How the U.S.-Israeli Strikes on Iran Have Damaged Schools and Hospitals The Times has verified U.S.-Israeli strikes on at least 39 schools and hospitals, a fraction of the devastation so far.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Message passing and cyclicity transition Message passing, also known as belief propagation, is a versatile framework for analyzing models defined on graphs. Its most prototypical application is percolation; yet, the interpretation of the mes...

New preprint on arXiv: “Message passing and cyclicity transition”
arxiv.org/abs/2604.01201

I argue that message passing for percolation isn’t looking for the giant component; it’s just counting cycles.

Comments and feedback welcome!

Rubble and ruins -- Iran Pasteur Institute in Tehran, bombed by US-Isreal

Rubble and ruins -- Iran Pasteur Institute in Tehran, bombed by US-Isreal

Rubble and ruins -- Iran Pasteur Institute in Tehran, bombed by US-Isreal

Rubble and ruins -- Iran Pasteur Institute in Tehran, bombed by US-Isreal

Pasteur Institute of Iran, founded in 1920 now destroyed by Israel-US bombing😞

It played a pivotal role in developing vaccines & public health services, for over a century, now gone😞

A few days ago a pharmaceutical plant was bombed, accused of making anesthetic fentanyl

#War
#PasteurInstituteIran

The deeper question, though, is neither about birds nor frogs. How AI enters that community, how credit is shared, how new ideas are appreciated, how judgment is calibrated, matters more than anything it can compute.

And when a generation of researchers outsources the frog-work from the very beginning, what do they lose?

Science is a community product, built from argument, partial progress, and the slow accumulation of trust between people who have learned to communicate properly and read each other’s mistakes.

Anyone who has spent real time doing that work knows this is not a small thing.

AI’s power is no surprise to me. But I still have two questions to ponder. Can AI do what bird-type scientists do, sense a connection between two distant fields that nobody was looking for? The early evidence is thin.

This is where AI has quietly entered. What it changes most concretely is the cost of exploring nearby territory: small gaps in the literature, routine reformulations, the patient, frog-work of science, done now at a speed that was not possible before.

The edge of knowing is like the inside of a sponge, full of cavities and half-finished arguments [the right picture]. Good research is not always about filling those holes. Sometimes it is about finding the one whose filling leads to new horizons, and sometimes we can wisely avoid others.

Science needs both, and Dyson’s point was not that one is better than the other.

Most of us begin our careers in science as frogs. We specialize, reach the frontier of what is known, and push it forward a little [Matt Might’s illustration on the left]. That frontier is not a clean edge, tho.

Freeman Dyson once said scientists fall into two types: birds and frogs. Birds fly high above the landscape, drawn to the horizon, looking for connections that tie distant ideas together. Frogs live close to the ground, digging into one problem at a time. Hilbert was a bird. Besicovitch was a frog.

A heartbreaking message from a brilliant med student in Iran, determined to pursue neuroscience. She graduated only one week before the war started and now is volunteering to care for the injured.

What would you tell her? (Part #4, especially). Please share your thoughts and comments.

#IranWar

This is me in 2017 after the first workshop on complex systems for high school students at Allameh Helli High School in Tehran. Teenage boys and girls were sitting next to each other, curious and full of questions. I loved that school. Seeing it damaged by US and Israeli bombs is heartbreaking.

In their noble quest to spread freedom and democracy, US and Israeli forces have thoughtfully chosen to bomb schools, commercial buildings, medical centers, vital desalination plants, and Iran’s oil storage and refining facilities.

Congrats @nbes.bsky.social 🎉

What is emergence, after all?
New PNAS Nexus paper: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar....

In this paper, I clarify the scientific meaning of emergence as a measurable and physically grounded phenomenon through concrete examples, such as temperature, magnetism, and herd immunity in social networks.

If you have an Iranian colleague or friend, this is likely how they feel theses days:

We're already in the phase that each of us (Iranians) by now know someone killed/injured in our circle of friends/family. And this is despite the continued internet blackout, when millions haven't still managed to hear from their family/friends since Thursday, January 8th. This tells a lot ... 😥😥

How did we decide to call a tree “tree”? A bird “bird”? Not now, but in the early days, when there could have been different ways to name or define something.

On Language & Poetry | A short post I wrote over the Christmas holidays; abbas.sitpor.org/2025/12/28/o...

Pokec (Slovak Facebook) is a clearer example of how aggregate homophily can be misleading, as mixing patterns change systematically with group size.

with @bolozna.bsky.social @clarastegehuis.bsky.social and Riccardo Michielan

Homophily within and across groups - Nature Communications People tend to connect with similar others in different groups, shaping how ideas and diseases spread. The authors introduce a data-validated model that captures homophily across group sizes and show ...

What if birds of a feather flock together, but only at specific group sizes?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is the focus of our new paper, now published in Nature Communications. We introduce a new network model and show how to model and measure homophily to incorporate group variations.

But we keep calling the same things by different names in practice, sometimes it’s jargon, sometimes it’s marketing, but what do you think is the worst way this ends up misleading people?

PS: We even renamed “graphs” to “networks” for marketing, and that was fine… right?

Science is supposed to know no borders, until every major conference in my field picks the most hostile country to travel to as its venue 💆🏼

#Epidemics10 #NetSci2026 #CCS2026 #IC2S2 🇺🇸

“I have always tried to live in an ivory tower; but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.”

Doing science in contemporary academia, with its endless pressure to please grant committees, often feels like this Flaubert’s complaint in an 1872 letter to Turgenev.

What you expect the least from the reviewers and the editor is exactly checking for the main claims!

Being in #academia as someone not from the global north be like:

#phdchat #phdlife

Hmm, this isn’t a cumulative curve, so the interpretation should consider the entire trajectory, not only the late stages of the pandemic. I also wonder whether trust in Sweden stayed constant throughout.

“Physicists are very good and famous for getting the right answers for the wrong reasons.” Why? Here’s a clue: noisy philosophizing!

Sean commenting on Nima's talk, Two Cheers for Shut Up and Calculate, at the Natural Philosophy Symposium 2025

@pholme.bsky.social's feed

We are hiring multiple PhD and postdocs for two newly funded projects at the intersection of mental health and political polarization at the CS Dept at Aalto, Finland. The PIs are Juhi Kulshrestha, Talayeh Aledavood, and Mikko Kivelä.

Full call text and link to apply: www.aalto.fi/en/open-posi...

We should switch from paper to screen posters—more eco-friendly and far more engaging. Elisa’s poster already showed us how creative this can be.

@elisamurators.bsky.social @cssociety.bsky.social