2025 October 1

How the Brain Balances Excitation and Inhibition

Yasemin Saplakoglu

In the mammalian cortex, the vast majority of neurons are either excitatory neurons that trigger other neurons to fire or inhibitory neurons that stop others from firing.
Excitatory and inhibitory neurons work in similar ways. Most release neurotransmitters, which travel across synapses and dock onto receptors on the next neuron. What distinguishes excitatory and inhibitory neurons is the type of neurotransmitters they release.
Excitatory neurons release glutamate when they fire. Glutamate triggers a bunch of positive ions to flood into a neuron, increasing its internal voltage and spurring it to fire an action potential.
Inhibitory neurons release a neurotransmitter that triggers negatively charged ions to flood into the next neuron or positively charged ions to flood out, inhibiting the next neuron from firing.
Excitatory neurons vastly outnumber inhibitory ones. But throughout mammalian brain evolution, inhibitory neurons have diversified and increased in quantity, suggesting they play critical roles.
Inhibitory neurons inhibit specific cells. For example, they fire less when an animal is near a food location, thus enhancing the desired signals.
Both excitatory and inhibitory neurons fire in milliseconds. Neuromodulatory neurons are much rarer in the brain and work more slowly.

AR Interesting summary of basic facts, but important for understanding how the brain manages the balancing act of staying near criticality (blog 2025-09-07).

 

⦿ Eleanor Lutz
The Solar System
(with radial log scale)
 

2025 September 29

Building Intelligent Machines

George Musser

Large language models can solve some problems but fail at others. No one knows how brain regions work together to create a self. One hypothesis is that consciousness is key.
Global workspace theory (GWT) conjectures that consciousness is integral to intelligence. Brain modules operate mostly independently, but every 100 ms or so they have a staff meeting where confident modules shout louder. The winner places its information into the workspace.
We can build a bottleneck filter into neural networks to pay attention to the key words in a text. Assigning zero value to the computational variables for some words stops backpropagation working, so a soft-attention mechanism that assigns nonzero weights to all options is part of the transformer architecture.
A global workspace cannot keep track of all the options. A generative flow network periodically selects one of the available options with a probability determined by the attention weights. The network is trained to work in either the forward or the reverse direction, so it can always go back to fix any errors. It develops representations of input data that parallel those of our brains.
Brain modules can create separate jargons. When we train two neural networks on English and French, each models its language as a latent space. The word cloud is the same shape for both languages because they refer to the same world, so we can rotate the two word clouds until they align. This procedure can also translate between module jargons.
GWT inventor Bernard Baars: "I'm constantly doubting whether GWT is really all that good."
Anil Seth: "Consciousness is not a matter of being smart .. Understanding conscious selfhood starts from understanding predictive models of the control of the body."

AR GWT has been around awhile, and many neuroscientists say IIT is better, particularly following the ASSC 2023 face-off where IIT came out marginally better. I say they're both inadequate, for reasons that parallel (but generalize) Seth's comment.
 

2025 September 25

A New Financial Impetus for Peace in Ukraine

Friedrich Merz

Vladimir Putin continues his brutal war of conquest against Ukraine. We must raise the costs of Russian aggression.
We will support Ukraine's defence for as long as it takes. I advocate mobilising financial resources on a scale that will secure Ukraine's military resilience for several years.
Germany is cautious about confiscating frozen Russian assets in Europe. There are questions of law and the role of the euro. But we can use these funds to defend Ukraine.
A solution should offer Ukraine an interest-free loan of almost €140 billion. That loan would only be repaid once Russia has compensated Ukraine for the damage it has caused.
Such extensive assistance will require budgetary guarantees from EU member states. Member states and Ukraine would jointly determine which materiel is procured.
Peace and freedom in Europe are under threat. As Europeans we hold powerful means to resist that threat.

AR Excellent idea. I'm delighted that Merz is bold enough to propose it. The scheme will let us fund the resistance until Putin is stopped.
 

2025 Autumn Equinox

Psychedelics Blew His Mind

Emily Eakin

Justin Smith-Ruiu is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Paris. In March 2020, the city shut down and he caught Covid. He sank into existential despair.
Smith-Ruiu, 53, turned to drugs: cannabis, psilocybin, and muscimol, a psychedelic made from a mushroom. A specialist in the history and philosophy of science, he then wrote On Drugs stone sober.
When philosophers think about consciousness, they tend to focus on paradigm cases. "But I think it might be methodologically preferable to go to the weirdest things our minds do and see what the problem of consciousness looks like then."
William James, 1902: "Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different."
Smith-Ruiu: "It seems strange to consider no other neurochemical settings as giving any kind of access to the way the world is."

AR I doubt that much of real value for consciousness studies will result from such a one-person self-reported anecdotal account. I recently read Christof Koch's autobiographical account of his drug use, and it told me nothing I could regard as a serious contribution to the science of consciousness.
 

2025 September 21

Security Guarantees for Ukraine

Alexander Stubb

Security guarantees in essence are a deterrent. That deterrent has to be plausible, and in order for it to be plausible it has to be strong. And that means also strategic communication, so we're making real security guarantees, and Russia knows that.
An American backstop will be necessary to give the guarantees real force. Foreign policy is always based on three pillars: values, interests, and power. Small states only have values and interests, but [Finland] can have influence instead of power.
Russia has absolutely no say in the sovereign decisions of [Ukraine]. But this war is too big for Putin to lose. He has made probably the biggest strategic mistake since the end of the cold war, and he has failed in all of his strategic aims.

AR President Stubb is right. We must give such security guarantees to Ukraine. We must be ready to fight on its behalf. America needs to understand and support that imperative.
 

2025 September 14

Trump Is No Strongman

Simon Tisdall

By posing as an uncrowned global monarch and grand arbiter of war and peace, Donald Trump perpetuates fantasies of US hegemony, omnipotence, and divine right.
The Ukraine and Gaza conflicts are expanding and escalating. By alternately appeasing, excusing, and encouraging the two foremost villains of these twin tragedies, Trump is greatly to blame. Faced by tough, unyielding opponents, he folds.
Trump has become a prime obstacle to peace. His ill-considered interventions, grandstanding, and partiality are prolonging both conflicts. His poor leadership and his lack of integrity or common sense are shocking for Europeans. His hostility to the EU and NATO, his tariff wars, and his electoral machinations have undermined western cohesion and confidence.
Putin acts with impunity. His drone incursion into Poland was a test of NATO. Trump has done nothing. He will not admit that his fawning subservience toward Putin has backfired. European NATO states see that waiting for Trump to act is futile.
Arab leaders face similar pressure to break with the United States. The Trump administration is unwilling to restrain Israel. Trump is out of his depth.

We are watching a scientific superpower destroy itself
Stephen Greenblatt

In October 1957, Americans learned of Sputnik. This vivid Soviet success provoked a rapid US response. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). America became the undisputed global leader in science and technology.
Today, according to the latest annual Nature Index, which tracks research institutions by their contributions to leading science journals, the sole remaining US institution among the top 10 is Harvard, in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The others are all Chinese, except for the German Max Planck Society in ninth place.
This is another Sputnik moment. The NDEA reflected a realization that something had to be done. America urgently needed more physicists, chemists, mathematicians, aerospace engineers, electrical engineers, material scientists, and other experts in STEM fields. The government grasped that to get them would take a massive infusion of money.
What began as a project of national security blossomed into a generator for inventions and discoveries. The result was institutions that not only trained STEM experts but also fostered advances in the humanities. American universities became supreme civilizational achievements.
Today, the whole enterprise is at risk. The Trump administration complains about affirmative action, diversity initiatives, liberal bias, and the like. Several universities have paid huge fines. If the Trump team is determined to reshape their intellectual life and values, recovery will be impossible.
The situation is not hopeless. The United States has won far more Nobel Prizes than every other country. American universities still have their autonomy and their imaginative freedom.

AR America is sinking fast. Yet Americans seem sworn to follow their loser and go down with a bang − or a series of bangs. This is tragic for all of us in the West.

 

⦿ Daniel Birman/International Brain Laboratory
Neural activity in brain of mouse making decision
 

2025 September 10

Brain Map of Decision Making

Mindy Weisberger

Neuroscientists have made a neural map showing brain-wide activity when making decisions.
The data encompass activity from neurons spread over about 95% of the mouse brain. This map is the first to provide a complete picture of what happens across the brain as a decision is made.
The researchers used a standardized procedure across laboratories then tracked neural activity in mice responding to visual prompts. Seven years in the making, the findings were published in Nature in two studies. One outlined the widespread distribution of electrical activity when making decisions. The other used the data to evaluate how expectations shape choices.
For decades, scientists have studied brain activity using electrodes that record electrical pulses from single neurons. Today, digital neural probes called Neuropixels can monitor thousands of neurons at once. These were essential for creating the new map.
In the experiments, mice wore electrode helmets while turning a wheel to control the movement of an image on a screen. The image briefly appeared on either the left side or the right side, and mice that steered it to the center received a reward. All the while, Neuropixels recorded electrical signals in their brains.
Activity first spiked toward the back of the brain, in areas that process visual input. Activity then spread across the brain, with motor-controlling areas lighting up as a decision culminated in movement. Widespread brain activity followed when the action succeeded.
The brain accesses prior knowledge early in making decisions.

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour
International Brain Laboratory, D Angelaki, B Benson, et al

Neurons in hundreds of interconnected brain regions integrate sensory inputs with previous expectations to initiate movements and make decisions. We report a set of recordings from 621,733 neurons recorded with 699 Neuropixels probes across 139 mice in 12 laboratories. The data were obtained from mice performing a decision-making task with sensory, motor, and cognitive components. The probes covered 279 brain areas in the left forebrain and midbrain and the right hindbrain and cerebellum. Visual stimuli were represented transiently in visual areas and then spread to activity in other brain regions. Neural responses correlated with impending motor action almost everywhere in the brain.

Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making
C Findling, F Hubert, International Brain Laboratory, et al

We investigated the neural representations of prior information about the state of the world by examining brain-wide Neuropixels recordings and widefield calcium imaging. Mice were trained to indicate the location of a visual stimulus, which appeared on the left or right with a prior probability alternating between 0.2 and 0.8 in blocks of variable length. The mice estimate this prior probability to improve their decision accuracy. This subjective prior is encoded in at least 20% to 30% of brain regions that span all levels of processing. This widespread representation of the prior is consistent with a neural model of Bayesian inference involving loops between areas.

AR This study tends to support our theories about how brains make decisions. The time profile of activity in the cortex is broadly consistent with such theories of consciousness as the integrated information theory and with the picture of consciousness I explore in my new book Psy‑Phy.
 

2025 September 7

The Critical Brain

David Robson

The critical brain hypothesis says our brain circuits lie near a tipping point between order and disorder in a critical zone at the edge of chaos. Such critical systems are governed by precise mathematics.
Danish physicist Per Bak first outlined the laws governing critical systems in the 20th century. He found that the transmission of forest fires, for instance, lies on the cusp of a tipping point, and showed that forest fires tend to be scale-invariant, with frequencies following a power law.
Neuroscientists think electrical activity in the brain shows a similar pattern. Our neurons are connected in networks, and when a cell fires it can trigger other cells to fire in a chain reaction. At the tipping point, each active neuron prompts just one other neuron to fire, on average.
There is a zone of healthy brain function around criticality. Staying in the zone may be good for information transmission and processing. The scale invariance of critical systems enhances communication both within and between brain regions and hence computational power.
Staying close to criticality keeps the brain both stable enough to make sense of the world and dynamic enough to respond optimally. This may enhance creativity. Departures into order or disorder may result in brain dysfunction.
The longer the brain is awake and working, the further it moves from the tipping point. Sleep may let the brain recalibrate and return its dynamics to the critical point. Caffeine may reduce fatigue by pushing the brain toward criticality.
All this may relate to consciousness. Integrated information theory says consciousness arises from the way data is processed and combined in the brain. Mathematical measures of information integration peak when the brain approaches the critical point.
The anaesthetics xenon and propofol interrupt consciousness, whereas ketamine dissociates it. The brains of patients under ketamine remain near the critical zone, whereas the brains of those taking xenon or propofol move away from it.
Brain criticality may be necessary for consciousness.

How the brain constructs the outside world
György Buzsáki

Brain networks maintain their own internal dynamics. They perpetually generate myriad nonsensical patterns of neural activity known as neuronal trajectories, like filling a dictionary with nonsense words. Learning is a process of matching some of these neuronal trajectories to events in the world.
Neurons ground their firing patterns through action. During actions, motor areas inform the rest of the cerebral cortex with a corollary discharge. This commands the muscles that control bodily sensors to orient toward the source of an input, sends notifications to other brain areas to ground sensory circuits, and informs the rest of the brain to add meaning to perception.
Brain networks should resist perturbations but show plasticity selectively when needed. Most neurons are only weakly connected to others, but a smaller subset retains robust links. The strongly connected minority is always on the alert. It fires rapidly, shares information within its own group, and resists changes to its circuitry. These subnetworks remain informed about neuronal events throughout the brain.
This "rich club" makes up a fifth of all neurons but is in charge of nearly half of brain activity. The neural "poor club" tend to fire slowly and are weakly connected to other neurons, but they are also highly plastic and can physically alter their synapses. When something important is detected and recorded for reference, they mobilize to capture subtle differences by changing their synaptic weights.
Both rich and poor clubs help maintain brain dynamics. Members of the rich club fire similarly in response to diverse experiences and offer quick solutions under most conditions. The brain relates the new to the old and generalizes. A vast reservoir of neuronal trajectories is available. Within the brain, neurons spend more time sustaining perpetually varying internal states than they do on stimuli from outside.
As brain complexity increases, more intricate connections and neuronal computations insert themselves between motor outputs and sensory inputs. This investment enables the prediction of planned actions in more complex and changing environments and deeper into the future. When sensory input pauses, disengaged neuronal activity continues to access an internal virtual world and cognitive processes.
Episodic memories let us plan for the future. When we rest after a busy day, our hippocampus generates sharp-wave ripples that replay the neuronal sequences activated that day. The ripple sequences use trial and error to form memories and shape cognition.

AR The critical brain hypothesis is not new. I recall discussing it with experts in Denmark in 1997. But it's still a very reasonable theory, and I'm reassured to know recent work supports it.
The "brain from inside out" saga helps me understand how the brain manages to do what it does. The contrast of the rich club (with fast and furious members) and the poor club (with slow and sensitive members) recalls the tale Daniel Kahneman told in Thinking, fast and slow.

 

⦿ Ng Han Guan/AP
Chinese V-day parade in Tiananmen Square, Beijing
 

2025 September 3

Chinese Victory Parade Marking End of WW2

Cui Jianshu, Shi Zhengyong

The Chinese people fought against fascist invasion during WW2. They paid a heavy price with about 35 million casualties. Their resistance contributed to the Allied victory in 1945.
The international order, which has helped maintain global stability for 80 years, is now under threat. The United States has been undermining globalization and encouraging other countries to do the same. US tariffs are weakening the postwar economic order.
China is duty-bound to safeguard the postwar international order and maintain global stability. In terms of economic strength, China is the world's largest exporter of goods and the second-largest economy. The country is also modernizing its military.
The display of advanced weaponry in the parade is not a show of force but a demonstration of the transparency of China's military capabilities. China's military power is for defending its sovereignty, national security, and territorial integrity.
The Chinese government aims to demonstrate its commitment to defend the postwar order and help maintain global peace.

A shift in the global balance of power?
Justin McCurry

Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the re-election of Donald Trump have combined to bring Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un together in what may be a shift in the global balance of power.
On Wednesday morning, the three men led a group of more than 20 world leaders as they strode up to a rostrum in Tiananmen Square in Beijing to watch a V-day parade marking the end of WW2.
Xi and Putin have declared a "limitless" partnership, but analysts say Beijing is rankled by Russia's war on Ukraine and by North Korea's support of it. Xi is striving to balance his alliance with both nations while avoiding further Western sanctions.
Trump on Truth Social: "May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration. Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America."

AR I like the Chinese way of taking the moral and rhetorical high ground. It puts even a bombastic military parade into a modest perspective and invites optimism about Chinese global hegemony.
By contrast, Trump's passive-aggressive response is unpresidential.
 

Genesis

Fatih Bildirici

Henry Kissinger's book Genesis, co-authored with Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie, explores the transformative impact of AI on humanity and on the biggest existential questions.
Genesis offers a roadmap for the AI era. AI can solve major crises but poses threatening challenges. This is not only a technological revolution but also a new stage in the evolution of the human spirit.
The authors say human dignity should underpin the human relationship with AI. We need to create AI systems that understand and respect human values.
AI will transform economic structures and social dynamics. It could reduce inequality and improve social wellbeing but will need institutional adaptations and policy interventions.
The technology can be used to benefit all of us. In medicine and science, it can be used to advance healthcare and unravel human biology. These advances raise ethical and social dilemmas.
The authors suggest empowering humans by adapting them to AI technologies and prioritizing approaches that align AI with human values.
Genesis synthesizes historical, philosophical, and technological perspectives on the rise of AI and emphasizes human dignity and moral clarity.

AR Even with authorial support, I don't know how well Kissinger understood the opportunities and challenges of AI, and books with three authors are rarely as good to read as those by one, but in his case we can trust the result is good.

 

⦿ State Emergency Service Of Ukraine
Firefighters work at site hit by Russian drone strike in Bila Tserkva, Kyiv region, Ukraine
US treasury secretary Scott Bessent: "President Putin .. has done the opposite of following through
on what he indicated he wanted to do .. As a matter of fact, he has in a despicable,
despicable manner increased the bombing campaign."
 

2025 September 2

UK Electoral Reform

Polly Toynbee

Britain is at more risk of a populist right-wing takeover than many of its European neighbours. The reptilian grin of Nigel Farage haunts the political landscape.
First past the post (FPTP) elections make the UK vulnerable. Reform UK has reached the point where winning a mere 30% support could propel him into 10 Downing Street.
On Tuesday, MPs will be voting on a fairer electoral system for electing mayors in England by abolishing FPTP and returning to a supplementary vote system.
Voter support for electoral reform in general elections now stands at 60%. Instead of being a barrier to dangerous outsiders, FPTP has catapulted Reform UK closer to power.
Across Europe, the inclusion of populist-nationalist parties in coalitions under proportional representation (PR) forced them to moderate their extreme demands.
On Monday, the parliamentary group on fair elections published its report calling for a national commission on electoral reform (ER). Labour voted for ER at its 2022 conference.
An election bill is due shortly. If the bill does not include a promise of a commission on ER, many MPs will sign an amendment to include one.

AR Memo to Keir Starmer: Do it. Make ER, introducing PR, and restoring democracy in the UK your historic legacy.

 

Cell (CC BY 4.0)
Mouse vagus nerve branches into the stomach and small intestine
A study published in Cell shows a 3D connectome map for the entire nervous system of a mouse. Co-author Guo-Qiang Bi:
"By revealing the precise projection patterns and organ-specific targeting of different peripheral nerves, these maps
will provide a structural framework for understanding how the PNS mediates body physiology."
 

2025 August 28

Albert Einstein

Dmitri Levitin

Albert Einstein discovered special relativity while working as a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office. Diana Buchwald and Michael Gordin show that he always worked in a broader community.
His scientific interests were stimulated by his father and uncle, who worked in electrical engineering, and he excelled in mathematics at school. At the age of 17, he enrolled at the ETH in Zurich. There he met his first wife, Mileva Marić, who shared his passion for physics.
In 1905, Einstein was working at the Patent Office, evaluating electrical technologies and interacting with scientific counterparts. His two famous achievements that year were to explain the photoelectric effect and to develop the special theory of relativity.
Galileo had discovered the relativity of the laws of physics to a reference frame. But James Clerk Maxwell and others discovered that the speed of light in a vacuum is unchanging for all observers. Building on the work of Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré, Einstein reconciled these two postulates by abandoning the idea of absolute time: "Two events which are simultaneous with respect to one observer are, in general, not simultaneous with respect to a second observer who is moving relative to the first one."
In 1914, Einstein took up a research post in Berlin. In 1915, he announced his theory of general relativity, which posits that gravity is a consequence of the curvature of spacetime. In 1919, an expedition led by Arthur Stanley Eddington to observe a solar eclipse confirmed that the Sun's gravitation curves light rays from distant stars, and Einstein became a celebrity.
In the 1920s, Einstein focused on quantum theory. He was unhappy with the seeming paradox that distant particles can be entangled and that measurements performed on one can affect the others, regardless of the distance between them. In 1933, he moved to Princeton.
Scientists are not philosophers. Their role is to develop and test ideas through their experimental and mathematical work. Einstein: "The external conditions [set] by the facts of experience do not permit .. adherence to an epistemological system."

Famous double-slit experiment gets its cleanest test yet
Physics World

MIT scientists have achieved the cleanest demonstration yet of the famous double-slit experiment. Using two single-atoms as the slits, they inferred photon paths by measuring changes in the atoms after scattering. Their results match the predictions of quantum theory.
In a double-slit experiment, we send light through a pair of slits to a screen and see what happens. If the light passes through the slits unobserved, we see an interference pattern of bright and dark fringes. But if we observe which slit the light goes through, we see two bright spots. Whether light acts as a wave or a particle seems to depend on the act of looking.
Einstein said observation only has an effect because it introduces noise. If the slits were mounted on springs, he suggested, their recoil would reveal the photon path without destroying the fringes. Niels Bohr said measuring the photon recoil precisely enough to reveal its path would blur the slit positions and erase interference. He said quantum systems can behave like waves or like particles, but never both at once. In all the numerous versions of the experiment performed since then, the results have sided with Bohr. Yet the noise in real setups left room for doubt.
An MIT team led by Wolfgang Ketterle performed Einstein's thought experiment directly. They cooled more than 10 000 rubidium atoms to near 0 K and trapped them in a laser-made lattice. If a faint beam of light was sent through this lattice, a single photon could scatter off an atom.
The team collected very little information per experimental cycle. Team member Hanzhen Lin: "This was the most difficult part. We had to repeat the experiment thousands of times to collect enough data."
This is the first experiment to measure scattered light from trapped atoms and to repeat the measurements after the traps were removed, while the atoms floated freely. This eliminates the possibility that the traps interfere with the observation.

AR The new book on Einstein surely contains no great surprises, but I'll read it anyway.
The new double-slit result is no surprise either, but the experiment was worth doing.

 

Instagram
♥♥ Travis and Tay-Tay will tie the knot
 

2025 August 26

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce

Helen Lewis

When Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce sat next to each other recently on the video feed of New Heights, telling the story of how they met, they looked like one of the old couples in When Harry Met Sally. That interview let Swift announce The Life of a Showgirl, which drops on October 3.
Swift is one of the best songwriters of her generation. Now she has a new narrative. She is molding Brand Tayvis into the beloved American archetype of the smart wife and the lovable husband. In her Instagram post today revealing their engagement, she wrote: "Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married."
Kelce is happy to play his part in this narrative. Swifties adore this very modern form of relaxed masculinity. A big hunk. A supportive partner. A man who is sensitive and good with kids but can also chug a beer and dance in public. A woman can have it all.

Taylor and Travis announce their engagement
Madison Malone Kircher

The New Heights podcast this month was the vehicle for an interview and the new album cover reveal. In 2023, on an episode of New Heights, Kelce recounted how he tried and failed to give Swift his number at one of her concerts on her Eras tour.
Swift: "This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell. We started hanging out right after that .. It was such a wild romantic gesture."
Kelce is a three-time Super Bowl champion and has been a star in his own right for years, but his relationship with the multi-award-winning megastar rocketed him to a new level of stardom.
Swift started showing up at his games. In 2024, she made a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas from Tokyo, where she was performing on the Eras tour, to watch him and his teammates win the Super Bowl. Later that year, he appeared onstage with her on the Eras tour during a performance in London.
Now they're engaged.

AR ♥♥

 

⦿ Sergii Polezhaka, from his series Naive Gardens
Ukrainian garden view
 

2025 August 24

The Myths Behind Putin's War

Timothy Snyder

Vladimir Putin believes that an ancient priestly chronicle sanctifies his war in Ukraine.
The Tale of Bygone Years was assembled by medieval Kyiv monks and records Scandinavian conquests in the east Baltic region in the early Middle Ages. Its hero, Danish chieftain Rørek, pacified lands far and wide. But since Scandinavians only began to settle in Kyiv a century later, the monks in Kyiv made Rørek the hero of an impossible story.
The Scandinavian kingdom of Kyivan Rus collapsed after the Mongol invasions in the 12th century, and most of it came under Lithuanian rule. In 1721, Peter the Great reached back a thousand years to appropriate the Scandinavian name Rus. Moscow first became a power centre under the Mongols. And now Putin is using the Tale to say Moscow must rule Kyiv.
Another Rørek appears in the medieval compendium Gesta Danorum, written by Saxo Grammaticus in the late 12th century. This Rørek was a prince in Denmark whose career began when his father killed the favourite son of the god Odin and was then avenged by another son of Odin. Rørek observed the rivalry of two chieftain brothers, Feng and Orvendil, and gave his daughter Gerutha as wife to Orvendil. A jealous Feng then murdered his brother and married Gerutha.
This drama was all witnessed by Orvendil's son Amleth, whom Shakespeare called Hamlet. After Putin's war started in 2014, a surge in social media work supported the invasion of Crimea, Brexit, and Trump's presidential campaign. Putin aide Vladislav Surkov was largely responsible for the new turn in Russian politics and was obsessed with Shakespeare's play Hamlet.
In Hamlet, Norway is fighting Poland, but along the way seizes hold of Denmark, a more powerful state that had defeated it not long before. Transpose Norway to Russia, Poland to Ukraine, and Denmark to Trump America. Fortinbras is a more appealing character than Putin, and Hamlet is less vain than Trump, but Surkov saw the parallel.
This is how Putin's war in Ukraine began.

AR This unlovely hodgepodge is supposed to justify an invasion with over a million casualties? Putin needs to be firmly corrected on his history. And Trump needs to be firmly scolded for supporting such nonsense.
 

2025 August 23

America Versus Europe

Nick Clegg

Donald Trump has historical precedent when he brandishes imperial designs on Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. His VP JD Vance seems willing to use American power and European dependency to interfere in European domestic politics.
America looks supreme over Europe. Silicon Valley investors recall the old joke that there are two kinds of Europeans: the smart ones, and those who stayed behind.
Americans foresee the end of Western civilization. In Trump America, saying the wrong thing can get you defunded or deported. EU laws governing online content can suppress legitimate debate.
A united stance against Russian authoritarian ambitions was the basis of Cold War solidarity. Trump has chosen to treat Putin with more political respect than many leaders in Europe.

How to save the internet
Nick Clegg

Silicon Valley is a magnet for smart people buzzing with creativity. There are no limits to ambition. Every obstacle is an opportunity. But it is also a breeding ground for hubris.
When I arrived at Facebook, I found a company in shock. Many employees had joined when it was an exciting place led by a boy genius with a mission to connect the world. Becoming public enemy number one was a culture shock.
Silicon Valley is full of people who see the world as engineers. Their mindset is to identify a problem and fix it, then move on to the next problem. They operate in a maze of acronyms, and everything has to be quantified. Approaching problems this way helps order thoughts and guide decisions.
But it is also reductive. When I talked to engineers about data, they talked about it the way a carpenter would talk about wood, putting logic and reason before emotion and gut instinct. This can seem tone deaf to the concerns of people outside.
Mark Zuckerberg is a visionary and competitive innovator. He has the drive and appetite to keep learning. He may be perceived as all logic, but he has depth and curiosity.

AR I like Clegg. When he was deputy prime minister beside David Cameron, he made HM government seem good enough for me to join the Conservatives in 2014. This turned out to be a huge mistake in 2016. Clegg is still on my side on Britain's European question.

 

⦿ Alexander Drago/Reuters
Crisis averted − for now. L to R: Ursula von der Leyen, Keir Starmer, Alexander Stubb, Volodymyr Zelensky,
Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron, Giorgia Meloni, Friedrich Merz, Mark Rutte; White House, 2025-08-18
 

2025 August 18

Trump Has No Cards

Anne Applebaum

President Trump berated President Zelensky, delayed military shipments to Ukraine, and said the latest tranche of arms will be the last. His administration is easing sanctions on Russia.
Putin calculates that Trump has no cards. He can ignore Trump's wish to be seen as a peacemaker. The meeting in Alaska was a tragic farce.
As the Trump administration dismantles the government and fires the experts, the US ability to act will diminish. Agencies are being undermined by unqualified political appointees.
America has no cards: Trump has given them all away.

Trump's war on scientific truth
Philip Ball

The Trump administration is conducting an assault on science. It has cut the subscriptions of governmental agencies to the journals produced by the Springer Nature group. These include Scientific American and its flagship title Nature.
US Department of Health and Human Services: "Precious taxpayer dollars should not be used on unused subscriptions to junk science."
President Trump is announcing a return to "gold standard" science. His administration is accusing scientists and journals of suppressing evidence that conflicts with their "woke" agendas.
The Trump administration has been deleting scientific databases on climate and the environment, as well as data relating to gender and diversity that are vital for healthcare.
In this climate, truth is political. Saving data is a way to fight back.

AR Trump is a Russian asset. The FSB/SVR must have some pretty damning kompromat on him. But Trump is also a mighty fool − science should not become a political football.
 

2025 August 17

Putin Grieves Over Lost Glory

Andrew Higgins

President Vladimir Putin made clear after his meeting in Alaska with President Trump that his deepest concern is with the "situation around Ukraine" − meaning lost Russian glory.
Putin seeks "a fair balance in the security sphere in Europe and the world as whole" to remove "the root causes of the crisis" in Ukraine.
Casting Russia as a victim has long been a Kremlin tactic. Shortly before attacking Ukraine in 2022, Russia presented NATO and the United States with draft treaties demanding that NATO retreat from Eastern Europe and barring Ukraine from ever joining NATO.
Putin aims to weaken or destroy the transatlantic relationship confirmed with the admission to NATO of formerly Communist nations in Eastern Europe.

Trump is destroying America
Ben Rhodes

Donald Trump is both a cause and a symptom of the unraveling of US society.
The first Trump administration ended in a catastrophically mismanaged pandemic, mass protests, and a violent insurrection.
The second Trump administration is losing the future. It has taken on trillions of dollars in new debt, bullied every country on earth, deregulated the spread of AI, and denied the fact of global warming. Trump only wants victory today.
Trump is trying to reverse globalization and promises a new golden age.

AR A plague on them both. If only Europe could get its act together to confront these bully boys effectively. China is better governed − but it doesn't care about us.

 

Tripadvisor
Highgrove Gardens
Highgrove estate is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall and rented by King Charles III, who calls the garden
"the outward expression of my inner self" and uses it to sell jams (£7.95), plant pots (£230),
seeds (£7.95), picnic hampers (£150), and trench coats (£2,490).
Turnover at Highgrove last year was £6 million.
 

2025 August 13

Moral Love

Cathy Mason

Being in love is one of the most profound experiences we can have. This experience is not limited to romantic love. But it might seem to have little to do with morality.
Iris Murdoch, 1969: "We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love .. can once again be made central."
Murdoch says that at the core of our moral life is the way we see the world. We are always looking at something, and in doing so we either build up a fairer and more adequate picture of it or we distort our vision of it. Our most basic moral activities are attending to particular things in particular ways, since this shapes our vision of the world.
For Murdoch, our pictures of the world can be either enlightening or unfair and misleading. To distort reality and fail to do justice to another person is a moral failing. Love enables us to do right by others, but the ego makes it difficult to attend to one another properly. It gets in the way and obstructs or distorts our vision. The human psyche is absorbed in itself.
Murdoch says we are animals with minds that are continually active, fabricating an often falsifying veil over the world. The ego looks inward and pulls us into our own concerns, obscuring everything else. It distorts our attention and can prevent us from understanding other people. Personal fantasy is the enemy of moral excellence.
Murdoch: "It is in the capacity to love, that is to see, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists."
Attentive love has the power to draw us out of ourselves and toward reality. It lets us see and respond to others as they really are. This is the core of morality.

AR Hard as it might be to parse this view of morality in analytic philosophy, I think love is a better basis for morality than a set of axioms subject to formal logic. But try telling that to the moral philosophers in academia.
Iris Murdoch was a compelling novelist. I read a heap of her novels in the hot summer of 1976 and really enjoyed them. Like me, she spent time teaching philosophy in Oxford and working as a civil servant in London.

 

Australian Department of Defence

2025 August 11

Australia Buys Japanese Frigates

Brad Lendon, CNN

Australia last week announced a $6.5 billion deal to buy 11 new Mogami-class stealth frigates from Japan. The ships are at least a match for any warship China or the United States is deploying.
The new warships will have 32 vertical launch cells capable of firing surface-to-air missiles and anti-ship missiles. These will enable the ships to fire 128 air defense missiles. The launch cells are big enough to carry Tomahawk cruise missiles.
The frigates will need a crew of only 90 and have an unrefueled range of over 18,000 km. The first three will be built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan and the remaining eight in Australia.
Former US Navy captain and Pacific Command JIC head Carl Schuster: "Japanese shipyards do outstanding work and deliver their products on time and within the assigned budget."

AR The Australians also looked at buying German frigates. Given Japan's greater stake in maritime security, as well as its obvious excellence in shipbuilding, I guess they made the best choice.
At this rate, they'll soon have a stronger navy than their former imperial overlords!
 

2025 August 8

The Rationalists

Cade Metz

Lighthaven, in downtown Berkeley, California, has become a temple to the pursuit of artificial intelligence and the future of humanity.
Lighthaven is the base of the Rationalists. This group has many interests involving mathematics, genetics, and philosophy. The Rationalists believe that AI can deliver a better life if it doesn't destroy us first and that it's up to us to ensure that it works for the greater good. Many of the AI world's biggest names are influenced by the Rationalists.
The Rationalist movement is a lifestyle as much as a set of ideas. The community embraces unconventional ideas, including polyamory and the genetics of intelligence as well as Effective Altruism, which is a utilitarian philanthropy that aims to benefit not just people who are alive today, but all the people who will ever live.
The Rationalists emerged in the 2000s when philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote The Sequences, a collection of essays that promoted seeing the world through cold and careful thought. Yudkowsky also wrote the 660,000-word serialized novel Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Each December, hundreds from the community gather to celebrate the Winter Solstice. The most recent celebration opened with a song of praise for the power of technology.
Rationalist Ozy Brennan: "We face a number of threats our ancestors couldn't have imagined .. If we fail .. so will everyone else."

The Singularity
David Auerbach

The Singularity is the hypothesized future point at which computing power becomes so great that superhuman artificial intelligence is developed.
The term was coined in 1958 in a conversation between Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann, where von Neumann said: "The ever accelerating progress of technology .. gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."
Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil popularized the term. They believe the Singularity will happen within the next few years.

AR Yudkowsky is alarmist about the risk of AI taking over the world, but I guess he lives a quiet life where AI is the biggest thing he can see and the Singularity looms large.
I'm tempted to think AI could rule the world better than our present political leaders − even if it decided to exterminate humanity.

 

⦿ Chrysalis
Project Hyperion winner Chrysalis

2025 August 7

Project Hyperion

The Guardian

The Project Hyperion design competition to develop plans for "generation ships" capable of supporting up to 1,500 people on a 250‑year journey to a habitable planet, was launched last year. An expert panel including NASA scientists judged the viability of almost 100 submissions.
The winner was Chrysalis, a 58 km craft designed around a series of concentric cylinders, each dedicated to a different function: 3D-printed living quarters, communal spaces, and various farms and biomes. The Chrysalis proposal also explained how family structures would become centered on the starship community.
Initiative for Interstellar Studies executive director Andreas Hein: "We asked participants to integrate architecture, technology and social systems to conceptualize a functional society spanning centuries − and the outcome was beyond expectations."

AR Fascinating, but it would exceed any budget we could devise − unless we outlawed war and devoted all our former defense spending to building Chrysalis. Even then, the money would be better spent on making an overheating Earth more liveable.
 

2025 August 6

Nuclear Arms Race

Ankit Panda

Amid a rise in geopolitical rivalries, technological advancements, and civic discord, the shadow cast by nuclear weapons over international politics is growing once again.
In May, fighting broke out between two nuclear-armed rivals when India and Pakistan traded air strikes and missile attacks. In June, Russia lost a significant number of nuclear-capable platforms after Ukraine attacked them using drones.
Less than two weeks later, Israel took military action to stem nuclear proliferation in Iran. Iran's retaliation with hundreds of missiles was the largest-ever attack against the heartland of a country possessing nuclear weapons.
Allies of the United States ask whether they can continue to rely on its guarantees of nuclear deterrence. South Koreans watch North Korea's nuclear arsenal growing. Eastern European NATO members see Russian nuclear weapons enter Belarus.
Loose talk around the pursuit of nuclear weapons speaks to growing malaise about a world that is more primed for conventional wars and about a less consistent United States.
China is building up of its nuclear arsenal, which could grow from roughly 200 warheads in 2019 to 1,500 by 2035. Washington and Moscow will lose numerical limits on their nuclear forces when the 2011 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expires in February 2026.
The United States is likely to deploy more nuclear weapons on its existing submarines and ICBMs, while pursuing a missile defence system dubbed Golden Dome.

AR Projected US spending on Golden Dome could well-nigh bankrupt an already heavily indebted America. Also, it wouldn't pay off until after Trump ceased to be POTUS and left MAGA undone.
This is just as well, because an effective Golden Dome would give POTUS a first-strike capability, incentivizing a recklessness that could kill most of humanity outside America.
 

Remembering Hiroshima

Terumi Tanaka

Last December, I accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H‑Bomb Sufferers Organizations. The Nobel committee bestowed the prize on us in recognition of the work we have done over the past 70 years to build and strengthen the global taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.
Today, the nuclear taboo is on the verge of collapse. In the current wars in Europe and the Middle East involving nuclear-armed states, threats by the belligerents to use nuclear weapons are weakening the taboo over deploying them.
We are facing an emergency, but we have the solution in our hands. The United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons not only bans nuclear weapons and all activities related to their production, deployment and use, but also mandates that countries that joined the treaty provide support for people harmed by nuclear weapons in the past and for the cleanup of areas that were used for nuclear testing.
Over four years after the treaty coming into force, half of all nations in the world have signed or ratified or acceded directly to it. More must join.
President John F Kennedy: "The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us."

AR This message needs repeating until we all live in peace.

 

AR
Celebrating August with a walk in the woods
 

2025 August 2

Global Societal Collapse

Damian Carrington

Luke Kemp in Cambridge is pessimistic about the future. His new book Goliath's Curse covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years.
He says our global civilization could lead to the worst societal collapse yet. Leaders with a dark triad of traits dominate a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, and killer robots.
He calls kingdoms and empires built on domination Goliaths and says all Goliaths are cursed by inequality. People high in the dark triad fight for resources, arms, and status: "As elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile."
Collapse today would be global and disastrous for all. Our societies all act within a global capitalist system. The three most powerful men in the world share the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping is a Machiavellian manipulator.
Kemp says the agents of doom are the corporations and groups that cause global catastrophic risk: "It is not about human nature. It is about small groups who bring out the worst in us."
We can escape global collapse: "First and foremost, you need to create genuine democratic societies to level all the forms of power that lead to Goliaths."

Trump conjures with chaos
John Gray

Donald Trump is a clairvoyant channeling the American unconscious. After his sweeping victory last November and six months into his second presidency, there is no going back to the old world.
Trump has released forces that neither he nor the remnants of the liberal order can control. By making judicial institutions targets for political capture, liberal legalism signed its own death warrant.
Trump is eviscerating any institution that could inhibit executive authority. His removal would leave a society too polarized for consensual governance. The international system in which a liberal superpower could function has imploded.
The American-led financial system is already history. A multipolar global currency system is emerging, in which gold plays a key role. As Trump's tariffs risk inflaming domestic inflation, Western capitalism has become a self-undermining system.
Trump's economic nationalism is the perfect inversion of an unfettered global free market. An established economic orthodoxy has been upended to please a faction of MAGA.
Trump's global inheritance will be a mess of radical populisms − mystical imperialism, millenarian fervor, and feelings of hatred and revenge. As he conjures with chaos, nemesis unfolds.

AR Looking grim ..
 

2025 August 1

End of the American Scientific Empire

Ross Andersen

From 1945 to 2025, America was the most compelling destination for scientific talent in the world. It remained so until earlier this year.
The very best scientists came to America from all over the world. That may no longer be the case a generation from now. The Trump administration has made it more difficult for foreign researchers.
Not since the Red Scare has American science been so beholden to political ideology. Three-fourths of American scientists in a recent poll said they are considering leaving the country.
Every scientific empire falls, but not at the same speed, or for the same reasons. Germany was a great scientific power for decades. When the Nazis took over in 1933, Hitler purged the universities.
The center of gravity for science moved across the Atlantic Ocean. Until Trump took power again, support for science was a given. His interference in the sciences is something new.
All is not yet lost for American science. Lawmakers do not intend to approve Trump's full requested cuts. Research institutions are suing the administration for executive overreach.
If America ceases to be the world's techno-scientific superpower, it will suffer. China may begin to recruit elite foreign scientists.

AR The demise of US science is a world-historical tragedy, but mostly for Americans. Science will go on elsewhere.
 

Entropic Gravity

Jon Cartwright

Erik Verlinde says gravity may be a byproduct of rising entropy. This could explain dark energy and dark matter and may be testable in a lab.
The rise of entropy is governed by the second law of thermodynamics. Jacob Bekenstein said the entropy of a black hole is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. Ted Jacobson then said the gravity in empty space behaves like a thermodynamic system.
Verlinde says gravity is an emergent phenomenon. He imagines a spherical mass enclosing another mass within and calculates that the outer mass feels a gentle push inward because the total entropy of the system increases if the two masses get closer.
Entangled regions around galaxies ought to be more disrupted than their mass distribution suggests, resulting in more entropy and gravity. This avoids a need for dark matter.
Dan Carney et al aim to test entropic gravity in the lab. When test masses interact with a system that conserves energy and raises entropy, the masses gravitate by the inverse square law. Carney et al aim to detect quantum jitters in a pendulum next to a quantum cloud of atoms.
Kazem Rezazadeh finds that entropic gravity on a cosmic scale ought to accelerate the expansion of spacetime. This avoids a need for dark energy.
No one can yet say what gives rises to gravity. But existence may be a network of entangled qubits.

On the origin of gravity and the laws of Newton
Erik Verlinde

Starting from first principles and general assumptions we present a heuristic argument that shows that Newton's law of gravitation naturally arises in a theory in which space emerges through a holographic scenario. Gravity is identified with an entropic force caused by changes in the information associated with the positions of material bodies. A relativistic generalization of the presented arguments directly leads to the Einstein equations. When space is emergent even Newton's law of inertia needs to be explained. The equivalence principle suggests that it is actually the law of inertia whose origin is entropic.

AR I'm excited anew by this concept. Verlinde's paper is really interesting and compelling. I wish I'd read it years ago − unusually for such research papers, it's quite readable and intelligible.

 

AR

2025 July 25

Psy-Phy: A Brief Introduction To Ultimate Reality

J Andrew Ross

The human mind is still in many ways a mystery to science. This book explores a framework for scientists to understand it. It aims to found psychophysics, where the science of mind meets physics.
Physics is the fundamental science of nature. Psychology is not yet a science in the same sense. The framing logic needs recasting. We need to recognize the role of becoming, or of evolution in the widest sense, to the task of building models in science.
The new perspective on psychology is radical. A logic of becoming distinguishes the big self from the little self. If the ego is the big self in being, the little self is projected into existence as a puppet avatar in a virtual reality, or a mindworld. As conscious beings, we live in a mindworld movie. Our lived reality grows in time.
The book introduces a new logic for science. It is written for readers who want not only to see how it works but also to enjoy the ride.

AR It's done! Fifty years of work and nine months of writing − a life's work, if I dare say so.

 

⦿ Leon Neal/PA
Friedrich Merz with Keir Starmer, Downing Street, Thursday
 

2025 July 17

New Anglo-German Treaty

The Guardian, BBC News

German chancellor Friedrich Merz and UK prime minister Keir Starmer signed a friendship and cooperation treaty at a ceremony in the V&A museum in London today.
Starmer: "It's a privilege to have you here today, particularly to sign this Kensington Treaty, which is a very special treaty, because it's the first of its kind .. between our two countries."
Merz: "Our treaty on friendship stands for freedom, security and prosperity − and for bringing our young generations closer together."

Highlights of the treaty
•  Cooperation on military and training exercises, cyber threats, and arms exports
•  Commitment to limit global warming to the 1.5 K laid out in the Paris climate accords
•  Strengthen bilateral trade within the framework of EU−UK agreements
•  Commitment to free and open markets, promoting employment, and economic growth
•  Cooperation in science and technology development
•  Cultural exchange, youth mobility, and partnerships in education
•  Frequent UK travellers to Germany via e-gates at the German border by August
•  All UK nationals via e-gates as soon as technically possible
•  New direct rail service between UK and Germany by 2035
•  Explore border controls like those for Eurostar passengers
•  Visa-free school group travel made possible by the end of 2025
•  Cooperation on deterrence, law enforcement, and irregular migration

AR Excellent development. It's not much, I know, but small steps are better than none. The direct train link may be too late for me personally, sad to say.
 

Shamanism

Manvir Singh

Shamanism is a practice in which a specialist enters altered states to engage with unseen realities or agents and provides services like healing and divination.
Shamanists often have public ceremonies in which musicians play drums and the shamans dance. Healing ceremonies may induce trance through psychoactive substances.
Trance is a compelling performance for both practitioner and audience that demonstrates a profoundly different state of being with access to special powers.
Shamanism is religious at its core. It offers engagement with unseen realities, services like healing and divination, and altered states. Behind shamanic ritual is an intuitive dualism of mind and body.
Around the world, the vast majority of hunter-gatherers practice shamanism. During the classical period, many of the Hebrew prophets were shamans. Greece had shamanic oracles.
Shamanism works on our sense that uncertain events are influenced by invisible agents, our reliance on ritual to influence high-stakes outcomes, and our intuition that people who seem different may have special powers.
Shamanic healing feels festive and celebratory. It can induce the placebo effect and offer escape from harmful self-narratives. It can provide an assurance that you are loved and that people are fighting for you.
Psychedelics echo shamanic tradition. Historically the shaman enters an altered state, not the patient, but both seem to heal patients by altering harmful beliefs through subjectively profound experiences.
Shamanism offers direct relationships with the divine. Its practices can induce mystical experiences that can be meaningful and therapeutic.

AR Interesting perspective on the limits of mind and the roots of religion. When shamans do their thing, experience is raw, unfiltered by the Kantian categories, and rational cognition is gone.
Can a scientist have such raw experiences while remaining rational?

 

⦿ Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
Ukrainian brigadier general "Hunter" sits on sea drone Avdiivka
 

2025 July 15

Is America Ready for the Next War?

Dexter Filkins

The Pentagon is trying to remake itself in response to new ways of fighting seen in Ukraine.
In Ukraine, drones are helping the Ukrainians fight the Russian army. Russia has suffered about a million casualties, many inflicted by drones.
As the conflict began, Russian warships roamed the Black Sea. Ukraine attacked them with missiles and aerial drones. When maritime drones sank three Russian warships, the Black Sea fleet retreated and agreed to a ceasefire.
Last year, Ukrainian factories turned out more than three million drones. Their main worry is the supply of parts made in China.
American officials are looking on with a growing sense of unease. For decades, US armed forces have relied on sophisticated weapons that take years to design and cost billions of dollars to produce.
The Pentagon is accustomed to doing business with huge, entrenched players selling fantastically complex systems running on software that was often obsolete before it was deployed. The Defense Innovation Unit aims to give contracts to new technology companies with better ideas.
Palmer Luckey helped found the California defense startup Anduril in 2017. Anduril plans to build devices and offer them to the Pentagon. If the generals want something slightly different, Anduril can simply rewrite the code. The weapons are little more than shells for software.
The Pentagon needs them now. President Xi Jinping has told his military to be ready to seize Taiwan by 2027. The PLA has been testing kit for an invasion and conducting sorties around the island.
In 2023, US defense officials launched the Replicator initiative to mass-produce air and sea drones to deter Chinese military action. If the Chinese invade Taiwan, US officials aim to flood the skies and seas with drones.
The drones would be guided by a kill chain. Satellites would detect an invasion force and relay location data to targeting systems for the drones. The kill chain requires rapid, intricate orchestration of satellites and sensors controlled by numerous US federal agencies.
Integrated command and control is a big problem. US leaders are working on it.

AR Interesting that Ukraine is showing so much more innovation in this conflict than Russia. The obvious contrast is that for Ukrainians the fight is an existential bid for survival and freedom, whereas for Russians it's an unwelcome duty to the unloved Putin regime.

 

Ukrainian Emergency Service
Ukrainian firefighters Wednesday following overnight Russian attack in Volyn region
Russia continues its overnight strikes on Ukraine with large drone attacks.
Donald Trump said "a lot of bullshit is thrown at us" by Vladimir Putin.

AR TACO, your mentor in klepto-autocracy is no one's friend.
 

2025 July 9

Consciousness

Adam Frank

To explain consciousness, the physicalist approach has not worked.
Viewing organisms as complicated machines overlooks their organization. Living organisms each form a holistic unity. How a cell is organized defines its nature.
Living things are self‑organized in an autopoietic unity. They are self‑creating and self‑maintaining. This is what separates them from machines.
Consciousness is something you do, not something you have. Experience and consciousness are performed. Organisms are inseparable from their life‑worlds.
Cognition is inseparable from the body and its capacities. How we move and interact with the world shapes what we perceive and how we understand. Organisms are engaged in an ongoing process to establish meaning and relevance as they interact with their world.
Brains are part of the organizational unity of organisms that co-create the world around them. A world without us and our experience is a fantasy.
The life‑world of experience is a world of others. Life always occurs in communities. The entire planetary history of life is implicated in individual experience.
Sentience is fundamental to life. To be alive is to be a locus of experience as a mutually arising agent and its environment or life‑world.
We cannot separate experience from nature. Our deepest stories about the universe include ourselves in it.
Organisms are physical systems that use information. Our use of information gives it semantics. We aim to understand the autopoietic information architecture of organisms.
Our scientific stories must include us and our place in life.

AR All this is consistent with my words in Psy‑Phy (in prep). Caveats: I say foregrounding experience is compatible with physicalism, and I ignore autopoiesis to keep my story on point.

 

VKW
Paradise in Poland: Saturday noon in a country garden
 

2025 July 6

America Switches Sides

Anne Applebaum

Donald Trump spoke to Vladimir Putin on July 3, and Putin responded with more attacks on Ukraine. Russian soldiers continue to be wounded or killed and the Russian economy is heading for a recession, but Putin still thinks he can conquer all of Ukraine.
The American realignment with Russia and against Ukraine and Europe is gathering pace. The Trump administration will not send a large shipment of weapons to Ukraine. The Russians interpret this as a signal that American support for Ukraine is ending.
American incentives help persuade Putin to keep fighting. Sanctions are disappearing and weapons are diminishing. Different US policies would help the Ukrainians win faster.

Europeans will pay more for arms
Steven Erlanger, Jeanna Smialek

European countries have committed to spending nearly double, as much as €14 trillion, on military investments over the next decade. EU officials will limit spending on US equipment from the €150 billion EU defense funding program. But Europe lacks good alternatives to the best US defense equipment.
As the United States shrinks its support for Ukraine, French officials and EU institutions want to restrict the use of EU funds for building the European defense industry. The Nordic and Baltic nations and Poland say Europe needs capabilities now to help Ukraine.
Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski: "From our national budgets, most European countries will continue to buy, with the possible exception of France, a huge proportion of their weapons from the United States."
Buying F‑35 jets means committing to a long-term relationship with their manufacturer for updates. Given the recent wobbling of the transatlantic alliance, officials question future purchases. But with no equivalent alternative to this 5G fighter, Nordic and German officials say Europe must keep good relations with US defense companies.
Université Libre de Bruxelles professor Guntram Wolff: "It's really about weaning Europe off the technological dependence on the United States."

The UK is threatened by China
Paul Mason

The People's Republic of China aims to become the dominant global power by 2049. British universities rely on Chinese student fees, and 11% of British science is co-authored with the PRC.
President Trump is encouraging Chairman Xi to focus on a military solution in Taiwan. China will be able to invade and conquer Taiwan by 2027. Taiwan is the world leader in semiconductor design and manufacture.
The UK government warns that in future it might have to choose between values and interests. The UK should not let authoritarian China dominate the world.

AR The American abandonment of Ukraine and Europe is the surest sign yet that a US implosion is imminent. Under Trump, America is heading the way Germany went a century ago.
Rational European defense officials will cut their losses, resist the allure of more F‑35 procurements, and develop a European 6G jet together, fast. The UK should throw its investment in Tempest into the pot. This is no time to resist a joint Euro-Japanese project.
On China, I advise caution. Xi wants Russia to win in Ukraine mainly to keep the US focus off Taiwan. Once that issue is resolved, peaceful relations with China are possible.
 

2025 July 4

AI Creativity

Webb Wright

Algorithms can mimic our intellect and our creativity.
Diffusion models are designed to generate copies of their training images. They use denoising to convert an image into digital noise, then reassemble it.
Technical features of the denoising process cause diffusion models to be creative. A mathematical model of trained diffusion models shows that their creativity is a deterministic process.
In morphogenesis, Turing patterns reflect how groups of cells self-organize into organisms. Cells coordinate at local level. They adjust how they act in response to signals from their neighbors.
By locality, diffusion models focus on one patch of pixels at a time. By translational equivariance, if you shift an input image in any direction, the model makes the same change in the output image. The models generate the patches and then fit them into place using a digital Turing pattern.
Mason Kamb works in the lab of Surya Ganguli at Stanford. Kamb conjectured that locality and equivariance lead to creativity. A system that optimizes for locality and equivariance should behave like a diffusion model.
Kamb and Ganguli's ELS machine can predict denoised images based solely on the mechanics of locality and equivariance. It can match the outputs of trained diffusion models with an average accuracy of 90%.
The creativity of diffusion models is a result of the denoising process. It can be formalized and predicted with high accuracy.
The work may provide insight into human creativity.

AR Beautiful work! This result does indeed help me understand human creativity.

 

NSF-DOE Vera C Rubin Observatory
Small section of the Vera C Rubin Observatory's view of the Virgo Cluster
The observatory is in Chile and has a digital camera with about 3.2 billion pixels. It produces about
20 TB of data every night, to be transferred and processed in California, France, and Britain.