Slow thoughts

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  • April 10, 2025

    Microsoft’s Majorana Move Isn’t About Qubits. It’s Bigger Than That.

    Quantum. Nobody said it was supposed to be straightforward.


  • February 27, 2025

    How Not To (and Just Possibly How To) Study Japanese

    Coming at a language as an outsider isn’t always a disadvantage. What first feels like an insurmountable barrier can become a vantage point.


  • January 3, 2025

    Tradecraft : the Stuff They Don’t Teach You at School

    Spies, coders, journalists—they all rely on intuition, improvisation, and experience. It’s tradecraft.


  • January 2, 2025

    Weaponised Randomness : Monte Carlo from the Manhattan Project to The Three-Body Problem

    They call it “weaponized randomness.” I had no idea what it really was until I stumbled across it in three consecutive books.


  • December 26, 2024

    The 2024 Reading List

    It’s been a good reading year.


  • December 23, 2024

    Elementary : From Hadron Bootstrapping to the Implicate Order

    If there’s nothing fundamental about ‘elementary’ particles, if nature never bottoms out, then what remains to hold on to?


  • December 19, 2024

    Teach, Don’t Tell : Lessons in Mastery, From Tennis to Welding

    What’s true on the court is true in the workshop: effective teaching relies on clarity, precision, and the ability to transcend words.


  • December 17, 2024

    Quantum Primitives : An Ontology in 12 ½ Chapters

    Mapping out the primitives of a field is a useful way to understand its landscape. In the case of quantum technology, this approach proves especially challenging—but equally rewarding.


  • October 24, 2024

    Super-Signalling

    Evolution has created a nasty cognitive hack that ethologists call the super-stimulus. I’d like to propose a term for a related behaviour.


  • October 13, 2024

    Sweet Nothing : The Gospel According to Frank Bascombe

    Richard Ford wraps up the Bascombe saga and leaves the reader with a sense of miracle.


  • October 7, 2024

    Saying is Believing : Authenticity, ‘Hypnosen,’ and the Startup Myth

    Hypnosen is great fun, but it paints a picture of the startup circus I don’t fully agree with. Not all entrepreneurs are full of shit, and pitching isn’t just a spectator sport.


  • September 25, 2024

    Nothing is Real : Amanda Gefter is Thinking About Life, the Universe and Everything

    Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is a coming of age story—not only for an exceptional science writer, but for the entire cosmos itself.


  • September 4, 2024

    A Conversation With Jacek Dukaj

    He is Poland’s most popular science fiction author, with his work adapted for both the silver screen and a Netflix original series. He also engages deeply with geopolitics, on Earth and beyond.


  • August 26, 2024

    Seeing the Light : Fei-fei Li and the Dawn of AI

    Fei-fei Li has had a front-row seat to the cutting-edge development of AI over the past couple of decades. Her biography is captivating.


  • August 16, 2024

    Commonplacing : Nurturing Slow Hunches from Notebook to Knowledge

    Carmen Berzatto does it. Sherlock Holmes did it too. How about you, do you commonplace?

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