Vincent James Hooper, at The Blogs

Vincent James Hooper

Oct 11, 2026, 4:47 AM

In 1982, Yehoshafat Harkabi published a book that should have been a vaccine. Harkabi had served as head of Aman, Israel's military intelligence directorate, from 1955 to 1959. After leaving the service he became a professor of international relations...

Oct 9, 2026, 8:48 AM

A Page and a Half

On Tuesday the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the Nobel Prize in Physics. It will be the first announcement since François Englert died in June, and so the first at which neither laureate of 2013 is alive to be...

Oct 7, 2026, 6:37 AM

The Empty Kennel

There is a note near the end of Heart of the Beast, the Brad Pitt film that opened in cinemas late last month, and it is the most serious thing in the picture. James Belmont, a retired Special Forces officer,...

Oct 5, 2026, 11:28 PM

The Hand on the Switch

Golda Meir once joked that Moses led the Jews through the desert for forty years to bring them to the one place in the Middle East without oil. It was a good line for decades. Then, in 2009 and...

Oct 5, 2026, 4:12 AM

Brainy Sand?

The latest row about machine minds began with a joke. A programmer published a small project on GitHub and called it the AI Torture Chamber. It takes a small language model running on the user's own machine and, using...

Oct 4, 2026, 3:49 AM

The Name That Travelled

On Sunday morning, at ten o'clock Israel time, the Bahrain Grand Prix will start in Malaysia. Sport 5+ Live has it in the schedule from a quarter to ten, under the name Bahrain, and nobody at the channel needs...

Oct 2, 2026, 7:27 PM

The Catalogue

Wile E. Coyote has been ordering from the same company since 1949. Rocket skates, earthquake pills, dehydrated boulders: all delivered to the desert, all failing at the worst moment. In Coyote vs. Acme, which finally reached cinemas in August,...

Oct 1, 2026, 10:08 AM

The Letter Addressed to Thou

In 1923 Martin Buber published a short book arguing that we meet the world through two basic words. One pairs I with It: the stance we take towards things we use, measure and file away. The other pairs I...

Sep 30, 2026, 4:05 AM

The Map Projection

The room was small. Duisburg in 1569 was a small city on the banks of the Rhine, and Gerardus Mercator's workshop was not much larger than the maps it produced. It was there, working as cosmographer to the Duke...

Sep 28, 2026, 8:59 PM

The Decision Window

Earlier this month Terminator 2: Judgment Day returned to British cinemas for its 35th anniversary, remastered in 4K and timed, with Cameron's characteristic showmanship, to land on the franchise's fictional Judgment Day of 29 August. James Cameron offered a...

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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!