Pet peeve of the day: Ordinary graphs *do not* encode only "pairwise" interactions! For example, a majority function of several inputs is encoded by a graph, but the interaction cannot be decomposed into independent pairwise ones. Please stop spreading this silly meme!

“Call me old-fashioned, but I like my tiramisu scooped from a bowl and hitting my plate with a wobbly splat.” There's something wrong with the British.

Hell on earth.

Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, says UN inquiry

That's a question I find myself pondering all the time: how much of clearly bad but prominent science can be attributed to charlatanism or to incompetence. It's a mixture, but at the surface the confident fool and the cynical imposter are nearly indistinguishable.

Bolsonaro sentenced to 27 years behind bars! 🤘

To those that post a screenshot of a paper without a link: seriously?

Bad news for MDL! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

There's nothing incredible about this at all. Would anyone seriously expect a tech CEO to stand up to a sitting US president? Goes also to show how much power the US presidency has. Remember this the next time a president you actually voted for ”failed” to bring about positive change.

The power law found is no different from the 1/r^a scaling present in the age-old and ubiquitous gravity law of mobility... It's literally the exact same thing. 🤷 But it's interesting that it seems to go all the way down to tens of meters.

Pleased to learn that my department will be changing the name of the "Dissertation Defense" to the "Dissertation War"

"Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948)". Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, genocide scholars' association says - www.reuters.com/world/middle...

A beautiful visualization of the state space of puzzles, 11 min of joy, h/t @danlarremore.bsky.social

Somewhat pedantic pet peeve: There's no social media platform "without" an algorithm to determine what content users see. Chronological feed is an algorithm... It has its own consequences for visibility and information spread. “No algorithm” is not an option. There's always an algorithm!

Israel murdered Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues because genocide can only proceed without witnesses. Western media outlets have failed to condemn the systematic murder of Palestinian journalists, and in the process have become accomplices. Cartoon by Carlos Latuff.

It’s so funny watching Pete Buttigieg go from liberal darling for his way of cutting through republican talking points and being a skilled orator to suddenly not knowing how words work when it comes to Gaza.

“It’s a bit of an obscenity that I’m asked so much to speak on this subject because I happen to be Jewish and because I happened, as an infant, to have survived the Holocaust…Why aren’t we listening to the Palestinians?”

REVTeX4 is the apex.

Last week we had our second “Inverse Complexity Lab Retreat” at wonderful Traunkirchen! skewed.de/lab/group.ht... Nothing like eldritch C++ incantations by the sunny lakeside! 🏖️

Never Again*

Happy to see some principled and courageous academics signing this letter. That said, I wish the list of signatories was much longer. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

"It's just fields and fields of gray ash." www.instagram.com/reel/DM8H5L2...

Academia is basically a collection of people who got lucky early on and mistook it for genius. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

The first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, which drew 1,000 anti-Zionist Jews and their allies to Vienna, marked a significant moment in the rising tide against the settler-colonial state of Israel.

🚨 Israeli forces have killed hundreds of starving Palestinians seeking food in Gaza. These are not isolated incidents; these are war crimes. Our latest investigation lays out the evidence. #Gaza #WarCrimes 🔗 www.hrw.org/news/2025/08...

No politician or government is perfect, but just imagine for a second if the EU had responded in the same way Lula did to Trump's imposition, instead of submitting like a vassal. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/w...

I don't agree with everything in this article, but I do agree with this: "The act of writing the thing is the same thing as the thinking of it. If you can’t write it, you haven’t actually thought it." And AI allows us to 'not' think. engelsbergideas.com/essays/a-war... #academicsky #ai #teaching

Excited that our #network data sharing recommendations have received a commendation from SIPS! Read the recommendations 👉 www.zacharyneal.com/datasharing Endorse the recommendations 👉 forms.gle/sgpjyUnkufJF...

I enjoyed visiting Florence for #STATPHYS29...

In honor of his passing, here's my absolutely favorite Ozzy Osbourne collaboration: his duet with Miss Piggy covering "Born To Be Wild" www.youtube.com/watch?v=acL4...

New preprint: “Multiscale patterns of migration flows in Austria: regionalization, administrative barriers, and urban-rural divides”, with @thomrobiglio.bsky.social, Martina Contisciani, @martonkarsai.bsky.social, arxiv.org/abs/2507.11503

Attending @ic2s2.bsky.social? Checkout the poster presented by @thomrobiglio.bsky.social! #ic2s2

SIGN NOW ✍️ “Annalena Baerbock does not — and must not — represent us.” Here is why she must be blocked from presiding over the UN General Assembly, and why you should sign our petition. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq7m... Sign and share now: act.progressive.international.

Every single day. Yesterday was the same. Today and tomorrow will be the same. Unabated barbaric depravity going on for almost two years straight, with uninterrupted enthusiastic support from US, UK, and EU, without which this would not happen.

David Hume is spinning in his grave.

How long is the world going to allow this horror to go on?

”A shining symbol of freedom in dark times.” This mass delusion of all parts of the US political spectrum is the only that is rock solid about it.

Absolutely nefarious.

This wrong intuition seems hard to shake. Even during lectures about inference, overfitting, high modularity partitions in random graphs, etc, I would show students a layout of an ER graph with <k>~1 (without telling them), and ask to infer the communities by eye. They would pick the components! 🙃

There are some corners of the network science literature which adamantly claim that connected components *must* belong to different communities. Yet, ER networks can easily be disconnected, and the same is true for individual groups in SBM networks. There, splitting the components overfits. 1/4

Continuing position on Mathematical Optimization in our School here in Sydney. usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/USYD_E...

”On unavoidable hypergraphs: Think about it, when did you run into a hypergraph last time? Aren’t they as easy to avoid as discrete math journals?” Good old times...

TIL that Pedology is an actual scientific field. I wonder if pedologists are having a hard time having their grants about studying the “pedosphere” funded.

It's amazing how many *scientists* think _exactly_ like this.

Are you from the US and would like to work as a postdoc in Austria, maybe in our lab? 25 new fellowships will be available in July from the @oeaw.bsky.social: www.oeaw.ac.at/en/news/25-n... If you are interested; get in touch!

I have a different point of view. It could well be that humans reason in a probabilistic way—it's certainly error prone! However, actual reasoning can be abitrarily *difficult*. Reasoning tasks can take a long time and cost a lot of energy. Yet LLMs spit out every answer with the same effort...

“Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.” — Schiller

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/