Dream Dust By Langston Hughes Gather out of star-dust Earth-dust, Cloud-dust, And splinters of hail, One handful of dream-dust Not for sale. From The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (2002) via @PoetryFound. Photo credit—TBD—please share if you know.

...negative liberties naturally and profoundly incentivizes behavior that contributes to the social good while protecting individual rights. More at Babel Blog. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog (scroll down). Image: Composite made by JCF. See website for information.

The beauty and power of negative liberties lies in how freedom is defined—the 'allowed behavior' is the behavior that remains after all behavior that hurts or impinges on the rights of others is 'disallowed'. With the lightest touch,

Perspective on rights that emphasize individual liberties are sometimes equated with selfishness or described as anti-social. It is precisely the opposite for the concept of negative liberties. Continued... Image credit: Isaiah Berlin by Steve Pyke, National Portrait Gallery

Isaiah Berlin—proponent of negative liberties as a remakably effective + broadly useful yet relatively simple (compressed) guiding moral principle—on the perilousness of ideological certainty. From an essay @nybooks by Henry Hardy. nybooks.com/articles/200...

Happy Public Lands Day!

Tomás Sánchez is a Cuban painter. His works are often in my mind. This painting, I believe, is from his 1948 “Enchanting Forrests” series. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog

Intellectual opportunities or recognition that comes with personal choice or other tethers, or which is backed by institutions that discriminate based on political views, are not merit-based + are neither interesting, or worthy of time or attention. Palette cleanser: m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml14...

For science related issues, I can be reached at the email on my website. In addition, I post often abt my work, and that of others, on Babel Blog. The latest post is on Borges, Oulipo + the impoverishing power of being able to see everything everywhere all at once. jessicaflack.wordpress.com

After ~23 years at the Institute—as grad student, postdoc, + professor—I’ve elected not to pursue renewal of my faculty contract. My last day was August 1st. There are fundamental science advances on the horizon. . .more @ Babel Blog. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog Image: Turrell Blue Day. JCF

Interested in emergence + computation in nature? Please visit the Bio, Research, Pubs, and Babel Blog pages of my website. jessicaflack.wordpress.com My foci tend to be on collective phenomena at the intersection of bio, cognitive neuroscience, consciousness, CS, information theory, + physics.

Two versions of Danny Boy for this Sunday afternoon. m.youtube.com/watch?v=JHJ3... m.youtube.com/watch?v=PweU...

Two of Wright’s Haiku: That frozen star there, Or this one on the water,— Which is more distant? Keep straight down this block, Then turn right where you will find A peach tree blooming

Wheeler, who cites Wiliam James, wanted to know how a vision of one world arises out of the information-gathering activities of many observer-participants. Essentially abt collective computation, it's remarkable to think this question could unite physics + biology + even AI. 1/n

On Babel Blog—Borges, Oulipo, and the impoverishing power of being able to see everything everywhere all at once. This post isn’t abt Oulipo per se but abt value in boundaries + constraints, when self-imposed or cooperatively adopted, rather than imposed by others. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog

Any potential project is at least a year off + there are no guarantees given continuous petty nonesense. Delays serve to aggravate, undermine confidence in skills, + push start dates further into the future. Had decision-making been intelligent, projects could be starting now. 🤨 rubegoldberg.org

After ~23 years at the Institute—as a grad student, postdoc, and professor—I’ve elected not to pursue renewal of my faculty contract. My last day was August 1st. There are fundamental science advances on the near horizon. . .more at Babel Blog. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog

Spotted on the Picacho Peak trail—Galadriel with her quiver and a snow leopard. She was out of breath with glossy pearls of sweat beading above her brow. 🤨

Retraction Should Not Be An Error Correction Tool Retraction should be reserved for fraud + misconduct by authors, reviewers, + editors. Retraction should not be used to remove from the literature results that come to be understood as erroneous. More at Babel Blog. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog

Spotted on the Picacho Peak trail—Galadriel with her quiver and a snow leopard. She was out of breath with glossy pearls of sweat beading above her brow. 🤨

No libraries. No institutes. No collaborations with Japan or Australia. No further help with corruption or translation. Fine with me. Far less work. Trample those who help you and you eventually get what your stupidity deserves. 🤨

Still not for sale. As Murray said, "Meciocrity is not a specter. It is a very real threat."

Thinking this morning about memorable + enjoyable performance venues. I loved watching Buena Vista Social Club on a warm summer night while picnicking in Atlanta's Chastain Park ampitheater (I lived in Little Five Points). I often recall the total... Image credit: JCF, Santa Fe Opera

Interested in emergence + computation in nature? Please visit the Bio, Research, Pubs, and Babel Blog pages of my website. jessicaflack.wordpress.com My foci tend to be on collective phenomena at the intersection of bio, cognitive neuroscience, consciousness, CS, information theory, + physics.

Among many collective computation questions on which I have worked is the question of collective memory. How is it encoded + what role does it play in micro, meso + macroscale outcomes? jessicaflack.wordpress.com/wp-admin/pos... Figure from Hartle's The Physics of Now. arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/04...

New posts on Babel Blog. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog 1. Reasoning + discreteness 2. Shannon, hourglass emergence, flourishing 3. Weaver's 3 communication problems 4. Euler's formula and causal horizon 5. Bistable images and tbe common now 6. Laughlin's protectorates and hourglass emergence.

One of the primary concerns abt even a limited sale of public lands is that although it might not be in and of itself harmful, it sets a precedent. This slippery slope issue should not be trivialized. Beyond this the devil is in the details. Some issues to keep in mind: www.wsj.com/opinion/fede...

Especially given the 911 system in PA was down statewide yesterday. Now restored.

It's not transformative AI models + other tech that's the problem. AI can facilitate flourishing if we hold to account those who use it to exploit others + if we are intelligent abt regulation. Problems will occur if development + use of AI is by people + firms who think "you can just do things"

TRUE 🤔 "It is (relatively) easy to copy something that you know works,” Altman wrote. “It is extremely hard to do something new, risky, and difficult when you don’t know if it will work.”

Fermented coconut thickened with tapioca. This is store bought (as my kitchen is ill equipped at the moment for more serious cooking). It can be used with or in place of cream and eggs to make ice cream. One of the best textured ice creams I've made was a fennel pollen ice cream that used this...

IT FROM BIT, THE COMMON NOW, AND COLLECTIVE COMPUTATION Happy Birthday, John Wheeler.! For a collection of foundational papers in complexity science, I wrote an article from the POV of collective computation on Wheeler's it from bit paper. c4computation.substack.com jessicaflack.wordpress.com

What would Proust have thought about appropriating Truman Show style high resolution surveillance to create a narrative. Would he...

The long term solution to protection against privacy + other civil liberties violations can't be $200M ranches w 6 ft walls + security forces. It has to be rooted in intrusion detection tech, social norms, enforced laws, + default private infrastructure + building materials. x.com/C4COMPUTATIO...

Juxtaposed they remind us to have humility, that what matters is how we treat each other, and that our lives must be lived on many scales at once—to cast our vision near and far. jessicaflack.wordpress.com Image: composite made by JCF—info on website.

That frozen star there, Or this one on the water,— Which is more distant? Keep straight down this block, Then turn right where you will find A peach tree blooming

As Feynman wrote in a poem read in an address to the National Academy in 1955, “I. . .a universe of atoms. . . an atom in the universe.” This line of Feynman's + his poem as a whole provide perfect context for two of Richard Wright's 4000 haiku. . . ht @proffeynman.bsky.social Image credit: TBD.

Five of his students were American. The other three were from Australia, China, and Peru. Murray's PhD supervisor was an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. A collaboration that brought Murray great joy during his later years at the Institute was with Russian linguists. Photo credit: TBD

Happy Fourth of July! Every year in recent memory the celebration of the fourth has been different. Below, a lush scene on the return portion of a run in the southern ln rockies to an ~11,500' highcountry lake just below a mighty peak on a Fourth of July during the pandemic.

Anyone holding information on my behalf should get in touch directly.

Proposal: 21st Century Library of Congress that expands its collection of printed media to include an internet archive for digital media, a high quality, open source internet search engine, + a publicly searchable realtime database of AI models, their components, + use cases. x.com/C4COMPUTATIO...

An incredible—and entirely vegetarian—asparagus soup from Naomi Pomeroy's "Taste and Technique". Perfect for this time of year. It's a little bit of work to make but worth all of the effort. Also great is this salad of peas, white chocolate, and macadamia nuts from Jeremy Fox's "On Vegetables".

The author of this lovely quote, philosopher C.S. Peirce, also invented in 1886 perhaps the 1st electric logical machine. "The first chaos consisted in an infinite multitude of unrelated feelings. As there was no continuity about them, it was, as it were, a powder of feelings." ht @CSPeirceSpeaks

One of my favorite conservation ideas that greatly benefits humans, wildlife, and ecosystems, and generally enjoys bipartisan support—highway and busy road wildlife crossings. 🧡 Forrest Service Report: www.fs.usda.gov/psw/publicat... Photo: NBC Los Angeles.

This morning having come across some posts from the Tanzania Wildlife Management Authority 🤔, I was inspired to try to remember my Kiswahili, which I studied at Cornell for several semesters + also of course used in Tanzania, but its now ~30 years w no practice. Had to cheat w a translation app—

So many beautiful places in the world to inspire great work. Thanks to those asking abt health issues. No changes to report despite having been robbed of daily backcountry runs and hiking in tbe wilderness, as well as daily time in a real gym, for more or less 2 years (imagine that for yourselves)

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, —William Butler Yeats, whose birthday was June 13, 1865, and his poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, posted tbis morning in memory of Cormac, who died on June 12, 2023.

This poem is not so much abt peace as it is abt the fundamental character of social life + by extension role of conflict management in societal cohesion. CM principles rooted in negative liberties cultivate cohesion–even flourishing—wo crushing diversity but, to work, demand emotional discipline.

Murray had eight doctoral students (according to Wikipedia) and from him and them came some of the 20th centuries most important work in physics, work that quite possibly will also underlie some of the 21st centuries most important, generative work in science.