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Purity has long been treated as a virtue. Clean water. Clean bodies. Clean ideas. Clean bloodlines. Pure as the driven snow. It is not merely descriptive language but aspirational language, a claim that something has approached an ideal state. Yet the closer science has come to understanding how living systems actually function, the stranger this… Continue reading Purity Is an Aesthetic of Death [From the Glitch Series]
I recently wrote about the Earth as an anomaly of abundance: a planet bursting with color, texture, chemistry, and gratuitous detail, adrift in a universe otherwise dominated by emptiness, repetition, gas giants, gravitational fields, and uniform stone. Against a cosmological backdrop that seems to favor scale over subtlety and uniformity over nuance, Earth reads almost… Continue reading Executable Error: Why We Are a Glitch That Will Not Go Galactic
I’m Done With Birthdays Not ageing. Not candles or cake. Not even the marking of time. Birthdays themselves. Or rather, birthday celebrations as they have become: bloated, indiscriminate, and rolled out at scale with all the thoughtfulness of a software update. The problem isn’t just scale. It’s philosophical. At some point a ritual stops meaning… Continue reading One Billion Day Funeral for Birthdays
“At every occasion, I’ll be ready for a funeral” https://vimeo.com/12315305?share=copy The violence and unprecedented lawlessness of events generating world media headlines in the first week of this year have delayed this long-overdue eulogy. They also sharpened the risk that any further delay is likely to result in its never being written at all as the… Continue reading One Billion Day Funeral for the Toaster
I find myself in constant awe of human creativity. Human creativity in its ordinary form, beyond the masterpieces, the unceasing churn of fonts, gadgets, fabrics, toys and tools, gushing into existence in such voluminous torrents the mind short-circuits to infinity. Unless you are a fanatic minimalist just have a look about your house. If you… Continue reading This is not a Pipe and Other Instruments
Imagine a world where we could barbecue brisket, kebabs, tavuk and langoustine to ensure adequate protein intake without reliance on industrialised agriculture and the ruin it has wrought upon the biosphere. Better still, without the moral dissonance required to justify the mass torture and mechanised slaughter of domesticated animals. There was a time these lofty… Continue reading Adults in the Room Behaving Badly
Occam’s Razor is one of those ideas that slipped out of philosophy and wandered into popular culture, shedding its actual meaning along the way. Ironically, the very process that made it famous - simplifying it for wider distribution - also hollowed it out. It’s journey towards accessibility stripped away nuance leaving something simple, catchy, and… Continue reading What Occam’s Razor Can’t Cut
You’ve just stumbled out of bed, slowly emerging from the dark syrup of sleep, your mind a fogged window. In the hall or kitchen stands someone who’s been awake for hours, upright, caffeinated, and burning conversational octane at a high rpm. They greet you with that buoyant, easy cheer that can only radiate from a… Continue reading Household Thermodynamics: The 2nd Law
through the day. “Good morning.” “Good afternoon. It’s 12:16 p.m.” You know the type — that wry, pedantic smirk. Fack off. English, among other tongues, has turned noon into a change of guard, a hinge-hour demanding we adjust our greeting like a uniform. Compliance is obligatory. There’s no way out of this small tyranny. You… Continue reading The Battle of Midway
It had been several minutes since the tug pushed us away from gate 3C and left us idling in the middle of the tarmac at Hamad International. From 6A’s porthole, the sea swayed gently at the edge of the runway, the Gulf sun making the ridges on the water and in the concrete slabs shimmer.… Continue reading Yute
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