Jessica Flack

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. 🤨

cc @science.org

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

Nope. Not an out of shape depressed alcoholic. Also @x is misrepresenting who I block and follow and has been doing this for at least two years. (Among other issues).

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. 🤨

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.

Still not for sale.

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

Still not for sale.

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

What are some examples of well-designed, lovely amphitheaters on the smaller side?

delight I felt as a child watching an evening performance of Midsummer's Nights Dream at Virginia's Lime Kiln Theater.

Santa Fe Opera is truly magical. On my to-do list is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (as well as a visit to the nearby Rogue Brewery).

Image:Lime Kiln Theater website.

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

...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.

...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,

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,

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...

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

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

There is also great work in ecology on emergence and increasingly in economics + computational social science.

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.

Both photos in this thread are by JCF and are of public lands that include the very popular and highly appreciated Dale Ball Trail System around Santa Fe.

sfct.org/dale-ball-tr...

Fitness—including walking outside in 'natural' areas—is likely the most underused yet effective medical intervention available—and for a range of ailments from mental health to cancer. Want to improve public health while decreasing healthcare costs? Start thinking outside box abt food + fitness.

use reconfiguration period as an opportunity to renovate buildings and update infrastructure in light of surveillance + energy concerns in the age of AI.

2. It's a bad idea to increase distance to outdoor recreational activities (there r lovely hiking + biking trails through 'desert land' in NM).

1. Subfivisions and other housing projects that backup against National Forests increase fire + flood risk. Playing fields, dog parks, and small, produce-producing farms could provide multi-functional buffers. Think about how space might be intelligently reorganized +

Opinion | A Second Push for Mike Lee’s Federal Land Sales Freeing up a sliver of government holdings to build homes is a good idea. Deregulation can help.

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...