James

Next Day Delivery

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Next Day Delivery

Or what to make of all the pieces of time that come in the post

Don’t get upset, it is the postal service’s function to deliver these to you.

Don’t leave them around where young children might swallow them.

Don’t leave them to be crushed by their own weight. 

Unpack them.

Don’t forget to piece them together.

There is nothing worse than to leave them separate. 

The one thing worse than leaving them separate is to put them together in the wrong order.

Do that don’t.

The one thing worse than putting them in the wrong order is to assemble them in no order at all. Or to stack them instead of spreading them in a line as the instructions instruct.

The instructions are simple. Follow them. Put one after the other, put the next one directly after the one that comes before, do not be tempted to try to put them the other way round. 

Do this. Don’t stop doing this. Don’t stop doing this. Don’t stop doing this. Don’t stop doing this. And repeat.

A Parable I am holding in reserve in case I am ever asked to give a commencement address, or such like

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A man walks into a gallery one afternoon.  Of all the works on the wall, there is one that captivates him especially – a luminous circle depicting almost perfectly the timbre of the autumn as he is experiencing it. A tree that has half shed its gilded leaves, the poised light. So simple, so apparently … Read more

Borges & I & I

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Borges wrote of the other Borges, the one things happen to, winner of prizes. The one known for his Fictions, for his playful philosophical devices, his austere prose and sometimes loveless characters. The conjunction of marble and flowers. But I know a third Borges. I see him from where I am sitting at my desk … Read more

Because Υou Αre Αlive

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∀y∀x : (y & ¬y → x) Every undergraduate logician is taught that anything follows from a contradiction.  They marvel over this for two minutes, that if one accepts a set of contradictory premises, one can prove whatever one wishes, with the full force of logical certainty. One can equally prove that nothing follows from … Read more

The Speed of Information

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What distance means for gaming, interplanetary dating & alien conversations The dizzying progress in increasing the speed of communication is brushing up against physical limits. The world may start to feel bigger. Consider the time sent to send a message between a sender in London and a receiver in New York: Between 1600 and the … Read more

[5] Merlin Dreams of Newton

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Merlin Dreams of Newton

Here everything is bound by magic, which is to say it is tacked together haphazardly.

Suppose one wishes to fly away on holiday, one must open a book, gather herbs in the forest, mutter and stir. Though it won’t work without a certain knack, and no-one can explain what that is. Indeed, no-one can explain much of anything. Children’s stories tell of a place where a small set of rules, stronger than any spell, governs all nature, where the alignment of planets leaves daily lives untouched. Where stars and people are made of the same democratic atoms. A scientific republic.

[4] Landers

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Landers

This world is inhabited by a lethargic species, whose members’ skin harvests energy directly from light. Neither do they die, nor do they reproduce. They are capable of racing across their planet’s featureless surface at great speed. Yet they never move. Their minds are able to weigh up many million thoughts at once. When meteor showers streak across the cloudless sky, they can tell instantly where each rock will be in ten thousand years. They would beat you at chess, Starcraft or Go, should they wish to do so. And that is the problem. They have no need of wishes.

[3] Faith

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Faith

In this world God exists and undertakes many acts to prove it. She has written “I exist (God)” in stars. She often swoops down to Earth to pat babies, cure the sick and give clues to physics problems. She is an unusual dancer. Her grooves are mysterious.

Despite all this, a large group of people refuse to believe in her. They gather to spread the bad news, insisting you must have faith, and that – although they provide no evidence beyond their own intuitions – “that lady ain’t God, and you better not believe in her, otherwise you’re headed straight to hell.”

Great Equations: Kinetic Energy

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There are some sets of symbols that, when interpreted, capture something significant about the way things work. This is one such set: Where m is a mass, v its speed and KE its kinetic energy. This is an equation that receives relatively little attention compared to more famous cousins, yet here we find both a … Read more