A theory of everything contender? #complexsystems #physics #networkscience

Yesterday, 3,000+ people got #ComplexityThoughts Issue 75 in their inbox. Want the next one? Subscribe: open.substack.com/pub/manlius/... #ComplexSystems 🧪🧬🦠🌐 As usual, also on: 🎧 Spotify: creators.spotify.com/pod/show/com... 🎧 Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

When people actually care about government services, and evaluate spending technology in terms of what it actually does rather than FOMO, look what happens!

Oh, they are hiring a human. But it needs to be a highly-qualified one willing to be underpaid to improve a bot that plagiarizes the work of their peers.

This is lovely. www.plough.com/en/topics/li...

I wanted to do an episode that grapples with the fresh horrors our feeds deliver to us and how to balance bearing witness, activism, and not falling into doomerism. @amandalitman.bsky.social is the perfect guest. *highly* recommend her insights to fellow bluesky posters!

Green Day and Bad Bunny. 😂😂😂

During an upcoming Harvard Chan Studio event, two deans of leading schools of public health—@meganranney.bsky.social of @yalesph.bsky.social and @deanbaccarelli.bsky.social—will explore how to navigate a rapidly evolving landscape in public health education. Register to join us on Feb 5 at 1 pm ET:

"When the internet is severed, the diaspora is not just worried; we are psychologically confused and helpless." healthydebate.ca/2026/01/topi...

Awesome! Check out this @theresisters.bsky.social podcast with @fitterhappieraj.bsky.social.

Alright… this is a lot of snow.

For the OSINT community: GeoConfirmed QGIS Plugin is now available. Query GeoConfirmed's conflict geolocations directly from QGIS with: • Boolean keyword search • Faction & date filtering • Spatial filters (radius, canvas extent, within polygon) github.com/Silverfish94... @coupsure.bsky.social

“Vá para o raio que o parta!” Is an old Portuguese idiom meaning ‘leave me alone, or go to hell’ but it literally translates as ‘go to a place where a lightning bolt splits you in half’.

What’s up??? What’s up???!!!

"Drawing on a 20.3-million-query audit of ChatGPT, we map systematic biases in the model's representations of countries, states, cities, and neighbourhoods. From these empirics, we argue that bias is not a correctable anomaly but an intrinsic feature of generative AI”. ht: Dagmar Monett

Great aurora in Banff www.youtube.com/live/zlxbH2x...

Wrote this after emerging from the Gas Town rabbit hole. I wasn’t there for long, but it was long enough.

Speaking of…

If you went down the Gast Town rabbit hole you may like this sanity rope to climb out. “It takes you a minute of prompting and waiting a few minutes for code to come out of it. But actually honestly reviewing a pull request takes many times longer than that. The asymmetry is completely brutal.”

Now to really important matters.

When what comes out of Davos starts seeming like a balanced worldview, you know we're in deep trouble.

Another must watch from @taylorlorenz.bsky.social

Auroras today should be visible easily mostly anywhere in Canada. Look north if skies are clear. (And your not in a city…)

Thanks for making this video @taylorlorenz.bsky.social lets hope people listen and not accuse you of "calling everything you disagree with eugenics" and such as they did me and @xriskology.bsky.social 🙄 I don't know how much evidence people need.

Hey just found out @tpn-uoft.bsky.social is on bluesky. and I am the first follower. Bragging rights?

Great piece on prioritizing quality over quantity in scientific publication. For those of us with labs, this necessarily involves shrinking our group size. After I got tenure I started to downsize my lab and have not regretted it one iota. More time for each student & more time to think & write.

I just woke up from a nap and somehow while I was asleep, everyone on the bus has figured out we are not going to the right place

⏰ Less than two weeks left to apply! @isi.it & CRT Foundation offer 10 one-year scholarships in data science & AI, applied to: 🩺 public health · 🌍 humanitarian response · 🏙️ urban development · ♻️ sustainability 📅 Deadline: Feb 2, 2026 🔗 Details here: sites.google.com/view/lagrang...

Writing is thinking "On the value of human-generated scientific writing in the age of large-language models." www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I have an old wifi signal that clearly was created by me (I have the name and know the password). I changed my whole network to a mesh system and that old name is still showing up (and active). How do I find out which device is broadcasting it other than by elimination (disconnecting one by one).

Hayward was disappointing. Toni Colette does her magic, but she can’t hold the whole thing on her own. I tried. I think I’ll rewatch United States of Tara.

Finally watched K-pop demon hunters.

Orchestrated agentic LLM coders will bankrupt a lot of naive folks. And make a lot of money for cloud providers.

Are you new to the world of #ComplexSystems? Looking for a simple explanation of technical terms like #feedback, #entropy, #autopoiesis, and #criticality? At #complexitycat, we offer you solutions./1 😼 www.complexitycat.org/posts/comple...

Are you new to #ComplexSystems, #NetworkScience or #ArtificialLife? Part II of our “Complexity Miscellany for Beginners” is out today! From autopoiesis to the edge of chaos, everything with simple analogies and classic examples./1🤓🧩 #complexitycat 🐈‍⬛ www.complexitycat.org/posts/comple...

arXiv📈🤖 Power and Control in Complex Networks: A Taxonomy and Critical Review By Abeltino, Bacaloni, Bernardini et al

Now I think I have embarrassed myself because I think it was @SERiousEPI with my colleague @haileybanack.bsky.social and Matt Fox.

Did the @theresisters.bsky.social invite me to a podcast once…? So much that went on at the height of my grief still feels like a big clump of mental fog. I likely said no, or it never happened and I am imagining. The stuff that existed only on the other site and are long gone.

@rachelgilmore.bsky.social Please sign and share widely to restrict foreign-owned media in Canada. Deadline to sign is Feb. 18 at noon. www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en...

Sums it up.

The most important thing universities should do in a world with AI is to greatly increase the number of professors, so that classes can be smaller and more class time can be spent directly interacting with students as people.

Long overdue refresh of the SocioPatterns website! ✨ sociopatterns.org New content & datasets, and a chance to celebrate 17+ years of collabs, ~100 publications, 2000+ studies using our data. Thanks – more ahead! @alainbarrat.bsky.social @wouter-vdb.bsky.social @foolsdelight.bsky.social @isi.it

Et si je vous disais que l'expression "Which way, Greenland man" est inspiré d'un livre raciste, antisémiste et complotiste ?

pulling this reflection on white silence/fear over here, too:

“If they don't like strongman rule, they think, they can just elect someone else the next time. This misses the point. If you help a strongman come to power, you are eliminating democracy. You burn that bridge behind you. The strongman fantasy dissolves, and real dictatorship remains.

This says it all.

How complex should network models be? 🚨 In our latest paper we quantify (if and) when higher-order interactions are informative versus reducible to pairwise structure without losing functional signal (e.g., diffusion behavior). 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

New: meet ELITE, the Palantir app ICE is using to find neighborhoods to raid. Map interface; officers search for immigrants; click person to bring up individual dossier. This is clearest link between what Palantir is building and ICE's activities on the ground yet www.404media.co/elite-the-pa...

As we go to sleep, Toronto may be in for a historic snowstorm & a huge forecast bust. Evening run of the computer models go from low end of 10-12” (25-30cms) to high end of 17-20” (43-50cms) of snow. Even now, Environ Canada’s snowfall warning only forecasts 10-20cms. We’ll see! 🫣 #ONwx #ONstorm

Cool paper: “This work adds a differing perspective to several extant concepts in the study of social networks, including strong and weak ties, social capital, network vulnerability, segmentation, decay, independents, bridges, brokers, small world networks and core–periphery structures.”