ft. 6G Technology — I’ve been to some great shows over the years. The Charles Mingus Big Band and Al di Meola at Ronnie Scott’s. Chic, The Stones (no surprises there) three times, the great Colombian supergroup Ondatropica, Jupiter & Okwess International after they were run out of their native Mali by Islamists. The…

There’s something incomparably more difficult about sitting down to write something about a topic like friendship (though I’ve done it before), compared to sitting down to write about a topic like quantum computing, exotic matter, the history of language or artificial intelligence. In those cases, some vague patina of respectable…

And How Defenders of Liberty Helped Them Do It — This is a short story, and it’s a short story about the media as much as it is about the subjects it would otherwise obviously be about: like the ethics of large firms, the money-China question, and Apple CEO Tim Cook himself. It’s a short story that repeats another short…

How to Take Humans and Make Them Less — In light of a number of recent events, I’ve had impressed upon me the belief that we really could use a proper philosophy of business, just as we have a philosophy of science, mathematics and medicine. The first item in its canon might be the net benefit schema — the…

Excerpts from The Immaculate Roll: Albums of the Rolling Stones — One of the great pleasures of long love relationships is the amassing of an unbearable weight of trivial information: the things that we know about those whom we love, things that few others have taken or would take the time to know, are testament to the faithful longevity of a…

…in honour of the passing of my grandmother, Eileen Elizabeth Ranford, who died on July 23rd 2021 of COVID, at the age of 84 — July 23rd There’s one thing of which you can be sure. One way or another, the news will come. And one day — perhaps a fine day, perhaps a sunny day in the summertime, perhaps a winter’s morning clouded by ulterior event, perhaps a springtime evening when one is far away in…

“What is AI?” An interesting thing about this question is that it is likely, if you pose it to 100 people, that you will get more than 100 answers. “It’s kind of like machine learning…but it’s also possibly weaponisable…and lots of companies use it for data collection…in 10 years it…

It gives great, if rather quicksilver, insight into the tenor of our times that the statement “The IT Revolution has failed to produce meaningful economic benefits,” seems not only absurd but self-evidently absurd. …

Or “Viewing Beyond Perspective” — Preface i. Miyazaki and Takahata ii. Ghibli, Disney and Narrative iii. The Ghibli Recipe iv. Ghibli and the Self v. You’ve Got Balls vi. The Green Blood of Hayao Miyazaki vii. The Great Beyond In the mid-1970s, the man who may be the most eminent Japanese animator of the 20th…