There is a constant effort between all efforts, to call it war is to miss the point. War is a failure of effort, when our efforts forget themselves in the name of loyalty or some other type of dogma. ...

a bit ranty

The Sovereign Individual celebrates the instincts of the impossibly wealthy to accumulate, hoard and insulate themselves from the messier demands of mass democracy.

'Alignment' or 'aligning' came to my greater attention while in the latter half of my travels in Canada in 2025. These Alignment notes ⓧ posts are based on short notes from my red journal, an overwrit...

A method to use or explore an intentional suspension of judgement or separating out. While this term of the blur was developed before my readings on neo-Pyrrhonism, it has parallels with Pyrrhonist su...

I write about the blur as a state of mind, or perhaps it is better to say, a state of attention. Or intention : In philosophy, intentionality is the power of minds and mental states to be about, to re...

My writing on alignment, a sub-project of the taphonomy of worlding, now tilts to an embodied physics, which is a kind of metaphysics, but not about physics, but about how we world our bodies as anima...

My writing on alignment, a sub-project of the taphonomy of worlding, now tilts to an embodied physics, which is a kind of metaphysics, but not about physics, but about how we world our bodies as anima...

My writing on alignment, a sub-project of the taphonomy of worlding, is now at part 6, and while I was going to publish about causality next, I decided to get back to the first notes on alignment I wr...

rigidity. plasticity, multivarious dimensions of possibility and their alignments

My letter to the Economist, about the idea of a Chinese “quarantine” on Taiwan, got published (it’s below the linked letter here). As is normal, it was cut, so here’s the full version The idea of a “quarantine” (scare quotes in original) has been put forward as a strategy the People's Republic of China might deploy against Taiwan https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/05/01/any-chinese-curbs-on-taiwans-trade-would-carry-big-economic-costs. This new emphasis reflects widespread recognition, following the failure of Russian naval power in the Ukraine war, that neither a seaborne invasion nor a traditional blockade is likely to succeed in reincorporating Taiwan. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/implausibility-taiwan-blockade But a quarantine lacks any definition in international law. It is, to use an Australianism, the blockade you have when you are not having a blockade. The term, in this usage, was first used by President John F Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis, as a tool of de-escalation. Kennedy wished to prevent the transfer of missiles to Cuba without provoking a nuclear war. Hence, he wanted to avoid declaring a blockade which is a well-defined act of war. The Soviets, also wishing to avoid nuclear war, did not break the quarantine, and did not challenge Kennedy's characterisation This history makes it clear that the term "quarantine" is a legal fiction, dependent on the assent of both parties. There is no reason for Taiwan to take such a fiction seriously. Rather, any purported quarantine is, in reality, a blockade, and therefore an act of war. The only effect of using this terminology, rather than openly declaring a blockade, is to hand the initiative to Taiwan, which can choose whether and how to respond militarily. The actual role of this fiction is to allow the perpetuation of a discussion in which a PRC takeover of Taiwan is a real and present danger rather than a possibility for the remote future. This fiction serves the interests of many parties: the PRC which must maintain the claim that it can reincorporate Taiwan if it chooses, the Taiwanese government which hopes for US aid, and the dominant faction in the US military and foreign policy establishment, for which the threat supposedly posed by China is a central part of the raison d'être. Recognition that a forcible reincorporation of Taiwan into the PRC is not actually possible would imply a fundamental rethinking which no-one who matters really wants. https://www.economist.com/letters/2025/05/15/the-problems-with-deep-sea-mining

In the mid-1980s, on a windy slope with a view, overlooking the shallow waters flowing in Murrumbidgee of the Monaro, in southern New South Wales, a clean-cut hippy drummed deep into the weed-invested...

housekeeping

In this work, we show how Euclidean 3-space uniquely emerges from the structure of quantum temporal correlations associated with sequential measurements of Pauli observables on a single qubit. Quite r...

An investigation of the changing behaviour of a single quantum bit through time has uncovered a tantalising similarity to the geometry of three-dimensional space