That looks clean! Nice

Paper title and abstract for "Kaon decay constraints on vector bosons coupled to non-conserved currents".

Some feynman diagrams of kaon decays to two pions and a new boson, X.

New paper out on using precise measurements of kaon decays to constrain new bosons coupling to quarks and decaying to e+e- pairs. This is relevant for explanations of the X17 nuclear anomalies, which we find are in even more tension with the kaon factory data! 🧪⚛️

arxiv.org/abs/2602.19479

This would fit right in with the Zuckerberg and Thiel interviews. Also, reading "the beach" as Death Stranding's beach somehow makes for a better metaphysical context

What are your thoughts on reducing military spending to better fund welfare, public services etc. as a policy stance? Do you see this stance having better or worse political traction than others to improve the welfare state?

Economist points out the risk to innovation re: patents, but without any cost-benefit discussion, coupled with some very tone deaf comments on fairness. An example retort to this shallow reproach would be this cost-benefit analysis by Jacobin on capital flight risk:

jacobin.com/2025/12/mamd...

These books have never been more relevant YouTube video by Ryan Holiday

Found @ryan-holiday.bsky.social 's channel, I love what he's doing to get more people reading: youtu.be/rK6mwUSAp6Y

Vote with your wallets

Figure 4. 68% CL ellipses for CKM pairs, showing the PDG prior (red) and the baseline fit (blue). The bottom-right panel shows the correlation matrix of the complete fit and the ratio σ/σ1p between the 1-parameter and the global precision.

Pretty awesome look into CKM measurements from the neutrino lighthouse at a future #muoncollider
🧪⚛️

Lots of details inside:

arxiv.org/abs/2511.23288

I want to read more about instanton actions and effective couplings in QCD, GR and in general, any good references?

There are many seminal papers, though I found a few longer review-style works so far:
arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9...
arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0...

Caught this in Rogers Park!

Google scholar has a PDF reader with some nice features - in-browser text highlighting was just added, and it has a dark mode

100 million particle moose dropped on a right-angled wedge YouTube video by Alexander Gustafsson

What I watch on a Friday night instead of Netflix www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG0i...

It’s a great moment to celebrate milestones at CFS — in more ways than one. Today we announced we’re done manufacturing one of our key magnets and putting it through a rigorous, month-long battery of performance tests — which it passed. 1/4

#PowerMoves

TIL if dealing with

(huge_number - huge_number2)

which can lead to machine precision noise in python computing, while mpmath can help a lot, sometimes just doing

(huge_number.astype('float64') - huge_number2.astype('float64'))

does the job more elegantly!

Absolomb

listening to a banger open.spotify.com/track/49fTxU...

Graph Theory in State-Space YouTube video by 2swap

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGLN...

We've *gotta* revive this as a pet name for future colliders

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perhaps...

After >2 years, it's finally out!

Coffee and paper review

Toying around with some iNSPIRE API - trying to make a bubblemap of activity by subfield (counting papers with keyword in title by institution over the past 15 years)

Image of an optical module that was part of the STRAW apparatus. The module is shown clean shortly after deployment in 2018 (a.). An amount of buildup is visible in the 2020 survey (b.). The final 2023 survey shows a developed macro-fouling population, composed primarily of hydroids (c.)

Cool ocean science work on "biofouling" for the Pacific One Neutrino Experiment :) 🧪⚛️

arxiv.org/abs/2507.09086

Just got back from a visit underground at SURF, where we also heard a little about SABRE. Reminds me of this t-shirt:

Right there with ya Tao 😭
Though as Patrick put it, correlation != causation here, so the numbers shouldn't really change what we do or make us pessimistic - I think we keep writing good papers, talk to people, and apply anyways!

Absolutely, this is a mix of lots of career stages though I was more interested in cut-offs than the high h-index tail. And I think there is a bit of conditional probability here; I might feel less inclined to even apply if I have a low h-index / first postdoc

A histogram of number of faculty shortlists and faculty offers binned by citation count for papers with 10 authors or less, for 2024-2025 data.

A similar effect shows up in citation counts > 500. I've heard that committes don't necessarily impose hard cut-offs, but numbers obviously help to make your case. Perhaps the more optimistic thing I can draw from all this is that you don't need to hit these numbers to get shortlisted.

A histogram of number of faculty shortlists and faculty offers binned by paper count for papers with 10 authors or less, for 2024-2025 data.

Less so is the bias for high paper counts, although no offers were made to candidates with N(papers) < 17

A histogram of number of faculty shortlists and faculty offers binned by author h-index for papers with 10 authors or less, for 2024-2025 data.

Do metrics matter?

Some interesting statistics on faculty hires in hep-ph/th in the past two years, sourced from the rumor mill and inSPIRE data. For instance, there is a clear bias in offers to higher h-index ~ 15

Thanks for saying this part out loud, it's nice to know these practices are appreciated by others!

[W190] Adrian Thompson: The Terrestrial Neutrino Lighthouse YouTube video by lawphysics

I will give a talk on #neutrinos from a #muoncollider and electroweak precision on Lawphysics this morning:
www.youtube.com/live/_fd6w7o...
🧪⚛️

Diagram of the Earth’s core, with an example dark matter density profile superimposed. The solid-liquid boundary at 1200 km is the boundary between the inner core and outer core, while a radius of 400 km is where the seismic data we use loses sensitivity to the core’s structure (see text for details). Dashed arrows denote heat flow away from the center of the Earth.

Fun paper I noticed last night by Chris Cappiello and Tansu Daylan :D

Can a Dark Inferno Melt Earth's Core?
arxiv.org/abs/2505.24070