When an American thinks about the problem of #government-building, he directs himself not to the creation of #authority and the accumulation of #power but rather the limitation of authority and the division of power. - Huntington

Are you looking for a #postdoc to start in 2027? Do you have a #physics background and are you interested in #ecology #forests #ecosystems #learning #plasticity? I'm looking for candidates to nominate for the Human Frontier Science Program in the Physics Department at Seoul National University. 🧪🦋

A fantastic experience (I've heard)

Are you looking for a postdoctoral position? I'm looking for candidates to nominate for the Human Frontier Science Program in the Physics Department at Seoul National University. Thread continues below 🧪

New study examines 20+ years of armed conflict data across Africa. Researchers @kushwaha.bsky.social and @spintheory.bsky.social identify three conflict archetypes, but also show that classification does not necessarily help to predict the severity of conflicts. Learn more: shorturl.at/81pkf

A wintry day for complex systems!

People are often using AI to increase the seeming complexity of minimal ideas, where I find I spend most of my time taking highly complex ideas and compressing them as much as possible into minimal descriptions. Can AI do that? I would say not.

It’s times like these that remind me of Asimov’s Mule. And an interesting question about how far we can go beyond probabilities in looking ahead with social behavior.

Your daily reminder that in complex conflict scenarios, long-term strategy is important: arxiv.org/abs/2508.13213

„ Die Empfindung sagt mir, dass etwas ist; das Denken, was etwas ist; das fühlen, was etwas für mich bedeutet; die Intuition, was etwas werden kann.“ - Jung The four basic mental functions: sensation, thought, feeling, and intuition.

“Unreason darkens that gap of time bridged by our lightspeed ships, and in the darkness uncertainty and disproportion grow like weeds.” - Ursula Le Guin

2026년 가을부터 서울대학교 물리학과에 조교수로 합류하게 되어 매우 기쁘게 알립니다! 저에게는 새로운 장이 될 것이며, 학과에서 이미 진행되고 있는 놀라운 연구에 새롭고 복합적이며 다양한 기여를 더하게 될 것입니다. 마지막으로, 이러한 혼란스러운 시기에 민주주의와 법치주의를 수호하는 젊지만 활기찬 문화를 포용하는 곳으로 가게 된다는 것을 말할 수 있어 안도감을 느낍니다. 새해를 앞두고 미리 건배합니다! 🥂

I’m very happy to announce that I will joining #Seoul National University’s #SNU #physics department as Assistant Professor in Fall of 2026!

Merry xmas to Boltzmann!

🦋🧪 New research out in Royal Society Open Science! We used #MachineLearning to discover that armed #conflict in #Africa sorts into three distinct types—and found a surprising warning about predicting #violence. 🧵 @royalsociety.org @csh.ac.at @kushwaha doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

Great story about the power law that describes how prices on average move with buying and selling on the #stock market by the one and only Jean-Philippe Bouchaud. #physics #complexity 🧪🦋 physics.aps.org/articles/v18...

@Neon_sci I'm noticing that a lot of the SCBI precip data is blank when I download the data. Does anyone know what's up? NEON website claims all the data should be present. 🧪🌳

Finally got around to read Darwin. The clarity of thought is wholly impressive and still compelling today. Also very quotable and perhaps one of the reasons this work became such a recurrent tome. Will add examples below 1/n 🧪

#Schumpeter on #creative #destruction. Note the mention of #globalization and ref to #biology: "The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process... (1/2) 🧪🦋

This is nuts

A fun read about group selection on culture, not genes 🧪

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🍁A call for PhD positions in complex systems relevant to ecology

#Ecosystems, #ecology, and #forests as an example are marvelous examples of #complex systems. In collaboration with our colleagues at BOKU, we are also interested in applicants who want to study these topics! Applications due soon! 🧪🦋🌳

Highlighting this Simons postdoc fellowship again. Looking for junior postdocs who might team up with Brian Enquist and me. Keywords include nonlinear dynamics, reaction diffusion, population dynamics, metabolic scaling. 🧪🦋🌳

“the progress of culture consists only in the ever-increasing permeation of all of life by artistic purposes.” - Klimt

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs - Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75% - Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60% - Social Sciences by 50–70% - History by 60% - Biology by 75% - The German department will lose all PhD seats - Sociology from six PhD students to zero

This is a great Simons foundation #postdoc opportunity for theorists with incipient interest. If you’re interested in working in quantitative laws of life in ecosystems, please message me. Due date Dec. 4. Note the 3 years w/in PhD condition. #ecology #physics #maths 🧪🦋

One of the most fascinating points from the Q&A: Polarization isn't just about what we believe. It's about what we choose to make into a political issue. Some issues divide, others unite. The Senate is voting on more polarizing issues and, predictably, getting more divided outcomes.

The well-deserved #NobelPrize in #Economics this year reminds us how important (and really how little is known) about the dual forces of #innovation and #obsolescence as we discuss in our #arXiv #preprint. arxiv.org/abs/2505.05182 🧪🦋 1/n

von Neumann on #digital and #analog vs. #biological #computers (1964). Some notable quotations: 1/n 🧪

Stapledon's #Star Maker from 1937: a journey through #space, #time, and the Universe's end with an #emergent, #collective, #cosmic consciousness, and acclaimed as "one of the most brilliant, inventive, and daring [SF] books" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Ma...). Certainly imaginative and strange 🧪🦋

"It might interest you to know that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in 1905 that 'the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.' journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Politicians talk big. But what if (with a bit of physics) you could let their votes speak for themselves? In this Q&A, I chat with @spintheory.bsky.social about what his mathematical maps of US Senate politics reveal about polarization — with a surprising link to the physics foundations of AI 🧪⚛️

“INFORMATION THEORY AND STATISTICAL MECHANICS” by E.T. Jaynes is a real classic in #complexity and #complex systems 🧪🦋

A lovely quotation from Han Kang… As the snow lands on the wet asphalt, each flake, seems to falter for a moment. Then, like a trailing sentence at the close of a conversation…

Stifter: “genuine freedom, demands the most self-control, the constraint of one’s desires… The foremost, and only enemies of freedom, therefore are all these people who are possessed by powerful desires and urges, which they wish to gratify by any means”

The latest issue of Scientific American is the 180th anniversary, and they have a series of articles about "180 degree turnarounds" in science. Here's mine on RNA.

#1: 🎡 Vienna in the early 1900s was the center of the intellectual world, the fourth largest city in Europe, and home to “dazzling coteries of thinkers.” ...

What a great and fun video on echolocation!

A new paper out on arxiv today: "Collective contributions to #polarization in #political #voting" arxiv.org/abs/2508.02496 #physics #complexity 🧪🦋

Our paper on innovation/exnovation is up! journals.aps.org/prresearch/a...

Another call for scientists looking to move to #Europe: www.researchireland.ie/funding/glob... #academicsky 🧪

"Philip Anderson's 'More is Different'...profound ideas are lost when it is invoked to support a rather overworked sense of emergence...'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.'" -Krakauer #complexity #emergence 🧪🦋

“Meet the early-career scientists planning to leave the United States” “Funding to start a laboratory is generally lower in those countries than it is in the United States, but the career prospects seem more stable” #academia #postdocs 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, excerpts (1/n)

Anthony Downs, influential #political theorist (i.e. #economist) defines a #democracy in his 1957 article as... www.jstor.org/stable/1827369 "A democracy is a political system that exhibits the following characteristics:

Once upon a time… "For what pertains to warfare, nothing is required but practice in the mathematical sciences, that is, cosmography, geography and topography, in the mechanics of…

Some excerpts from Kuhn’s Essential Tension, “Mathematical and experimental traditions” (1/n) 🧪

I'm excited to say that one of the most exploratory and thought-provoking papers I've worked on in recent years was just accepted at Physical Review Research. Preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2502.21072 #physics #innovation 🧪🦋 @apsphysics.bsky.social