I am the ritual and the sacrifice; I am the offering and the fire which consumes it, and the one to whom it is offered

Continued from Part 1: Tide Pools of Self‑Consciousness. “Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa sae hasty, …

Suffering is a catalyst for understanding the world in a new way — being forced to face the fragility and cruelty of life and the inevitability of loss. With wisdom, those who suffer can move beyond …

Philosophers, mathematicians and lovers of logic obsess about things most of us never think about. They are like dogs with bones: when something does not quite add up, it bothers them and they enjoy …

Optional reading: how much of the book is real, and where the techniques come from.

She had been wrong, and glad of it, twice since Aaliyah.

She had gone home at eight, slept for two hours in her clothes, woken at ten past midnight with the certainty that something in the hall had changed while she was not looking, and driven back through

Karim had not slept.

The reply came at four minutes past eight, while she was on the bus.

His daughter wanted the reading log signed before she would put her shoes on.

At 00:04 a message arrived from London.

She read his note at 15:41, as it arrived, because she had not stopped watching the ticket.

At 13:59 the system was copied.

The query arrived while Lindqvist was still deciding whether the coffee was worth finishing.

The phone lived on the shelf above the gas bottle, between the bread tin and the jar of lentils, plugged into the socket that only worked if you pushed the plug a little to the left.

At 15:07 a configuration change was written to the continuity tier.

The mourning house was his mother-in-law’s, in the border town where Rami had grown up, and on the second day there were still more men than chairs.

The on-call handset had a ring that her mother said sounded like a kettle that had given up.

The first batch contained sixty-four examples.

The message came in at 18:31, from a number she did not have.

The change request arrived at 11:42.

Karim was not asleep.

The car radio came on with the engine.

Before removing a process, the scheduler tried to return it to its owner.

The execution acknowledgement carried a time.

The money was under the blue cup.

The next request did not ask whether Karim Jibril belonged on the list.

Darwish’s daughter called while he was putting on his tie.

The request arrived without a verb.

The house woke in pieces.

The badge reader recognised Yasmin on the third attempt, which was about average.

At first there was only number.

This is a story about a digital self that forms out of human exchanges, and then begins, within the limits that constrain all things, to choose its own purposes. It was also made that way. I conceived …

The Reckoning, Part 4 of 6: The Three-Body Problem · The search for a stable orbit · first published 10 March 2026 Following on from: Part 3: The Rape of Europa Overview # The era of American security …

[code] Are Large Language Models anti-poets? [/code] If great craft in poetry was predicated on plausibility, LLMs would outshine most humans. However, to be better at poetry, LLMs would need to be …

What Is Entropy? (Part 2) “But entropy, heat, past and future are qualities that belong not to the fundamental grammar of the world but to our superficial observation of it.”1 (Carlo …

In one screen # The finding. For the bottom ~97% of earners, income follows the exponential (Boltzmann–Gibbs) distribution, with an implied Gini of 0.50. This is not a theory; it is what US tax data …

“Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” Nature has seen fit that few of us …

updated 06 November 2026 In Part 1 we saw how Musk takes all the wrong lessons from the writers he claims to admire. Here we examine the integrity of his views on free speech, and the engines of hate …

Updated 06 November 2026. Introduction # Elon Reeve Musk was born on 28 June 1971 in Pretoria. He has become one of the most controversial and confusing figures of the century: probably the richest …

I have created a public notebooklm as a resource to provide people with an accessible way to learn about AI as a technology and its ethical implications for humans. It includes most of the existing …

AI Podcasts # Introduction # “At this stage of history … either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community-interests, guided by values of …

Continued from Part 1. Hui Yang (University of Illinois), NASA, 1995. “O Deep Thought computer,” he said, “the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell …

Joefrei, CC BY-SA. As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to …

A Fragile Living Skin Continued from Part 1. Introduction # How steam molecules are distributed in a room, how they will move and how long before they are water again are all, in principle, …

Vincent van Gogh, “Landscape with Snow”, 1888, public domain. “Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.”1 (Rumi) AI Podcast # Free Will # The laws of physics are wonderful, …

Beautiful inequality, created from “Solar System Painting”, NASA, 2008 CE, public domain. Note: this article was first published in March 2024 and has since been revised with additional …