In a connected world small actions have outsized effects. Let’s start with a truism: nothing takes place in a vacuum. This is so true in the world we live in right now with its complex interconnections and interdependencies but it is also true of the one place where you would reasonably expect for a vacuum to actually exist: space…

It’s time to make your life your own. — Nothing is ever truly original. This is not the same as saying that things cannot be new. Something borrowed from some other time, re-examined, re-purposed perhaps and presented in a way that allows us to achieve a fresh insight is more valuable than its source. The world grows in such…

The truth behind one of the greatest truths of all time. — There’s a passage in the King James Bible (John 8:32) that goes: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”. If you’re a person of faith you take this in exactly the spirit it is given: a promise that the realization of a specific set of…

Why we are inclined to support those who fool us and how to break out of it. The modern world is caught up in a tsunami of lies. You may want to blame Trump for this who broke all records, making no fewer than 30, 573 false of misleading statements during the four years of his presidency, but the trend didn’t start with him. Before him Obama…

What you need to know. — I don’t really have a crystal ball that can forecast the future and neither does anyone else I know. This is not the same as saying however that the future is entirely opaque to us. Because our brain devotes a lot of resources to forecasting the future, it is only…

How to overcome the limitations you allow yourself to experience. — In the iconic, 1999 movie The Matrix, there is a moment when Morpheus tells Neo that in order to achieve his full potential he needs to open up his mind to the possibilities presented by his realization that the present is now different to what he’d assumed it was. He…

The world is complex but we can determine how it works when we try. — Chaos Theory has been romanticized with the so-called “butterfly effect” where “the flap of the wings of a butterfly in the Amazon causes a tornado in Texas”. Preposterous as this may sound it is less unlikely than you think and the science behind it is explained in the video below.

And why you should be too. — It really doesn’t matter when you read this. But if you’re reading it now, just on this side of 2022, you know that the year behind us has been abysmal. And the year before that was pretty bad too. Threatening weather, threats to our democracy, threat to our health and…

I don’t write a lot about semantic search these days. The primary reason is that after five books on the subject including the ground-breaking Google Semantic Search I’ve grown bored of covering the same ground just for the sake of gaining a little more search-visibility as an authority on the…