The fire has escaped the engine room, and it is burning through the institutions of our civilisation. In a story like the Game of Thrones, itself influenced by the reality of feudal politics in Medieval Europe, we are taught that the...
When we (inevitably) discover intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy, I predict that they will have teapots. My line of reasoning is that just as the evolution of body plans inevitably stumbles across useful things like mouths and body armour, so...
I’ve just agreed to milk one of the neighbour’s cows. Haven’t milked a cow since I was about 6, when I used to hang around with dad when he was on milking duty. Our lovely jersey cow Heidi was a good...
For quite some time I have wished that Twitter had a native visualization tool that let you see what was trending in real time. There are lists of course, but I’m a visual person and there is so much potential for...
The singularity seems to be here. It just whooshed past, and we are in a new reality. OK? Of course, the first thing you’ll notice is that we’re all still alive. The world still seems to be here. It wasn’t the...
So here we are. This morning I woke up feeling optimistic for the first time in months. So I revisited this old draft post, and decided to make it live, even though things are moving on already. I live on twitter...
Doubt is the most potent of thoughts, the most humble. It is ok to look down the skeptical wormhole. You can always look away again later. Poetry is the stink in the compost of decaying thought. I would like to evolve...
I recently had a clear out of my notebooks which i took when traveling in 1997-8-9 and filled with poetry and drawings (most are not publishable – but some of the o.k. ones are in the ‘poem library’ part of this...
ONE The first number is really all the numbers. It is the infinite one. Indivisible, or infinitely divisible. One way of conceiving of it is a bright light, streaming in all directions, with no shape and no source. It is also...
I went to two high schools which gave me two completely different perspectives. The first two years were at a fairly rough local public. At this place there were many individual teachers who were highly engaged with their students, great teachers,...
Last semester I spent a lot of time enjoying Jason Grossman’s and Dayal Wickramasinghe’s brilliant course ‘philosophy of the cosmos‘ (previously ‘poetry’ of the cosmos). This course spans a lot of material that I have been privately reading about for years...
