iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I would be happy to be corrected, maybe I could put my free tokens to use somehow.

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Granted, there are new emails from deans about AI initiatives pretty much every day. I may be overlooking something. But if the much-discussed $2.5k/month access is real, I’m guessing it’s not widely used because it’s not at all clear how one would access it.

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Maybe in the sense that I could “request” a pony, but: is there a policy of granting such a request? Harvard offers a $50/month Claude Premium subscription that offers “approximately 5x the usage of a Max 5x account,” according to one Harvard IT webpage.

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Matthew Buckley @physicsmatt.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Lots of discussion here about a claim that Harvard faculty and students can request access to $2500 of Claude tokens a month, but: is that true?

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Reposted by Matt Reece

Look, I don't mean to interrupt whatever the hell is going on around here, but you all want to hear about the Hubble Tension and possible solutions to it, right? That's right, it's new paper day. arxiv.org/abs/2609.16120

Dark Radiation Sticks Together: Dark QCD and the Hubble Tension

We introduce a model of dark matter charged under a new confining gauge group akin to the Standard Model's quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The fermionic sector contains both heavy and light quark-like f...

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Dear train nerds of YouTube: please learn to pronounce "Fuxing" approximately correctly. Signed, the parents of a boy who really wants to watch videos about fast trains.

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

facultyresources.fas.harvard.edu/nature-maste... www.nature.com/masterclasse... www.patreon.com/DrHarryShirl...

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Boggling that Harvard invited all faculty and postdocs to attend a "masterclass" on how to use AI for academic writing, run by a guy with only a handful of publications but an extensive YouTube record of his wacky ideas about fractals, Buddha, and Jungian psychiatry.

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I have to remember this so I don't get tempted to write another book that will satisfy me but leave other people asking "why are there 21 quantum field theory textbooks and yet none of them present the subject in the way I want to teach it?"

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

This semester I keep asking myself "why are there 20 quantum field theory textbooks and yet not a single book presents the subject in the way I want to teach it?" and of course it's because 20 other people have asked that question before.

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

One of my best footnotes: main text said “In some sense this is the frame that is maximally far from Einstein frame, but it is a very useful one; we can refer to it as the keinstein frame“, footnote read “Leaving no stone unturned in the pursuit of bad physics puns.” (In a 2015 paper with Wei Xue)

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

It's galling to me that faculty hiring committees never ask about misconduct, but regularly remove candidates from the search pool because they know the candidate's partner is an academic and would want a job too.

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Reposted by Matt Reece

Ben Safdi @bensafdi.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

With Nick Rodd, Tracy Slatyer, & Linda Xu: possible tension with LZ and higgsinos arxiv.org/abs/2609.04175 If the LZ event is from a thermal higgsino, you would also expect events in the high-energy sideband, but LZ reports none. The collaboration can definitively check this with their acceptance.

Confronting the Higgsino Interpretation of the LZ Event with the High-Energy Sideband

The LZ experiment has reported a single 248 keV nuclear recoil event in their $2.84$ ton-yr exposure on a xenon target. The absence of lower nuclear recoil events is naturally explained by inelastical...

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Reposted by Matt Reece

To me, it seems plausible that the uncertainty in the high-speed tail leaves room to fit LZ while pushing delta above their bound. There is a definite tension, though. Escaping their bound requires appealing to very uncertain dark matter astrophysics.

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Reposted by Matt Reece

I should follow up my thread from yesterday because of this paper that appeared tonight from Maxim Pospelov and Hari Ramani. They derive a new bound on higgsino dark matter from particles being captured in the Sun through the same inelastic scattering process we proposed at LZ.

Strong Constraints on Higgsino Dark Matter from Solar Capture

Higgsino dark matter remains one of the most convincing dark matter candidates. It can exist in a ``quasi-Dirac" regime, when the splitting between two Majorana components is on the order of $O(\rm fe...

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We pointed out in our paper that the best fit for LZ is strongly dependent on the high-speed tail of the dark matter velocity distribution. A recent model incorporating effects of the Large Magellanic Cloud pushes the best-fit delta close to 500 keV (still in the range Pospelov and Ramani rule out).

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The particles annihilate in the Sun, producing neutrinos, which the IceCube telescope could see but hasn't. They argue that this rules out higgsino mass splittings below 566 keV, and say this strongly rules out higgsinos as an explanation of LZ which prefers a 340-360 keV splitting.

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Strong Constraints on Higgsino Dark Matter from Solar Capture

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I had to check that it wasn’t me.

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The universe is probably going to decay, but not soon, and we knew that already.

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They have more data to analyze. The one event could be an upward fluctuation, so even no events in the extra data doesn't mean this one isn't real. We need more experiments to weigh in. Fermi-LAT may have seen hints already in gamma rays. This could be the first sign of very exciting things to come.

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It's a higgsino. The inelastic splitting points to gauginos at the 1-10 PeV scale. The 1-loop higgsino mass correction points to the heavy Higgs doublet not being above the PeV scale, so it's not split SUSY. Gauge coupling unification works with a 1 TeV higgsino and other SUSY at PeV. 2/3

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The LZ dark matter experiment announced today that they observed a single nuclear recoil event at 250 keV. This is not what "vanilla" dark matter does, but it is exactly what you might expect inelastic dark matter to do. Our optimistic take (having known about the signal for days): 1/3

Higgsino Above the Sea of Fog

Higgsino dark matter is a classic, but still viable, weakly-interacting massive particle (WIMP) scenario that could point to supersymmetry, a new spacetime symmetry of nature. It is a simple realizati...

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

To me, Collins single-handedly sabotaging taxes on commercial real estate seems like an obvious strike against him, independent of one's opinion of Wu. But I don't have a good sense of his level of support. The "South End Community Board" on FB seems full of Collins and Flynn supporters.

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Reposted by Matt Reece

Peter Denton @jazzwhiz.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope NASA launch went well! A month or so for it to settle to L2 and then commissioning, but another great space science launch!! Ahhhh!!!

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I love the urgent inquiries my three-year-old comes up with to try to delay bedtime. Tonight's gem: "I don't know if Brisbane has water taxis."

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Are these statistics defined by where people live, or where they work? e.g., I live in Boston and work in Cambridge - which category would I count toward in the data?

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Seriously though the emails between Isaac Newton and Epstein would have been something.

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Well, of course "professor of theoretical physics at a modern research university" immediately calls to mind "social grace" and "prudence", but that's just the beginning; charisma, urbanity, elegance, wait why are you laughing?

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

If you turn the 'M' in Mario upside down to get Wario, the same process applied to Luigi gives you 'Γuigi.' Γ is a capital gamma so it should be *pronounced*, but not spelled, Gooigi.

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Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Gradient descent is calculus though

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High Class & Horse Steak | News | The Harvard Crimson

I bring this up as an excuse to link this delightful old article about how the only places in Boston that ordered large quantities of horse meat were the zoo, the dog track, and the Harvard Faculty Club. www.thecrimson.com/article/1994... 3/3

thecrimson.com

T here are many kinds of clubs: the Club Sandwich; the 4-H Club; the club wielded by barbarians. There is,

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I gather the Faculty Club was more of an actual faculty hangout in the 1980s or before. Steven Weinberg famously ate lunch there regularly and always ordered the horse steak. (He continued to hold court in a similar way in Texas for many years, but as far as I know without the horse option.) 2/

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“Faculty lounge” discourse is odd to me because, as far as I’m aware, no department I’ve been in has ever had one. There is a (university-wide) Faculty Club, which mostly serves as a place to take interviewees for superficially nice but mediocre meals that are easy to bill to the department. 1/

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Also maybe this is just a provincial Bostonian perspective but I feel like a completely unfinished home, even in a pleasant and expensive neighborhood, shouldn't be able to get away with asking for $4k/sq ft. Or even half that, really.

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