Vincent James Hooper, at The Blogs

Vincent James Hooper

Aug 24, 2026, 7:34 AM

A Fleet in Flux: Why Washington Will Not Move the Fifth Fleet to Israel — Yet?

The Wall Street Journal's report that the Pentagon is weighing a westward shift of Gulf based forces, with Israel named among possible new sites, has been read by some as the opening act of a wholesale relocation. It is...

Aug 22, 2026, 5:24 PM

The Gentleman’s Lathe

A lathe turns rough material into something precise. For two hundred years, Britain has owned one, admired it, and never quite switched it on. Jacob Rees-Mogg appeared on social media this week in a double breasted suit and polka dot...

Aug 21, 2026, 8:39 AM

Nature’s Margin Call

In January this year, the UK government published a national security assessment on biodiversity loss. Prepared with the help of the Joint Intelligence Committee, the body that oversees MI5 and MI6, it was initially deemed too alarming to release...

Aug 19, 2026, 6:33 PM

The 2,000 Year Old Punchline

Last month, the American Film Institute did something it had never done in a quarter century of list making. It reorganised its "100 Years… 100 Laughs" canon and elevated Blazing Saddles from sixth place to first, crowning it the...

Aug 18, 2026, 8:01 AM

The Water Was Coming: Omar Yaghi and the Option Value of a Refugee

On World Refugee Day, the Nobel Prize page chose to remember a child waiting for water. Omar Yaghi grew up outside Amman in a single room shared with nine siblings and the family's cattle, with no electricity and no...

Aug 17, 2026, 11:38 AM

Are We Living on an Atom?

In 1974, a young physicist named Jacob Bekenstein made an unusual career move. Two years after completing a doctoral thesis at Princeton that would eventually reshape modern physics, he immigrated to Israel and took a position at Ben Gurion...

Aug 16, 2026, 11:05 AM

The Universe Is a Neural Network

There is a disquieting idea circulating at the boundary of physics and machine learning, one that most physicists prefer to dismiss and most computer scientists lack the cosmological vocabulary to defend. It is this: the universe, at its most...

Aug 15, 2026, 10:17 AM

The Zero Camera

In the summer of 2012, Shane Meadows pointed his camera at seventy five thousand people in Manchester's Heaton Park and let William Burroughs narrate what he saw. "The camera and recorder can photograph and record from a point of...

Aug 14, 2026, 8:27 AM

Small Worlds: Vic Edwards and the Bletchley Park Photograph

UNSW Vic Edwards was a man whose stories you didn't always believe. He had too many of them, they were too good, and they connected too neatly. You'd sit there nodding, smiling, quietly filing it under "classic Vic." And...

Aug 13, 2026, 7:06 AM

The Splinternet and the Startup Nation: Where Does Israel Stand?

When Edward Snowden released thousands of classified NSA documents in June 2013, one detail barely registered in Tel Aviv but should have: a 2009 memorandum of understanding under which the NSA shared raw surveillance data with Israel's SIGINT National...

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!