Slow thoughts

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  • 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.


  • July 4, 2024

    Non-Commutative Reading Order : When Books Speak to Each Other Across Time

    It’s fascinating how books aren’t mere repositories of information. That the order in which you encounter them actually dictates how your understanding evolves.


  • June 6, 2024

    Killer Application: The Surprising Correlation Between Engineering Education and Terrorism

    It’s not that terrorists are desperate for tech-talent, it’s that engineering education breeds the type of mindset that’s conducive to extremism.

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