Eddie Lee

Release Trees and trusses · eltrompetero/innovation Initial release of code for publication in PRR.

It’s all open source!

github.com/eltrompetero...

Our work considers more abstract aspects of the way that the space of the possible is connected and how paths of innovation+obsolescence can interfere or speed up the process.

link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/...

🧪

Why economists should like booze A martini doesn’t just steady the nerves after a rollercoaster week

It seems that we missed a *very important* factor in our work on #innovation: booze.

A great article on the question of #alcohol and inspired thinking.

www.economist.com/finance-and-...

🧪

And the kicker,

…Furthermore, it is possible to maintain a sharp distinction between its physical and statistical aspects.”

…It is concluded that statistical mechanics need not be regarded as a physical theory dependent for its validity on the truth of additional assumptions not contained in the laws of mechanics (such as ergodicity, metric transitivity, equal a priori probabilities, etc.)…

…In the resulting "subjective statistical mechanics," the usual rules are thus justified independently of any physical argument, and in particular independently of experimental verification…

“Information theory provides a constructive criterion for setting up probability distributions on the basis of partial knowledge, and leads to a type of statistical inference which is called the maximum-entropy estimate…

“INFORMATION THEORY AND STATISTICAL MECHANICS” by E.T. Jaynes is a real classic in #complexity and #complex systems 🧪🦋

like the dying fall of a final cadence, like fingertips cautiously retreating before ever landing on a shoulder, the flakes sink into the slick blackness and are soon gone.

A lovely quotation from Han Kang…

As the snow lands on the wet asphalt, each flake, seems to falter for a moment. Then, like a trailing sentence at the close of a conversation…

Stifter: “genuine freedom, demands the most self-control, the constraint of one’s desires… The foremost, and only enemies of freedom, therefore are all these people who are possessed by powerful desires and urges, which they wish to gratify by any means”

The "Upended" section of Scientific American, Sept 2025

Philip Ball's article in Scientific American on the rise of noncoding RNA

The latest issue of Scientific American is the 180th anniversary, and they have a series of articles about "180 degree turnarounds" in science. Here's mine on RNA.

#1: 🎡 Vienna in the early 1900s was the center of the intellectual world, the fourth largest city in Europe, and home to “dazzling coteries of thinkers.” ...

What a great and fun video on echolocation!

Collective contributions to polarization in political voting Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in legislatures. The crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideologic...

Despite deep partisan divides, senators still form bipartisan coalitions on many issues. Politics is multi-dimensional—understanding this helps explain why left vs. right oversimplifies reality.

Paper here -> arxiv.org/abs/2508.02496

We can separate individual behavior from collective patterns. The data shows that the variety of issues voted on has decreased much more than individual senators have become inflexible. This collective change drives most of the polarization we see.

Senators don't just fall on a simple left-right line. They have multiple political preferences that can align or clash depending on the issue. Our model captures this complexity using far fewer parameters than traditional approaches.

We study political polarization in the U.S. Senate. Finding: polarization isn't only due to senators becoming more extreme—it's because the types of votes have become more divisive.

There are widely speaking two approaches to modeling voting. A focus on individual preferences versus interactions. We show these approaches are actually two sides of the same coin.

Collective contributions to polarization in political voting Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in legislatures. The crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideologic...

A new paper out on arxiv today: "Collective contributions to #polarization in #political #voting"

arxiv.org/abs/2508.02496

#physics #complexity 🧪🦋

Our paper on innovation/exnovation is up!

journals.aps.org/prresearch/a...

Another call for scientists looking to move to #Europe:

www.researchireland.ie/funding/glob...

#academicsky
🧪

"In a literal sense it has to be wrong, and in a conceptual sense it fails to convey why effective theories are important...it would be more accurate to say, 'the whole is less than the sum of its parts,' in contrast to the expectation that it be 'equal to the sum of its parts.'"
-Krakauer

🧪🦋

"Philip Anderson's 'More is Different'...profound ideas are lost when it is invoked to support a rather overworked sense of emergence...'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.'"
-Krakauer

#complexity #emergence
🧪🦋

Well, not trying to help, but Europe is great. Can highly recommend as an American scientist abroad.

Meet the early-career scientists planning to leave the United States Decreased funding, reduced opportunities and growing uncertainty has made life tough for international postdocs living in the US.

“Meet the early-career scientists planning to leave the United States”

“Funding to start a laboratory is generally lower in those countries than it is in the United States, but the career prospects seem more stable”

#academia #postdocs 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Superstition: “A different kind of consideration leads to squirrels being forbidden to pregnant women among the Fang of the Gabon. Squirrels shelter in the holes of trees and a future mother who ate their flesh would run the risk of the foetus copying a squirrel and refusing to leave the uterus.”

In this view, the operations of determinism are divined and made use of in an all-embracing fashion before being known and properly applied, and magical rites and beliefs appear as so many expressions of an act of faith in a science yet to be born.”

One can go further and think of the rigorous precision of magical thought and ritual practices as an expression of the unconscious apprehension of the truth of determinism, the mode in which scientific phenomena exist…