Photographer: David Clode | Source: Unsplash I am taking a step back from writing about contentious topics — authoritarian politics, climate change, approaching extinction and animal rights. Not for ever, but for a few weeks. It feels like every conversation about those topics…
In 1954, a commissioner of the US Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, declared that atomic energy would make electricity too cheap to meter. In other words we were going to enter an era of such radical abundance of free energy…
Academic work, like any other human activity, is dependent on constant practice. Writing routines are hard to re-establish once they are broken. If you go away to a conference for a week, the momentum that has been built up before…
I apologize in advance if this weeks email is too abstruse or technical. Consciousness is a difficult topic and there’s only so much one can do without jargon. As a famous man once said, “make things as simple as possible,…
This post is partly a response to Sartaj’s post from a few days ago. He starts his post with a rather remarkable quote: “Colors are an artefact of perception.” This one line captures four hundred years of western investigations of…
