Essays on network science, neuroscience, systems thinking, and the architecture of ideas.
February 16, 2026
Most adoption in networked environments is coerced. A simulation of social pressure dynamics shows 60 to 80 percent of participants adopt against their will, with coercion peaking in a critical window between 10 and 25 percent adoption. When network topology predicts individual choice, agency becomes a design variable.
February 09, 2026
Democritus is the father of atomism. Except he isn't. When we trace intellectual lineage today, Democritus owns atomism. Leucippus exists as a footnote. This pattern reveals something fundamental about how conceptual structures persist across time: ideas survive when their relational architecture is stable, regardless of who built the first version.
February 08, 2026
Picture the Mediterranean in 600 BCE as a graph with 150+ nodes and thousands of weighted edges. Nobody planned it this way. Yet the system self-organized with mathematical precision, driven by one brutal constraint: the cost function of moving mass across space.
January 13, 2026
I used to think understanding meant knowing all the pieces. Then I started studying complex systems. What I discovered inverted everything: the whole is fundamentally different from its parts. You can know every neuron in a brain and still not understand consciousness.
January 18, 2026
Hermann Hesse's Beneath the Wheel is typically read as a critique of rigid educational systems, but when you read it through the lens of signal integrity, something else emerges: a precise description of what happens when a person is forced to oscillate at a frequency that isn't theirs.
January 05, 2026
In my work as a computational neuroscientist, I study how networks emerge, organize, and fail. But there's a network story I've been reluctant to tell: the neurotoxic effects of indoor mold exposure. Understanding the network dynamics at play might help legitimize experiences while grounding them in rigorous science.
December 20, 2025
When someone becomes a critical node in a network, they accumulate influence regardless of intention. This is centrality. And it creates dynamics that no amount of personal boundary-setting can resolve. We're trying to fix a structural problem with individual solutions.
November 17, 2025
Picture a patient with multiple chronic conditions discharged from the hospital. Each clinician is dedicated, yet no single person holds the complete narrative. This is the reality of fragmented healthcare. Through the lens of network theory, it appears as it is: a system suffering from a failure of connectivity.
October 30, 2025
The 80/20 rule isn't an accident or rule of thumb. These patterns are mathematical inevitabilities that emerge from the hidden network structures underlying our connected world. Networks naturally generate power laws through preferential attachment, creating a "rich get richer" dynamic.