Folks, I'm pleased to be promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure at @CUBoulder, just days before my 36th birthday! An immeasurable thank you to my colleague Jamie Nagle, and to our post-docs, grad students, and undergrads for taking a chance on a new junior faculty!

My dog, whenever he hears the special word

Folks, I’m getting very credible information from industry sources that ASI (All-night Sleeping Intelligence) is close to being achieved internally in the nursery. We must reject all calls to pace the frontier — think of the parent-sleep-hours at stake!!!

I was in high school when 9/11 happened. In the weeks that followed, two facts became very clear to me: (1) Evil exists — not “blowback”, not “chickens coming home to roost”. Evil. (2) Open, liberal Western civilization has enemies who want very badly to pervert and dismember it. And later, over a period of years: (3) there are people whose political philosophies prevent them processing (1) and (2).

4 year old: 🎵 I’m bringing home a baby bumble bee / won’t my mama be so proud of me 🎵 me: aw what a nice song, I wonder how the rest of it goes

Very funny to me how baby bottle design has essentially been Solved. There is the end result of all technological innovation. We have found the deep global minimum and are now Done.

Extremely interesting data here on possible trajectories in public higher education (where I'm tenured faculty). The research flagship (UIUC) and the university located in the big dynamic city (UIC) prosper, and another 3-4 can muddle through. But the bottom half are all headed to zero. The question is how much will this generalize (i.e. how strong are the IL-specific factors?)

Side by side threads on Boulder-area @nextdoor this week: * People lamenting the closing/merging of multiple K-12 schools, forced by decreasing enrollment in the district * White-hot shrieking about the attempt to develop one (1) dilapidated parking lot

My four-year old discovered optical illusions yesterday and we looked at a bunch of them. I love the unrelenting novelty of childhood. On any given day, you can encounter a totally novel concept completely outside your previous experience. And this happens constantly, for years.

People have rightly commented how even recent sci-fi feels outdated and goofy in the modern LLM era. But I still find it funny when older sci-fi works could imagine the complete transformation of human technology, biology, society, culture… just not the end of the Soviet Union.

Proportionally scaling the food consumption and weight gain of a baby up to a full grown human is very funny. As a 200lb man, you would have to: * drink half a gallon of whole milk * every few hours * 24/7, for months * and by doing so, gain 10lbs every week

Here is my most polite and diplomatic take on certain elements of the breastfeeding support "industry" — Infant chiropractors, craniosacral therapists, and tongue tie evangelists are predatory frauds who should be launched directly into a supermassive black hole at light speed

Me: I already know all the tricks from the first kid, how hard could this be the second time around Also me (at 3am, delirious while changing diapers, softly to the tune of a Jay-Z song): we doing … big pooping, P. O. O. P. … we doing … big pooping up in NYC

Here is my official guide to AI use in academic research: Anybody who uses AI slightly more than me is doing cognitive offloading and has AI psychosis Anybody who uses AI slightly less than me can't relate to their students and will never get a grant again Hope that helps!

I have GOT to turn off cross-conversation memory

I love the future. Trapped under baby #2 while on the night shift -> decide to poke around Electron-Ion Collider ePIC experiment physics simulations with Claude Code via "Remote Control" on my phone -> file PR to fix a (small) calorimeter reconstruction issue. 🚀🤖⚛️

I'm pleased that the experimental nuclear physics group at @CUBoulder is on two project teams selected for funding through the Genesis Mission. Genesis is @ENERGY's national initiative to integrate AI into (transformative and durable) scientific discovery. Accelerate!! 🚀🤖⚛️

We are very pleased to tell you about the birth of our second child. Mother and baby are both doing well. In my 40 years on this planet I have encountered nothing, and I mean nothing, as profoundly transformative as the creation of new life. Our relationships to other human beings are the richest and most interesting aspects of our lives. My wife has magnificently changed and expanded mine. Our eldest had already pseudonymized his little brother as "Baby Ice Cream" in the womb, so that's what I'll call him on social media. 👶🍦 Ad astra, ad astra, ad astra. 💫💫💫

We are very fortunate to have two recent Ph.D. defenses in our @CUBoulder Experimental Nuclear Physics Group group. Congratulations to Dr. Dan Lis and Dr. Joey Clement, for their thesis work on the @BrookhavenLab sPHENIX Experiment under the direction of my colleague Jamie Nagle! These young scientists helped build and operate a new collider detector, and then go on to personally produce some of the first physics results - a rare and impressive accomplishment.

I ran my second-ever half-marathon, ten minutes faster than my first one. Woohoo! 🏃 It was very hot, though. 🥵 This concludes my 2026 running season...

Along with 50,000 others, I ran the BOLDERBoulder 10k race on Memorial Day. The finish line is on the big screen in the @CUBoulder football stadium. 🏃‍♂️ Shaved 9 whole minutes (!!!) off my 10k time from the BOLDERBoulder few years ago -- yes, I'm aware I'm still very slow compared to the "real" runners. 🤣