Vincent James Hooper, at The Blogs

Vincent James Hooper

Oct 26, 2026, 10:51 AM

This week, in a conference hall on Pennsylvania Avenue, researchers gather for the first International Conference on Organoid Intelligence. Ask a search engine about "eukaryotic AI" today and an obliging chatbot will describe an emerging field in which living...

Oct 25, 2026, 12:17 PM

The Borrowed Uniform

The new Ali G film opens with Voltaire. Those who can make you believe absurdities, the screen warns, can make you commit atrocities. Sacha Baron Cohen then spends the rest of the film proving it, with considerable help from...

Oct 23, 2026, 3:11 AM

The Small Excess

In 1848 a young chemist in Paris sat at a bench with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers and did something nobody had thought to do. Louis Pasteur sorted the tiny crystals of a tartaric acid salt...

Oct 21, 2026, 9:54 AM

The Demon at Door Nine

On the way to the Royal Albert Hall last night I walked up Exhibition Road, past Imperial College's Dyson School of Design Engineering, named for Sir James Dyson of vacuum cleaner fame. At the Hall my seat was upgraded....

Oct 19, 2026, 5:39 PM

The Turtle Needs No Visa

The official mascot of the United Nations climate summit in Antalya is a cartoon loggerhead turtle called Caretta. The organisers present her as an ancient traveller of the city's shores and a small ambassador for climate action. It is...

Oct 17, 2026, 4:54 PM

The Awl and the Doorpost

In 1920 a Czech playwright had trouble with a word. Karel Čapek had written a play about manufactured workers and had been calling them labori, after the Latin for labour. It sounded too bookish. His brother Josef, a painter,...

Oct 16, 2026, 4:51 PM

The Tiger and the Iron Wall

There is a line almost everyone believes Winston Churchill said in May 1940: “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.” Gary Oldman roars it in Darkest Hour, and it has been quoted endlessly...

Oct 14, 2026, 8:19 PM

The Patient Oracle

One woman told Teen Vogue that she could spend up to 14 hours a day putting questions to ChatGPT, chasing a certainty she knew did not exist. The chatbot was there for every one of those hours. It always...

Oct 13, 2026, 5:47 PM

Two Clocks in Stockholm

This year's economics laureates explain why a central bank's words matter as much as its rates. Israel is about to find out how much. Robert Hall has spent much of his working life telling Americans when their recessions began. For...

Oct 12, 2026, 7:18 PM

The Room Next Door

In the first week of August 1961, in Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale, a volunteer sat down at a machine with thirty switches. They ran from 15 volts to 450. Through the wall, in the room next door, a second...

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!