“Metros reduce car use in European cities but trams do not” The conclusion says: “Although cities with a metro tend to have a higher share of B, it is unclear whether the presence itself causes people to shift to B, and no causal claims can be made.” Then, why make a causal claim in the title? 🤷‍♂️

A statistic that concentrates the mind: In the first 6 months of 2025, China installed 250 GW of solar power capacity. This is around 150% of France's aggregate electricity production...

Firing a BBC director for *leftist* bias is like punishing a pig for taking a bath.

A team of 42 researchers lead by Oxford finds that bears do, in fact, defecate in the woods. www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...

James Watson is perhaps the greatest cautionary tale of where the competitive narcisism that poisons science can lead. www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/j...

Very good post. I very much agree with the overall position.

Nowadays, often the justification for choosing M$ is that it claims to be GDPR compliant, which just means that M$ can afford getting sued for any breach, which of course happens all the time. And universities don't care about potential breaches themselves, only about liability, which M$ absorbs.

lol

Double feature, just out on @royalsocietypublishing.org: "Uncertainty quantification and posterior sampling for network reconstruction" Previous explainer thread here: bsky.app/profile/tiag... Code here: graph-tool.skewed.de/static/docs/... royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Just out on @royalsocietypublishing.org: "Scalable network reconstruction in subquadratic time" royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... Previous explainer thread here: bsky.app/profile/tiag... Code here: graph-tool.skewed.de/static/docs/...

The work conditions in academia are rapidly deteriorating, but at least we still have academic freedom. 🫠 www.theguardian.com/education/20...

The first (1955) Danish edition of Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451. Later editions did not convert the title, so this is the only SI-compatible edition! 🎢

FFS, why did the ML literature decide to abolish *plots* in favor of tables?

Today I learned that there are bacteria and fungi in clouds, and I'm having a hard time processing this. www.bbc.com/future/artic...

I'd love to see someone try to estimate just how much time and money has gone into research that is either fully undermined by reliance on LLMs or fully pointless --- because obvious if you start from an understanding of what LLMs actually are. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

‘It’s like a nuclear bomb has hit’: shocked Palestinians return home to desolation

🚀 The University of Rochester is hiring in Complex Systems (Physics)! Join a vibrant cross-disciplinary cluster supported by the Simons Foundation. Great opportunity to build a program at the interface of physics, biology & cognition. Apply ➡️ apply.interfolio.com/173432

I've been porting some code from C++17 to C++23. Many nice improvements in the language! A side note: Clang is so much worse than GCC in almost everything, from compilation times, runtime performance, to C++23 coverage... GCC alone is a good reason to dump MacOS for GNU/Linux (among many others).

When you drag a woman by the hair, beat her and force her to kiss your flag, that’s how you tell the world you are the Good Guys

Want to promote transparency and clarity in network research by helping develop 𝐆𝐮𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 (𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐃)? Sign up to get involved here: tinyurl.com/help-with-GR... ▪️ All career stages welcome ▪️ All fields welcome ▪️ Be compensated for your time

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...