Predrag Cvitanović

Three Tweets to Midnight | Stanley Center for Peace and Security How might a nuclear crisis play out in today’s media environment? There are still many unknowns about the effects of social media on international conflict.

I think about the title of this report on a weekly basis stanleycenter.org/publications...

I use Claude (an AI) to scan my posts for spelling and grammar errors. On the most recent post (about the East Wing, link below), I got a really amazing addendum.
www.pbump.net/o/yes-most-a...

Time-Reversal Computation Offers Pathway to Practical Quantum Advantage A quantum algorithm that can simulate a temporal interference effect delivers a performance advantage that has the potential to benefit real-world applications.

Researchers have unveiled a quantum algorithm that could lead to quantum advantage. Using a time-reversal procedure, the algorithm calculated how quantum information spreads through a many-particle system. A classical supercomputer would take 13,000 times longer.

1/n - Trump says something about nuclear weapons tests...It’s hard to know what he means. As usual, he’s unclear, all over the map, and wrong.

1. The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country.

Wrong. Russia has more nuclear weapons than the United States.

Water, Fire, and Lightning: The Life of Laura Bassi, the First Woman Professor of Science. It's April of 1732, and the hot ticket in Bologna is not an opera, a play, or a beheading, but rather that most mundane of things: a lengthy thesis defense, in Latin. Routine stuff, except this time ...

Physicist Laura Bassi was born 314 years ago today. Her thesis defense in 1732 was a major social event which led to her getting hired by the University of Bologna as a paid lecturer. Here is her story!

tinyurl.com/4jyxuttr

#WomenInSTEM #Physics 🧪

YouTube video by PBS NewsHour Top researchers consider leaving U.S. amid funding cuts: 'The science world is ending'

Tao on the USA destroying what made it great - it’s universities

Florida’s Public Universities Should No Longer Hire Foreign Employees, DeSantis Says The Republican governor’s directive on H-1B visas comes as President Trump has initiated his policy of charging employers a new $100,000 fee to hire people from outside the United States.

www.chronicle.com/article/flor...

General Motors to close Georgia Innovation Center, cut hundreds of jobs - Atlanta Business Chronicle GM is cutting hundreds of jobs in Georgia.

In 2013, we gave General Motors $17.5 million in state & local tax incentives to get an "innovation center" in Roswell, GA. That's tax money that could have gone to public services.

Today, GM is closing the center. 325 people are being laid off.

www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news...

I like Swiss train station clock style Swiss watch.

Screenshot of text: unfuck google drive by shooting gemini Hey folks! Google is fucking you via sneaky enshittification again! Want the shit in your google drive to load instantly again, instead of taking for-fucking-ever? Open your gdrive (web OR app) Settings > Manage Apps Gemini was checked "use as default" (and i sure the fuck didn't set it that way, this was a silent push) Nuke that, and suddenly, folders that took up to a minute to populate and sort do so in a fraction of a second.

friend shared this, immediately updated my settings

Mass shooting:
1 dead and 6 wounded in shooting at Lincoln University in Lincoln University, Pennsylvania.

Jian Zu, Zhiguo Xu, Jingyue Hao: A Deep Learning Framework for Identifying Weakly Chaotic, Strongly Chaotic, Resonant and Non-resonant Orbits in the Generalized Kicked Rotator https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21318 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21318 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.21318

The pipeline for Ph.D.s out of U.S. universities is shrinking America graduates more Ph.D.s than any other country. They go on to invent things, cure diseases and win Nobel Prizes. But admission slots are disappearing.

The pipeline for Ph.D.s out of U.S. universities is shrinking www.axios.com/2025/10/26/p...

If you are pissed at the recently publicized demand letter from the Trump admin to UCLA, I warmly invite you to join us tomorrow at noon. We need everyone to fight this with everything we have. There is a plan, and you won’t hear it from administrators.

Transcript: Elite Colleges Reject Trump’s Authoritarian “Compact” Harvard’s Ryan Enos explains the importance of colleges working together to combat Trump’s attempts to shake down universities.

Harvard AAUP's Ryan Enos explains the importance of colleges working together to combat Trump’s attempts to shake down universities.

#defendhighered
@ryanenos.bsky.social

Great idea! (second only to not posting on twitter)

Simply amazing how this is happening and US media is focusing only on absolute nonsense. Now that Ellison and Weiss will control most of media, hard denial of climate crisis will be locked in.

Universities roundly reject Trump’s loyalty oath When the Trump administration invited nine elite universities to exchange blind loyalty for favoritism and federal funding, the AFT, the American Association of University Professors and academics acr...

“The Trump admin has tried many different ways now to stifle & censor the alchemy of universities. We see what works to fight this kind of repression, people standing up. Students, faculty, alumni, community, standing up together to create a big tent. Our assignment at this moment: be courageous.”

Happy World Phage Week to All Who Celebrate Microbes get sick too - infected by bacteriophage or simply ‘phage’. A first post in a series on the hidden world of phage & how they transform human and environmental health.

In a break from recent themes & in honor of World Phage Week (Oct 22-28), some reflections on the world of bacteria and phage, part of a short series explaining the rationale for why we have invested so much time in exploring when microbes get sick too.

joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/happy-worl...

I forgot to share that this paper is now 🎉 published 🎉 in Phys Rev Letters! Open access here: journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...
And still available on the arXiv at arxiv.org/abs/2412.06887. Or just check out the thread below!

🧪⚛️

#OAweek Support diamond #openaccess scholar-controlled journals, such as those listed at freejournals.org.

The Logical End Point of Trump’s Higher-Education Agenda A “compact” offered by the administration could devastate racial diversity at elite universities.

With its higher-education compact, the Trump administration is pushing schools to embrace an admissions policy that “might ensure that the next generation of diverse leadership is stopped before it begins,” Kevin Carey argues:

Abandoning Merit for Compliance: Unpacking The Compact for Higher Education How the Dept. of Education’s proposed “Compact” for higher education would undermine merit-based review in exchange for fealty.

A post focusing on the link between funding and fairness and why 7 of the 9 institutions who said no (& even Vanderbilt) objected to abandoning merit-based review for compliance.

Now, only UT Austin remains silent.

Much is at stake for them & other universities.

open.substack.com/pub/joshuasw...

Public universities that sign onto Trump's "Loyalty Oath" will violate the constitutional rights of their students.🤯

AAUP General Counsel Veena Dubal breaks down why in this clip from our recent AAUP TV update.

@veenadubal.bsky.social
#DefendHigherEd

Guest Essay: Unity is the only way out of Trump’s ‘compact’ - Washington Square News Grace Lindsay is an Assistant Professor of Psychology & Data Science at New York University. Nine universities received an Oct. 1 letter from the Trump administration with an offer: If you agree to a ...

I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Square News about the government's attempt to extort universities. nyunews.com/opinion/gues...

@sasolla.bsky.social

Harvard is the 'best case scenario' for US research pedagogy (at least, financially). They have a $57bn endowment. I think the takeaway here is that the days of most PhD programs in the US are numbered

@sasolla.bsky.social 🤗

AAUP TV: live update tonight, Tuesday, October 21 at 7:30 PM ET. AAUP president Todd Wolfson and AAUP General counsel Veena Dubal will discuss why Trump‘s university compact is unconstitutional.

TONIGHT!

Join AAUP president Todd Wolfson & AAUP General Counsel Veena Dubal for an update on the AVALANCHE of universities rejecting Trump’s loyalty oath compact & how the compact violates the US Constitution.
7:30PM ET / 4:30 PM PT
Live on both IG &
YouTube.

Link: youtube.com/live/h-H-ETa...

Government shutdown means many CDC experts are skipping a pivotal meeting on infectious disease An annual conference about infectious diseases is seeing a dramatic attendance decline, in part because Centers for Disease Control and Prevention experts can’t participate.

Just another normal HHS week: CDC researchers cannot present work at an annual Infectious Disease conference in (checks notes) Atlanta. As a CDC researcher put it:

“It appears to me that HHS’s goal is to prevent the dissemination of scientific information. It’s insane.”

apnews.com/article/infe...