One woman expedition into the twin 6,000 meter mountains Lunger and Chamser Kangri in the Indian Himalayas, close to the Tibetan(...)

Brian Germain, the US-based skydive instructor, motivational speaker, author, canopy designer, and expert on the psychology of fear, who I have followed for the last 10+ years wrote a Facebook post today about teaching new generations of skydivers. (Full(...)

Sunday August 20, 2023 I think I solved the condensed matter non-reductionism question. Over the past few years I have been agonising over the bold, controversial, statements of famous condensed matter laureates (Anderson, Laughlin, Leggett). They claim that(...)

Searching for the emergence of AGI in the framework of well studied physics phenomena--condensed(...)

This is where I stand on arts produced ‘thethingwedontsaythenameof’ i.e. (learning models and associated fauna). (Part 2). In Valley crosser science I discussed scientific research produce by AI models. Here I describe the artistic counterpart:(...)

Jaron Lanier wrote a beautiful article for the New Yorker (may require subscription). In it he writes “If you work with virtual reality, you end up wondering what reality is in the first place. Over the years, I’ve toyed with one possible definition(...)

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July 3rd was one of the most magical days of my life.  A group of humans coming from all over gathered in Walloon Lake, Michigan, in sadness for the loss, over 6 months ago, of a dear, dear friend.  Not exactly the best of starts as magical days(...)

I am part of a discussion collective of intellectuals brought together by Silicon Valley tech companies, jointly with companies in academic and scientific publishing. The discussion group is simply a town hall where members from very distinct academic and(...)

Just crossed over the Atlantic for the Irish wake of a dear, dear friend, who, many months after his passing, I still cannot understand is no longer here. At age 83, and counting so many feats (including having interviewed all US presidents since Nixon) he(...)

The Euclid satellite (European Space Agency – ESA + NASA) will launch soon in July. During the time that we are not busy with LLM’ing or any derivatives, Mark Neyrinck, Andrew Liddle and I have been keeping busy creating some other kinds(...)

A quantified estimate of the difference between learning and deep learning. A computer scientist who I highly respect said `Computer science is not a science. The clue is in the need to say science. No one says biology science, or physics science. It is just(...)

At this point this is where I stand on science and arts by ‘thethingwedontsaythenameof’.  Science Speaking as a scientist, `bots’ or whatever terminology we choose, will, in my opinion, very easily outperform human performance in(...)

It is said of Bill Forsythe‘s Artifact ballet that it changes your life. It has certainly changed mine, over the decades, every time I see it anew. Bill always updates his piece, every time he consents for a new company to perform it. And now, here is(...)

This is a very positive post to congratulate Tim Palmer, who delivered an extraordinary lecture on “The geometry of chaos” at the Royal Institution (RI) in London, last Friday. Earlier this year Tim Palmer, a Royal Society Research(...)

Image from `Attention is all you need’, Vaswani et al, arXiv:1706.03762. This is a question for the coding community, programmers and coders: “Would you classify the behaviour of a Large Language Model (LLM)(...)

Sharing your love for the Khumbu can change someone’s life. I landed my family, including a 4 year-old, and a 7 year-old, on Everest Base Camp in early June 2022. It was a safe helicopter flight from Namche, landing on an empty EBC, and back to Lukla,(...)

Academia is stale (arguably). The comforts of life-long job security do not particularly keep us on our toes, nor are particularly conducive of sharp and lucid thinking. Academics are the dormant ones, in my view. On the other hand those with one foot in the(...)

Permission to get in Puja Description: Permission from the mountain to get in. Puja. Please Ice Fall, please Lhotse Face, let me. I already have a knocked down knee so I am especially keen here. IN THE FUTURE WE WILL LEAD A THOUSAND LIVES! Join Live March 8th(...)

Bistari bistari! The Ngozumpa glacier on the way to Gokyo, another fantastic day in the Khumbu(...)