Slow thoughts

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  • May 22, 2025

    Q Day Came Quietly

    No quantum computer required. Just an idea — and an exponential speedup to one of the most important algorithms in science.


  • May 18, 2025

    OODA Loop

    We used to navigate by the stars. Now we have 2.7 seconds to decide who lives and dies. Welcome to the OODA loop.


  • 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 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 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.


  • 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.


  • July 17, 2024

    A Conversation With Sara García Alonso

    Sara García Alonso is a research scientist at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, and a class of ’22 reserve in the European Astronaut Corps.


  • July 16, 2024

    A Conversation With Guido Tonelli

    Guido Tonelli is an author and an experimental physicist. His team at CERN was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs boson.


  • July 5, 2024

    Love, Math & Witchcraft: How Roasting Psychoanalysis Came Back to Bite Richard Feynman

    The further we zoom in on Mother Nature, the clearer it becomes that, at its most fundamental level, science resembles ‘witch-doctoring’ more than anything else.

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