy usage estimate you use simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/29/...

Why support Baltimore Beat? Because Baltimore deserves journalism that doesn't ignore us.https://support.baltimorebeat.com/page/NEIGHBORHOOD

A thread of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that look like record covers... because that's EXACTLY what the world needs 1. Huey Lewis and the News: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Heroic effort by Joe Burrow for making the Ravens turn the ball over 5 times today

Ugh I had such high hopes for this book but it had disappointed me at every turn. Honestly makes me scared to talk to science journalists...