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Albion Lawrence

@albion.bsky.social
228 followers 347 following 84 posts

Theoretical physicist working in physical oceanography, geophysical fluid dynamics, quantum field theory, and quantum gravity. Opinions my own and not that of my employer. albionlawrence.github.io

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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Oceanography takes up most of my time now but I still have a couple quantum projects kicking around. I think we did something interesting here: arxiv.org/abs/2608.13664
arxiv.org
Open system probes of renormalization group flow
Open system probes can provide an efficient means to characterize quantum many-body systems by employing them as engineered environments. The key idea is to map long-range spatial correlations of the ...
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Eileen Guo (is on leave for rest of 2026) @eileenguo.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Watching Sam Altman's World ID announcement on its new ID verification partnerships w/ Tinder, Zoom, AWS, etc & want to point out that @technologyreview.com predicted all of this 4 years ago—while pointing out the privacy violations they built on. www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1...
technologyreview.com
Deception, exploited workers, and cash handouts: How World recruited its first half a million test users
The startup promises a fairly-distributed, cryptocurrency-based universal basic income. So far all it's done is build a biometric database from the bodies of the poor.
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SF Karel @karelsf.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
Ribbon cutting for our new imaging facility equipment funded by @malifesciences.bsky.social with special guests Mayor Jeannette McCarthy and Rep Thomas Stanley www.brandeis.edu/stories/2026...
brandeis.edu
Brandeis light microscopy facility marks a new era with ribbon-cutting ceremony
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Union of Concerned Scientists @ucs.org · 17/03/2026
UCS filed Freedom of Information Act requests to the NSF to publicly release all of its communications about its plans to restructure the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “NCAR represents one of the most successful models of federally supported scientific infrastructure in the US.”
ucs.org
UCS Files Requests to Make Proposals Public on How to Restructure National Center for Atmospheric Research
The Union of Concerned Scientists today filed Freedom of Information Act requests to the U.S. National Science Foundation to publicly release all of its communications about its plans to restructure t...
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AGU (American Geophysical Union) @agu.org · 17/03/2026
AGU urges the NSF to step back and ask a more fundamental question: What problem, precisely, is this restructuring intended to solve? buff.ly/eDGI0Cw
buff.ly
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
OMG
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Jeremy Bassis @bassisjeremy.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
Anyone asserting that professors are indoctrinating students needs to teach a 200+ person intro class. How am I going to find time to indoctrinate students when I spend all day responding to emails with variations like "As stated in class and in the syllabus . . ."
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Doug Henwood @doughenwood.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
Finally got to this. Excellent, important piece. Wokeness isn’t dead—it’s been repurposed for the right.
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LPE Blog @lpeblog.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
Today, @quinnslobodian.com takes you inside a recent conference devoted to the world after neoliberalism. What emerged, he argues, was less a rupture with the past than a centrist project of status-quo stabilization.
lpeproject.org
Post-Neoliberalism is the New Centrism
At a recent convening devoted to the death of neoliberalism, what emerged was less a rupture with the past than a centrist project of status-quo stabilization.
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
I want the superpower that lets you do key intermediate steps of the calculation wrong and still get the right answer.
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
Thank you, Henri!
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
Thank you! It's been too long since we've seen each other, is the problem here.
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
Re the prior posts: the Brandeis Physics department is a fantastic, collegial place to do science.
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
Re the PhD program, those interested in soft condensed matter, biological physics, experimental high energy physics, or quantum and gravitational theory, and astrophysics (focus on solar system & exoplanet atmospheres) are also encouraged to apply! www.brandeis.edu/gsas/program...
brandeis.edu
Graduate Programs in Physics
The graduate programs in Physics, in Brandeis University's Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, offer generous scholarships for master's and PhD students.
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
I also have funds for a PhD student in physical oceanography; this would be in the Physics Department. Further information about the PhD program and a link to apply is here: www.brandeis.edu/gsas/program...
brandeis.edu
Graduate Programs in Physics
The graduate programs in Physics, in Brandeis University's Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, offer generous scholarships for master's and PhD students.
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
I have a postdoc position available in physical oceanography. Please pass it along! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31407
academicjobsonline.org
Brandeis University, Theoretical and Computational Physics
Job #AJO31407, Postdoc in Physics Oceanography, Theoretical and Computational Physics, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, US
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
Props especially to joint Brandeis/Caltech postdoc Jack Skinner, who really drove this project and did very good work.
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
We also benchmarked the technique on a high-resolution numerical simulation for which the extraction and interpolation yielded excellent results.
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
A new paper with Jack Skinner, Jörn Callies, myself, and Xihan Zhang. Extends prior work of Zhang and Callies, using Bayesian inversion to extract the signal of balanced flows from SWOT and simultaneously interpolate across the gap between the swaths. arxiv.org/abs/2512.03258
arxiv.org
Isolating Balanced Ocean Dynamics in SWOT Data
The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission provides two-dimensional sea surface height (SSH) maps at unprecedented resolution, but its signal is a combination of balanced meso- and submesos...
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
I have many problems with the NYT and their right-wing framing of much of the news, but credit where it is due for highlighting the AACM with some great tracks: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/a...
nytimes.com
5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the A.A.C.M.
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Daisy Rockwell @shreedaisy.bsky.social · 27/11/2025
My memoir-essay on growing up with Norman Rockwell Thanksgivings is up in Vogue this morning. Here’s a small extract: www.vogue.com/article/norm...
A 1971 Ladies’ Home Journal photoshoot of Norman Rockwell’s family at a Thanksgiving meal, recreating his 1943 painting “Freedom from Want”
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Tom Ewing @tomewing.bsky.social · 23/11/2025
Handshake meme - "Me doing a CAPTCHA" and "THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O'Brien" uniting over "Is the guy riding the bicycle part of the bicycle?"
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Of the reviews I’ve read this is closest to my own experience of the novel.
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Defector @defector.com · 19/11/2025
Thomas Pynchon is laughing all the way to the brink:
defector.com
Thomas Pynchon Is Laughing All The Way To The Brink | Defector
Thomas Pynchon’s reputation precedes him. He is literature’s ur-diagnostician of the post-war psyche, the author of difficult doorstopper novels, and a sort of prophet of paranoia—someone ahead of…
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
A friend of mine once said to her HS students about something similar: "just because I have a French dictionary doesn't mean I know how to speak French".
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 09/11/2025
I'm pretty sure you read this but it has to be posted here (it is amazing to read now, 35 years after the first time I did) gwern.net/doc/ai/poetr...
gwern.net
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
Also contains lizard lassoing and Anole Annals
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Katrina Miller @katrinamillerphd.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
has your scientific work been cut? @nytimes.com wants to hear from you. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/c...
nytimes.com
Has Your Scientific Work Been Cut? We Want to Hear.
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
A well-turned sentence is an inspiring beginning to the working day.
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Leo C. Stein @duetosymmetry.com · 26/08/2025
I'm sad to report that Rainer (Rai) Weiss passed away yesterday at age 92. Rai developed the design for LIGO, he and Kip got it funded, trained countless researchers, and received the 2017 Nobel Prize. Rai always had time for students and treated us as equals. May his memory be a blessing
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James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
If you put the DOGE guys on a desert island where the only way out was to say the magic words “I’m not sure what the answer is, let me consult someone who has worked on this problem for a long time” they would all starve to death
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Katrina Miller @katrinamillerphd.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
Mary K Gaillard, a theorist who had a knack for telling experimental physicists where to look, died in her home on May 23 at 86. Dr. Gaillard was an unpaid scientist at CERN for more than a decade, & the first woman physicist hired & tenured at Berkeley: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/s...
nytimes.com
Mary K. Gaillard, 86, Physicist Who Probed the Subatomic Universe, Dies
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Kirsten Weld @kirstenweld.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
"In the absence of strong and principled leadership from Columbia’s Board of Trustees and Acting President, it falls to the faculty, above all, to defend the values and norms that have defined the university and allowed it to flourish." academeblog.org/2025/07/29/a...
academeblog.org
An Agreement That Settles Nothing
BY THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CHAPTER OF THE AAUP The Agreement between the federal government and Columbia University announced on July 24, 2025, has been presented as a settlement of Title VI violat…
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
Inspiring! www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
‘Things keep evolving into anteaters.’ Odd animals arose at least 12 separate times
Findings speak to the dramatic impact ants and termites can have on mammalian evolution
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
www.programmablemutter.com/p/this-simpl...
programmablemutter.com
This Simple Chart Explains Why Columbia Caved To Trump
The Muppets Who Actually Run the University
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Kirsten Weld @kirstenweld.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
The cited cost of this putative center ranges from $500m to $1b. Meanwhile, over at Harvard’s School of Public Health, a $200m budget gap due to the Trump admin breaking hundreds of NIH and NSF research contracts has already produced hundreds of layoffs, including of TT faculty. Priorities.
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Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
Academic freedom mostly means freedom to work on something for 10 years and still not submit it
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
Miles Reid on Andrew Wiles solving Fermat's Last Theorem: "it goes without saying that an individual with a total of only 14 publications to his credit who spends 7 years sulking in his attic would be a strong candidate for early retirement at an aggressive British research department."
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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
Someone on Twitter posted that they had run into Philip Glass at their lower Manhattan polling place, saying nice things about Mamdani. The campaign put this up as a quote-tweet within the hour.
Title card for Koyaanisqatsi, with the name of the movie superimposed on a long exposure of a complex highway intersection at night, except it's Zohraanisqatsi.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
who would the New York Times and Wall Street want in charge of New York's fire department: an upstart young firefighter or a serial arsonist? The answer may surprise you
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Brandeis University AAUP @aaupbrandeis.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
Brandeis faculty and staff out for #NoKings in Waltham! L to R: Matthew Headrick, Sabine von Mering (as a bear), Abigail Arnold, Irina Dubnina, and Toni Shapiro-Phim. Matt,Sabine, and Irina are members of @aaupbrandeis.bsky.social .
Brandeis faculty and staff at the Waltham No Kings demonstration, holding signs reading: "No King! Fund Science", "Keep ICE where it belongs" (held by Sabine von Mering dressed as a polar bear), "Emergency is here! Impeach Trump", and "Stand with Ukraine".
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Sen. Pumpkin Gogurt @ugarles.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
At 1pm Eastern today, 200 scientists will be doing a 100 hour livestream about all of the ways that the administration, through DOGE, is endangering us, through the dismantling of the weather and climate science apparatuses. Let people know and tune in. You don't have to watch all 100 hours.
wclivestream.com
Redirecting to: https://www.youtube.com/@wclivestream/live
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
There is also a BlueSky account: @aaupbrandeis.bsky.social
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
(We are awaiting recognition as an official advocacy chapter)
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Albion Lawrence @albion.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
The Brandeis members of the AAUP have a website! www.aaup-brandeis.org
aaup-brandeis.org
Brandeis AAUP
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