Entropy and Leonardo da Vinci You discover things in the stillness The muscular wind that hums on your forearms, the sun trekking across the mottled face of a boulder, the slender-armed windmills rotating on the high empty hills. Something is happening. When the world gets quiet enough, you can almost hear it. The seconds and nanoseconds…

A Rugby game in French Catalonia — Bon cop de falç! A good blow of the sickle. The national anthem of Catalonia echoes around the stadium, playing the tricks sound plays in places like this, open to the sky but ringed in on all sides. The lips don’t match the music, bad dubbing on an old foreign film. And this is…

Someone needs to want something from you — they’re not going to let you sit at a front table at some cafe in Europe in the mid-afternoon sun. - Charles Bukowski, Relentless as the Tarantula When I told the last boss I ever had that I was quitting, he just nodded He knew it was coming. In his own way, he was partly responsible for it. So was Brexit. So was my father. So…

Hafez tells the future — “How much did you pay?” A woman I don’t know is standing in my kitchen asking what is, to me, an impertinent question. We don’t talk about money. We don’t talk about unclean things. Then again, God’s name isn’t God either. …

We all need somewhere to go — Enclosures should provide warm basking areas, preferably in natural sunshine, so that all animals have access. Natural light is particularly important for diurnal primates, and indoor and outdoor accommodation should be provided. — Suitable Environment for Primates That window is keeping you alive Even prisons have them. The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment…

A life in exile can be addictive — To move somewhere new is to become a child again To learn all over again things you forgot you ever needed to be taught. How to talk. How to act. How to get groceries and pay bills and drive and work. But with that rediscovered venerability, that juvenile cluelessness, you get the rewards that come with childhood too. The wonder…

The brain, the mind, and the limitlessness of consciousness — No one really knows where you are Your brain is a three pound lump of watery fat. If I could explain how a dense bundle of neurons folded over itself and packed into a bony box creates personality, stores memory, and forms preferences that have nothing to do with mere survival, I’d have a Nobel. …

A quick tour of the Wasteland “It’s good for the soul,” she said. As a wave sighed in the way they do, the crystalline brightness of the water’s edge transforming by subtle gradations through aqua to turquoise to ultramarine. Somewhere, he’d read something or written something about ionized air, the spinning water droplets that carry an invisible…