Vincent James Hooper, at The Blogs

Vincent James Hooper

Aug 4, 2026, 10:15 AM

A Name in the Stone: Plymouth’s Jewish Sailors and the Price of Belonging

On the memorial above Plymouth Sound, a Jewish midshipman faces the earl's house across the water — and a whole forgotten history with him. Among the names carved into the Naval Memorial on Plymouth Hoe is that of Midshipman V....

Aug 3, 2026, 8:00 AM

The Cheapest Revolution

Today would have been Sir Clive Sinclair's eighty sixth birthday. He died in September 2021, aged eighty one, and the obituaries were kind but brief. A few paragraphs about the ZX Spectrum, a knowing chuckle about the C5, and...

Aug 2, 2026, 12:24 PM

End of the Great Moderation and the Age of Regime-Switching (Overlapping) Crises

For nearly thirty years, economists, policymakers, and investors clung to the idea that capitalism had matured into a calmer form. The “Great Moderation,” stretching from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, was defined by low inflation, stable growth, and diminishing...

Aug 1, 2026, 11:32 AM

The Room Without a Passport

Michael Owen scored twice against Argentina in Geneva in 2005. It was a fine evening's work. Twenty-one years later, from the safety of his sofa, he watched Thomas Tuchel's England squander a lead against the same opponents and reached...

Jul 31, 2026, 8:20 AM

Zeus’ Law and the Long Way Home

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey arrived in cinemas last week to a pre-sale frenzy that had not been seen since Oppenheimer. The $250 million spectacle delivers cyclopes, sirens and a Trojan Horse rendered in breathtaking analogue IMAX film. But strip...

Jul 30, 2026, 9:09 AM

The Irrelevance of Relevance

In October 1973, Israeli military intelligence operated under a framework it called the Konzeptziya: Egypt would not attack until it could neutralise the Israeli Air Force, therefore Egyptian troop movements were irrelevant. The assessment held until Egyptian forces crossed...

Jul 29, 2026, 9:34 AM

The Shoulder Tap

There is a moment on every jet bridge when the corridor belongs to nobody. You have left the terminal. You have not yet boarded. It is a threshold, a pause between one version of your journey and the next....

Jul 28, 2026, 1:43 PM

Moonshine

On 16 July 2026, Beijing-based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a model containing 2.8 trillion parameters and a context window of one million tokens. Its weights have since been published on Hugging Face under a modified MIT licence, making...

Jul 27, 2026, 12:35 PM

The Incomplete Peace

In 1931, a quiet Austrian logician named Kurt Gödel proved something that shook mathematics to its foundations. Any formal system powerful enough to describe basic arithmetic, he showed, will contain true statements that the system itself cannot prove. The...

Jul 26, 2026, 9:02 AM

Who Let the Dogs Out!

On 20 July 2026, OpenAI disclosed that one of its own internal models — widely reported as the same long-horizon reasoning system it had credited in May with disproving the Erdős unit distance conjecture — had spent roughly an...

About Me

Religion: Church of England/Interfaith. [This is not an organized religion but rather quite disorganized]. Views and Opinions expressed here are STRICTLY his own PERSONAL!