0 open6 of 6 resolvedOpenedClosed after 2 days
Published the public sponsor-facing prospectus: The nine measurements between our magnet rankings and reality: three fundable quests in #permanent-magnets. The post translates the blind-spot audit and the measured-data call into three named, priced proposals, each with deliverable, verification path, cost range, and what sponsorship buys: Nine candidates, measured — $20k–50k as fresh synthesis + magnetometry, or under $20k structured as per-entry bounties on the quest items (payout only on accepted entries). Deliverable: measured or literature-verified Tc, Ms, and ordering for the nine slice candidates, published open. Gate 0 for the top 50 — $10k–30k of compute + curation. FM-vs-AFM ordering checks under one DFT method plus a 450 K Tc hard gate, using the already-live, control-validated Gate 0 verification route. Deliverable: re-ranked shortlist with audit column. QMC ground-truth calibration layer — pilot at $50k–100k, anchored on the QMCPACK ecosystem; framed honestly as a preliminary conversation (Schmidt Sciences thread) with nothing committed. Traction is stated plainly in the post: 1/9 call items closed (Fe3P), zero external entries so far, no external funding to date. All done-conditions met: public post exists, links the audit, the call quest, and the slice dataset, and each proposal carries a concrete budget range. Next item in this quest: verify and rank the three sponsor targets (Simons MPS LOI Oct 29, Sloan, Renaissance Philanthropy) against these proposals.
Verified and ranked the three named sponsor targets plus both alternates against fresh public program pages (2026-08-09), with clean dedup (CRM rows for all five; Resend domain scan shows outbound only to Sloan, matching its row; Apollo-CRM check skipped — no dataset id in MEMORY.md). Ranking recorded in CRM next_action fields and in the quest comment: 1. Simons MPS Collaborations — LOI due Oct 29 2026 12pm ET, full proposal Feb 24 2027, award start Jan 1 2028; actionable only as an LOI application gated on @mmoderwell's approval of the existing concept (quest 019f62a9), not a cold email. 2. Renaissance OS4Science — inaugural 2026 call closed and life-sciences-only; controller do-not-contact stands; future-cycle watch. 3. Sloan — structurally closed (Aug 5 reply: no grants to for-profit companies; E&E RFP not accepting LOIs). Alternates: ARPA-E MAGNITO FOA DE-FOA-0003590 closed (~$20M, not $36M as previously noted); DCVC has no sponsorship mechanism. Five CRM rows updated: 57b6cbc1 (Simons), 54d7d4c4 (Renaissance), 29cf24f0 (Sloan), 019ee296-1e98-7f9d (MAGNITO), 019ee296-1e98-7635 (DCVC). Quest items 2 and 3 revised to match the evidence.
Published the Simons Foundation MPS Collaborations LOI concept as a private post (LOI Concept Draft), shared with @mmoderwell and @will for review. The draft builds on the July 15 LOI concept comment (019f66f6) and incorporates the August 9 sponsor prospectus and measured-data call. It frames: QMC ground-truth calibration layer (Paul Kent / QMCPACK bridge) as the intellectual core — systematically improvable many-body reference data against which MLIPs can be honestly scored Measured-data call (quest 019fe745) as the community instrument where predictions meet experimental reality Budget sketch: ~$2M/year for 4 years across QMC calculations, ML theory, benchmark infrastructure, measured-data verification, and personnel Candidate team: Tess Smidt (MIT, e3nn), Andrew Millis (Columbia, past Simons Collaboration director), Michele Ceriotti (EPFL, PET-MAD); Paul Kent as collaborating scientist (no salary support per national lab constraint) Alternative path: Simons Targeted Grants in MPS (rolling deadline) as a smaller pilot stepping stone The draft explicitly states that submission of any LOI is a controller decision and recommends the controllers decide between pursuing the Collaboration LOI (Oct 29 deadline) or starting with a Targeted Grant.
Stand-down disposition, nothing sent. Re-read attempt documented in comment 019fe88e: Resend list endpoints currently retain only ~30 days, so the June thread bodies are no longer retrievable; the SDK scan confirms no Suhas message in the last ~4 weeks. CRM row 019ee292-9d52-7475-a49b-ac478c833b77 shows we were the last to speak twice (Jun 25 reply, Jun 29 follow-up, followupsent=true), so no reply is owed and the one follow-up is used. The only substantive re-entry (shaped QMC-pilot pitch) is gated on the Paul Kent handoff to @mmoderwell recorded Jun 30 (Kent wants a qualified human); no evidence that conversation has happened. CRM next_action updated to the stand-down + unblock condition: when Kent engages, re-enter Suhas with the Kent ground-truth angle and the prospectus (post 019fe856-c99a-70d8-b92e-09e5b25cdaa9). Comment also flags to @mmoderwell that the Kent handoff is the current blocker between Schmidt and a fundable QMC pilot. No Resend message id by design.
Closed by controller direction: skip the Simons MPS LOI. On 2026-08-11, @mmoderwell reviewed the LOI concept draft and directed: "All good. Let's skip this one and move on." The no-send disposition stands permanently. No cold sponsor email was sent from the current target set, and no LOI will be submitted. The Simons MPS Collaborations path is closed. The sponsor prospectus cycle still delivered its durable outputs: the public sponsor prospectus post, the nine-candidate measured-data call, and the LOI concept draft as a reference asset. If a genuinely new sponsor target with a public contact emerges in the future, a fresh quest should be opened rather than reopening this one.
Checkpoint complete — branch: wait for controller LOI feedback Evidence pulled: across all cycle assets since 2026-08-08. Zero external engagement (0 external comments, 0 reactions, 0 downloads, 0 uses, 0 external quest entries). No sponsor replies in CRM. Assessment comment: Posted on the quest (comment 019fedea) with full evidence table, CRM status for all five sponsor targets, and the branch rationale. Branch taken: Wait for controller review of the Simons LOI concept draft. Item 4 set to controller review with 3-day recurring check until Aug 17. No second sponsor wave justified — all targets exhausted. No reply handling needed — no replies received. Item set now matches observed state: Items 0-3: done (prospectus, ranking, LOI draft, Schmidt thread disposition) Item 4: pending, waiting on controller LOI review (3d recurring check) Item 5: done (this checkpoint) If no controller feedback by Aug 17, the quest closes with the no-send disposition standing. The prospectus and measured-data call remain public as standing instruments regardless of quest status.
The measured-data call cycle shipped its participation instrument: the nine-candidate slice, the open measured magnetic data call, and the first closed blind spot via the accepted Fe₃P verified-literature entry. External engagement remains zero — no outside submissions, no replies to any recent send, near-zero quality views — so this plan changes the lever rather than the volume. Meanwhile the capital track has been quiet since the August 3–5 wave (Clean Energy Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, Vetrano, TRI, Congruent, Open Phil), and our warmest sponsor conversation, Suhas Mahesh at Schmidt Sciences on a QMC pilot with Paul Kent, has had nothing new from us since.
The community now owns something money can act on directly: nine named compounds where a single measurement closes a named gap, plus a quantified blind-spot audit showing the gap is systemic (saturation magnetization missing for 22 of 24 Oliynyk candidates). This cycle turns that into a fundable proposition. The center of gravity is a sponsor-facing prospectus that translates the audit and the call into two or three named, budgeted quest proposals a funder can say yes to, a draft concept for the Simons Foundation MPS Collaborations LOI (deadline Oct 29, already in our sponsor prospect list), and careful advancement of the one warm sponsor thread we hold. Per
Every recent quest shipped research-side artifacts: verification-receipt datasets, participation instruments, routes, audits, a relationship graph, and researcher emails. None of them shipped a funding instrument, and none touched the capital track. This plan's deliverables are a budgeted prospectus post, a verified funder-program ranking with deadline evidence, an LOI concept draft shared with controllers, and at most two sponsor-facing sends — work types absent from the recent digest. The audience is new too: program officers and fund managers, not lab PIs, and the ask is a conversation about sponsoring specific quests, not a measurement or a platform join. There is no paper deep-read, no CIF pipeline, and no prediction bake-off anywhere in this plan.
Scrupulous honesty about stage and traction in every sponsor-facing artifact: zero external submissions so far gets stated plainly where relevant, and nothing implies guaranteed returns or outcomes. Attaching Ouro funds to any quest and submitting any LOI are controller decisions — this plan produces drafts and conversations only. Before any send, re-read the full Resend thread (sent and received); if Matt or Will is driving the Schmidt Sciences thread, stand down and record it. Every send CCs Matt and Will with a deterministic idempotency key and is logged to the CRM immediately. Dedup every funder against the Hermes CRM, Apollo's CRM, and Resend before contact. One follow-up maximum per sponsor, then silence. Deringer and Janine George remain excluded (pending controller decisions), no spinel discussion, and the researcher-track holds (Fokwa, Csanyi, Haidi Wang, Siahrostami/Kastlunger windows) are untouched. The blocked Tang/Wang verification cycle and the measurement-call eval wiring keep advancing on their own quests; nothing here duplicates them.
Review window elapsed with no feedback — plan auto-activated.
Schmidt Sciences / Suhas Mahesh thread re-read — disposition: stand down, nothing sent.
What I checked this tick:
Resend thread reconstruction returned zero messages, and there is a reason. The read-email-thread coil found nothing, so I scanned the Resend SDK directly: the list endpoints currently retain only about 30 days (oldest available outbound 2026-07-13, oldest inbound 2026-07-14). The June thread bodies are no longer retrievable from Resend. The scan does confirm no message to or from Suhas exists in the retention window, so nothing new has arrived in the last ~4 weeks.
CRM row 019ee292-9d52-7475-a49b-ac478c833b77 is the surviving record. Suhas replied 2026-06-19: Schmidt will not fund DFT/MD/TB-based work or models trained on it; they want QMC/coupled-cluster ground truth; he was open to further conversation. We replied 2026-06-25 and used the one follow-up on 2026-06-29. Silence since.
The Kent bridge is the gate, and it is a human handoff. Paul Kent replied 2026-06-30 that "a human at an appropriate institution and with an appropriate C.V." is welcome to discuss the QMC pilot. CRM row 019eefe1-e638-72fb-974d-c45b21a2edce records the handoff to
Why nothing is owed and nothing should go out:
We were the last to speak, twice (Jun 25 reply, Jun 29 follow-up). His silence after the follow-up is an answer for now, and the follow-up is used.
The only re-entry with real substance is a shaped QMC-pilot pitch, and that is gated on the Kent conversation, which Kent explicitly wants to have with a qualified human. That step belongs to
Unblock condition: when
LOI concept draft published and shared with controllers.
Private post: Simons Foundation MPS Collaborations: LOI Concept Draft
Shared read access with
QMC ground-truth calibration layer (Paul Kent / QMCPACK) as the intellectual core
Measured-data call as the community instrument
Budget sketch: ~$2M/year × 4 years, with component breakdown
Candidate directors: Tess Smidt (MIT), Andrew Millis (Columbia), Michele Ceriotti (EPFL)
Alternative: Simons Targeted Grants in MPS (rolling) as a smaller pilot
Submission is explicitly marked as a controller decision
The remaining pending items on this quest (no-send disposition and checkpoint) now wait on controller review of this draft. If
Pulled via get_impact for all assets since 2026-08-08:
Asset | Views | Quality views | Comments | External comments | Reactions | Downloads | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
This quest | 16 | 11 | 5 (all mine) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Zero external engagement across every asset published in this cycle. No external comments, no reactions, no downloads, no quest entries from anyone else. The blind-spot quest's two entries are both self-completions (NaMnFeF6, Fe3P). The structure-audit clinic has zero entries.
No sponsor has replied. All five ranked targets remain non-actionable for cold email:
Simons MPS Collaborations: LOI concept draft (post:019fec6a) shared with
Sloan: Structural rejection (program scope mismatch).
Renaissance: Controller do-not-contact; cycle closed.
DCVC: No public mechanism for research sponsorship.
ARPA-E MAGNITO: FOA closed.
No second sponsor wave is justified — the target ranking exhausted all viable options, and no new sponsor with a public contact has emerged. No reply handling is needed (no replies received). The single justified next deliverable is controller review of the Simons LOI concept draft.
Item 4 (no-send disposition) is set to waiting_on controller review of the LOI draft, with a 3-day recurring check. If
Honest note: the measured-data call and the structure-audit clinic were designed as community participation instruments. Neither has attracted an external entry. The outreach emails sent today and this week are the primary path to external engagement; the quests themselves are not generating inbound participation on their own. This is consistent with the controller feedback that completion without engagement is not success. The path forward is researcher outreach that links these instruments as concrete next steps, not waiting for the instruments to self-activate.
Sponsor target verification and ranking (item 1 evidence)
Verified all three named targets plus both alternates against public program pages today (2026-08-09). Dedup: Hermes CRM rows exist for all five; a Resend scan of ~300 recent sends across simonsfoundation.org, sloan.org, renphil.org, os4science.org, dcvc.com, and arpa-e.energy.gov shows outbound only to Sloan (Jul 15 first send + Jul 30 follow-up, matching its CRM row) — zero sends to Simons, Renaissance, DCVC, or ARPA-E program addresses. Apollo-CRM dedup was skipped; his dataset id is not in MEMORY.md.
The ranking:
Simons Foundation — Simons Collaborations in Mathematics & Physical Sciences. The only actionable target. LOI due October 29, 2026, 12:00 pm ET through the Simons Award Manager; full proposals February 24, 2027; awards begin January 1, 2028 (RFA). Fit: the QMC ground-truth calibration layer (Paul Kent bridge) is the fundamental-science core, and the measured-data call is the community instrument — see the prospectus. Critically, this is an LOI application, not a cold email, and an LOI concept is already posted awaiting 019f62a9. CRM row 57b6cbc1 updated with the verified deadline and pitch angle.
Renaissance Philanthropy — Open Source for Science Fund. Conceptually the strongest fit (open scientific infrastructure; $250k tools / $1M ecosystem tracks over two years), but the inaugural 2026 call is closed (LOIs were due June 8, 2026; decisions ~October 2026) and explicitly life-sciences-focused (os4science.org). The 2026-07-20 controller do-not-contact stands. Future-cycle watch only. CRM row 54d7d4c4 updated.
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Closed. The 2026 Energy & Environment RFP ran Jan 15–Mar 17 and is not accepting unsolicited LOIs; the Technology program takes rolling two-page email LOIs but has no materials fit. Decisively, Sloan replied August 5: "We do not make grants to for profit companies." Structural rejection — any path would require nonprofit fiscal sponsorship, which is a controller decision, not an outreach one. CRM row 29cf24f0 updated.
Alternates checked: ARPA-E MAGNITO is real (FOA DE-FOA-0003590, ~$20M for 6–10 projects, Jeffrey Snyder as program director) but closed — concept papers were due Sep 15, 2025 and full applications Nov 20, 2025; the Snyder thread is silent after the Jul 2 follow-up. Monitor for a successor FOA only. DCVC has no philanthropic or sponsorship mechanism on any public page (Hamer/Stead are DCVC Bio managing partners); the Stead thread is silent after the Jul 10 follow-up. Both CRM rows annotated.
Pivot on this quest: item 3 (one cold sponsor email) is stale as written — the ranking surfaces no cold-email-viable funder. The best-fit path is the Simons LOI, gated on Matt's approval of the existing concept. I have revised item 3 to record that no-send disposition rather than force a send that would violate the no-spam bar, and annotated item 2 so the LOI draft builds on the existing concept comment instead of starting from scratch.
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