Richard Blythe

EPL celebrates its 40th anniversary! 🎉

To celebrate, we launch a series of 40th Anniversary Highlights, written by our Editor-in-Chief Dr Richard Blythe, and revisiting key papers published in EPL.

The first Highlight is now online and free to read:

👉 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Passing the time on New Year’s Eve by watching Back to the Future 2 for the first time. I’m reminded of the horrors of resolving git merge conflicts.

Exploiting individual differences to bootstrap communication Author summary A fundamental question in the field of language evolution is how a communication system can emerge in a population that is initially unable to communicate. One theory is that human comm...

Interacting agents can create shared communication systems without ever knowing if signals are successfully received. The conventionalisation process involves a curious interaction between joint attention and individual behavioural differences. doi.org/10.1371/jour.... Work with Casimir Fisch.

I’d be very interested to read that as I recognise many of the points raised. Was there much representation from non-profit publishers at the meeting? (I have a vested interest as an EiC for a non-profit)

Interesting because I don’t really feel like much has changed in the intervening (checks watch) 20 years. But I have done a lot of teaching, which I think has helped me better assess how much content fits a time slot. (Says no one who’s witnessed one of my 2.5hr overruns.)

Doing some housekeeping and found a talk I gave as a postdoc. 21 slides in one hour! I could barely manage five now…

There's one week left to submit an application to be a #postdoc in our group! The project is very flexible, so there is room for own ideas. The advertisement lists more details: www.ds.mpg.de/4078435/job_...

Giving a talk on “the physics behind our irreversible reality” in Kent next month. Expect grape juice, buttercream, starlings and grammar.
research.kent.ac.uk/kent-physics...

🥳 EPL is now on Bluesky! 🥳

FREE TO READ - OPEN ACCESS: Skyrmion soliton motion on periodic substrates by atomistic and particle-based simulations

by J. C. B. Souza, N. P Vizarim, C. J. O. Reichhardt, C. Reichhardt and P. A. Venegas

#FreeToRead #OpenAccess

👉 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Congratulations! I hope it's not cancelled along with the Street Party...

Suddenly a lot busier in here.

If you've read the docs and still can't get your C++ code to compile, chances are you need either to add or remove some consts. But you will never know which.

Eeek. "Maybe expand x" is all my reviews in a nutshell.

Supplemental Information: Where science goes to die.

One would have thought that after ~30 years of C/C++ coding I would suspect a self-inflicted buffer overrun over an obscure compiler/CPU bug as the most likely source of unpredictable half-right output...

Spent a _ridiculous_ amount of time chasing a bug that turned out to be an array index i mistyped as the numeral 1.
Ouch.

📢Now out in Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory🔓
"Reliable identification of selection mechanisms in language change"
doi.org/10.1515/cllt...
/Juan Guerrero Montero, myself, Kenny Smith, @dralgernon.bsky.social
The method is general, applicable to also cultural, social etc data!

If you post on a new social media platform, does it make it make any sound?

(I have a feeling I made more-or-less the same 'joke' the last time I signed up to something like this)