Making analogies is the engine of human intelligence, but for humanity as a whole, and our collective-intelligence enterprise called science, it is an obstacle. I’ll try to expand on that in this, maybe not sharpest of posts. Hypotheses In science and life alike, we use analogies as shortcuts to form hypotheses. Any other strategy—experimenting, making […]
Category: Scientific practice
The poster lovers’ manifesto
The arguments As in-person conferences are returning after the pandemic, here’s a tongue-in-cheek blog post to set the priorities straight. It’s simple: poster presentations are better than oral. Or, more precisely, the only reason not everyone is excited about poster sessions is that they are the Cinderellas of academic conferences: tucked into some small and […]
Temporal networks and the extraordinary fluidity of effortless abstractions
This is a semi-grumpy post about the many ambiguities and reinventions in the field of temporal networks. Cheerful posts are more fun, so do consider browsing away. Also, I’m not always contributing to clarity myself, so maybe I’m not entitled to whine about this. Many types of data consist of discrete interaction events, where we […]