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.
Matt Reece
@mreece.bsky.social
physicist, obsessed with axions. Boston resident. never had a twitter or a mastodon, but here I am, inexplicably.
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.
StreetsblogMASS@mass.streetsblog.org · 2w agoA public records request reveals how @mayorwu.boston.gov's election-year "review" of transportation projects created a duplicate layer of authority inside City Hall that fomented confusion and stalled urgent safety initiatives: mass.streetsblog.org/2026/07/22/f...
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.
mr. TIM@timkellogg.me · 2w agothe Dinitz-Garg-Goemans conjecture, a graph theory problem that’s gone unsolved for 30 years, was solved with this prompt
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."
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
Stand up for Science
Stand up for Science
zurl.co
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.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH — An open letter to Mayor Wu on street safety
Boston has been warned for years that delayed street-safety projects would cost lives. Read and sign the open letter.
benjaminsiegel.github.io
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.
Chris Geidner@chrisgeidner.bsky.social · last mo.BREAKING: The Supreme Court holds that the Fourteenth Amendment protects birthright citizenship, blocking Donald Trump's executive order to end it. Roberts has the opinion for the court, which is 5-4 on the constitutional question and 6-3 on whether federal law protects birthright citizenship.
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
The War on Cars@thewaroncars.bsky.social · last mo."The report calls for hood height caps of 85 cm (33.5 inches), width limits of 192 cm (75.6 inches), taxes tied to vehicle dimensions, parking fees based on size, and regulatory incentives reserved for smaller EVs measuring less than 4.2 meters (165.4 inches) long."
The three branches of the United States government, as delineated in the Constitution, are the God Emperor, The High Council of the Six Ayatollahs, and the Federal Reserve
What's wrong with the physics arxiv today? @arxiv.bsky.social The arXiv website shows no new papers in any physics category, but the InspireHEP database does (search, e.g., "find primarch hep-th"). For a resource as widely used as arXiv, there really should be some kind of status announcement....
“Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice … in the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York.” —Félix Guattari, 1989
I feel especially great about Brad Lander's whole trajectory through the mayoral campaign to where things stand now. A real win for menschism.
Relatedly: let me advertise my newest paper, which may have been buried in today's extra-long arxiv listing. We provide more evidence for a claim I've been making for a few years, that the discovery of an axion could be a clue about the fundamental energy scale of quantum gravity.
Quantum Gravity Cutoff from Axions: A Type IIB Landscape Study
Extra-dimensional axions have coupling strength related to fundamental, ultraviolet physics. It has been proposed that the properties of such axions imply a bound on the quantum gravity cutoff: $Λ_\ma...
arxiv.org
Matt Reece@mreece.bsky.social · last mo.A student brought me the perfect gift: an authentic box of "AXION."
A student brought me the perfect gift: an authentic box of "AXION."
Good work, South Enders! (I'm out of town at the moment, so a bit disappointed to miss this, which was filmed in the closest thing I have to a back yard.)
Paul@pawlbologna.bsky.social · 2mo agoI have received video of Seth Moulton being loudly booed at Boston Pride.
Taxing the rich: it's good. #mapoli www.raiseupma.org/news/dor-fai...
DOR: Fair Share Revenue Up 20% Over First 10 Months of FY26, Already Exceeding $3 Billion — Raise Up Massachusetts
Tax on Million-Dollar Earners Continues to Exceed Revenue Projections, Proving Fears of Millionaire Flight False BOSTON – The State Department of Revenue yesterday certified that Massachusetts...
raiseupma.org
My colleagues overwhelmingly voted to restrict our own academic freedom by capping the number of A's for undergrads in a class. I sometimes teach advanced grad classes where maybe 6 of the 20 students are undergrads, and all do spectacularly well. I don't know what will happen to such classes now.