@cmcshaff
CogSci / Bioengineering PhD Candidate, NSF Graduate Research Fellow (he/him) https://sites.google.com/view/connor-mcshaffrey/bio Indiana University, Vassar '21 🎓 Modeling life and its limits with dynamical systems 🦠 microscopy for fun 🔬
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Applications for the 2026 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) are now open!!
Are you interested in intelligence, mind, and cognition in all its forms? Early-career scholars from any discipline—and storytellers in any medium—are encouraged to apply!
More info: disi.org
New paper out in PRL!
With @artemyte.bsky.social and Sosuke Ito, we combine stochastic thermodynamics with nonequilibrium MaxEnt in large networks to infer entropy dissipation in high-dimensional systems from time series (up to 1000 variables!)
journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...
She's earned it! My cat has attitude and the gremlin isn't even two years old yet
I always gave her so many belly rubs because I suspected she had mastery of the dark arts
A picture of Annalee and Charlie Jane bundled up in their winter clothes, inside a tunnel made of twinkling LED lights. They are smiling and Annalee is sticking out their tongue. A friend is photobombing them in the background, popping up and smiling over Charlie Jane's shoulder.
A picture of several novels by Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz. "Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz from Tor Books Supporting Miss Major Alexander L Lee TGIJP Black Trans Cultural Center" Book Bundle.
This deal is incredible & it's for the best cause! You can get ALL the fiction by me and @charliejane.bsky.social from @humblebundle.com for a low, low price -- and all sales benefit the Miss Major Alexander L. Lee Black Trans Justice Center. www.humblebundle.com/books/charli...
Epstein-Barr Virus #EBV was linked to #MultipleSclerosis - now a plausible cause has been found, misidentification by longterm memory T-cells that pick on the wrong protein, ANO2, instead of the EBV-antigen. Massive inflection towards the elimination of MS!!!
🧪🧠Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
Saturday Jan 10, 11 am PST Virtual panel discussion: speculative stories about political protest, resistance, and hope. Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older. Free! Registration required (see link in post)
Need an antidote to the horror and paralysis? See you tomorrow at 11 pacific time. citylights.com/events/panel...
The last piece of microscope art I did in 2025 :) reflected light off a surface of a bubble and magnified by 100x, manipulated to give a planet-like effect
Wishing all a great start to 2026!
It looks like if the mermaid's purse egg-capsule developed into a little person instead of hatching into a skate!
I was midway through sipping on my drink and almost choked when I read this. Absolute gold.
A schematic of a death event in a multicellular system, where the loss of one cell results in a collapse in the dimensionality of the system. Each cell's essential variables have their ranges capped by viability constraints.
Where does the life-death boundary come from, and how will a cell's dynamics unfold relative to it? Myself, Eran Agmon, and Randy Beer argue for a theory of cellular viability, with new global organizing principles for cell fate.
Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07847
How “intelligent” is a slime mold? When it solves mazes, it might not be thinking:it’s obeying physics. Our new paper with
@jordiplam.bsky.social shows how it follows a least action principle,letting physics do the job arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08531
@drmichaellevin.bsky.social @docteur-drey.bsky.social
This is some really interesting work at the intersection of animal behavior, agent-environment modeling, and dynamical systems analysis.
Definitely worth checking out!
(Also, Eden is a pretty groovy guy; you should consider following him.)
I've had an increasing number of people ask me why I do not have LLMs automate my paper writing/research for me. My first answer is always on principle. My second is that nothing I work on is so derivative of other work that it is that well-represented in the training set.
All I know is that it is uncorrupted by the blind use of LLMs. Ah, the joys of being illiterate.
Do you review papers? Check out Earl's @earlkmiller.bsky.social recommendations.
The one that i would emphasize the most:
jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/qag76ip8...
#ALIFE2025 #TONAL2025 satellite
It was an honor to be invited to speak at the TONAL workshop on the role of noise in Artificial Life! www.oist.jp/research/res...
Looking forward to speaking about our recent work again later on at #ALife2025! Paper to be posted soon 🙂
Anyway, here is some actually incredible news
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
I am super excited to read this paper! Viability, semantic information, and more :)
journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...
Hello friends of bluesky! I am finishing my PhD this academic year, and am looking for postdocs and faculty applications in the realm of nonlinear dynamics, biology, complex systems, and CogSci. Any recommendations for places I should be looking at?
Congrats Will!
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You're tempting me lol
Going to change my dissertation proposal to this three days before the defense...
Anyone interested in autopoiesis and Randall Beer's formalization of it in Conway's Game of Life would probably enjoy looking at Tom's undergrad thesis, where he extends the ideas to the "Larger than Life" and "Real Life" family of cellular automata!
It was a pleasure, Tom :) very excited to see what comes next. Hope you are getting settled in your new home!
This looks like a nice entry point for folks interested in the intersection of dynamical systems theory and cell biology!