Today, let me introduce you to a new post format. Here’s the thing: the click-through “tile” design of the website encourages long-form writing. This was a deliberate decision to keep the quality of posts high and discourage filler content, but … Continued
I have a huge discovery to share with you: Scotland is Pakistan. Consider: A mountaineous hinterland full of angry bearded men wearing women’s clothing, who seem to be suspiciously close to their livestock. Cuisine based on bits of sheep the … Continued
Right now, Asia is a powderkeg with several simultaneously lit fuses. There are at least four conflicts in Asia from which neither side can afford to back down, as the stakes are too great, there is no prospect of a … Continued
Nobody is more imaginative than a person who doesn’t want to concede an obvious point. As the internet brought 24/7 global debates, it also brought rapid innovation in the field of being a dishonest intransigent asswipe in the face of … Continued
How sweet something tastes is clearly a matter of acclimation. When you cut sugar from your diet, your sense of sweetness gets “downregulated” in a few weeks. Afterwards, sweet things often taste too sweet. So I have a plan to … Continued
Tardigrades can survive an extremely broad range of environments, including: Temperatures between -272°C (a degree above absolute zero) and 150°C. Pressures between a hard vacuum and 6000 atmospheres (six times the pressure at the bottom at the Mariana trench). 10 … Continued
In a time of muddled language and words losing all meaning, it falls to the best and brightest among us to engage in a heroic effort to make language correspond to reality again, a Herculean, Confucius-inspired work of rectification of … Continued
The notion that laws of nature apply to humans gets called a lot of nasty names, such as “biological determinism”, but it is simply consistent science. This really shouldn’t be controversial. We now know all human traits have a genetic … Continued
It helps tremendously to understand that countries have de-facto shareholders, usually invisible by design, except with a bit of digging or their own carelessness. We have witnesssed an example of carelessness resulting in increased attention and unmasking of the game … Continued
There’s a theory called the “pump of evolution” that says mass extinction events were necessary for the rise of complex life, and eventually intelligence, although anyone who has spent more than five minutes on Twitter would seriously doubt intelligent life … Continued
Here’s something interesting: we’ve been selectively breeding crops and animals for thousands of years before any formal theory of evolution was written. Not only do we act on knowledge we don’t realize we have and would struggle to put into … Continued
The broken windows theory says that visible signs of crime and general nastiness lead people to behave in more socially destructive ways. The opposite also applies: making things nice helps people behave better. In the 1980s, the New York subway was … Continued
Western intellectuals are consumed by paroxysms of postcolonial repentance. While that is ethically understandable, it is unclear why they’re preoccupied with European colonies 200 years ago while remaining curiously silent about the colonial empires that exist to this day. We … Continued
In 2012, the Chinese government has generously built, “for free”, a new $ 200 million headquarters for the African Union in Addis Ababa, including a sophisticated computer system. In the most unsurprising plot development in history, the building was recently … Continued
Uber gets fairly criticised for unethical business practices, and unfairly criticised by taxi drivers scared of superior competition. There are, however, at least two giant problems that you rarely hear addressed. For one, a solid proportion of Uber drivers are … Continued
Maybe the fundamental reason your barista wears a waistcoat is a creeping collective sense that civilisation got derailed in the early 20th century, and we need to restore it to the last known good setting. Isn’t it remarkable that of … Continued
Imagine a western mandarin at a G20 summit. He drives a Volkswagen, has a grey suit, mediocre salary, a plain wife and only one mistress. Then he meets his Saudi counterpart. Who arrives in a Maserati, with a team of … Continued
You should probably not take your serious geopolitical analysis from a drunken essayist . That being said, for entertainment purposes, here’s my take. On Tuesday, someone in Syria dropped nerve gas on a busy street full of civilians. It is not … Continued
If you agree that things have causes, and that really big things don’t just appear out of nowhere, you might find the following line of thought worth a thought. Do you ever feel like your country is basically a bunch of … Continued