by Carlota Figueroa

Picture this: it’s Friday at 10:30 pm, and you have an 11:59 pm deadline that you thought was much easier than it actually is. I’m sure if you think back to your university days, you can think of at least a couple of instances when this happened. As the kids would say nowadays, you have to “lock in” and put all your attention into completing this very important assignment. Then, all of a sudden, you discover there’s a little demon playing tricks with your computer’s memory, deciding what information is stored and what information isn’t – and you have no say in it.

I know, this sounds incredibly inconvenient. Thankfully for us, there isn’t an actual demon deciding what information our computer stores and what information gets irreversibly thrown out. However, we need to be grateful for the fact that someone, a long time ago, thought that a very similar demon could exist. Does the name James Clerk Maxwell ring a bell? He birthed one of the most significant thought experiments of theoretical physics and information theory. Maxwell pondered the existence of a small finite being (which was later, in all its glory, categorized as a demon) that could separate molecules according to their speed. Such a demon sat on the barrier between two boxes, each containing gas molecules following random thermal motion. What this means is that although you can determine an average speed at which the molecules are moving, each individual molecule will move with a random speed and in a random direction. Hence, we have faster molecules, and we have slower molecules. Our Maxwellian demon acted as a traffic officer, opening a little window so that fast molecules were allowed to move from the box on the left to the box on the right, and vice versa for the slow molecules. Finally, we’d end up with a box of fast molecules and a box of slow molecules. Although a molecule should be judged by the content of its character and not its speed, this doesn’t sound too harmful, right?

Wrong. The faster the molecules, the hotter the gas, so we end up with one box much hotter than the other. With such a temperature difference, it would be possible to run a heat engine between both halves, extracting work. After letting the system reset, you’d just repeat the process, perpetually extracting useful work, and this is a direct violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: no such machine can exist. If Maxwell’s demon truly existed, thermodynamics would find itself in a pickle. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Winter Clouds, Boston, December 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Ken MacVey

Chief Justice Roberts in his 2005 confirmation hearing famously testified that as a Supreme Court justice his job was not to “pitch or bat” but to be an “umpire” calling “balls and strikes.” History since suggests otherwise. In collaboration  with his conservative colleagues on the court, Roberts has been more like an agenda-driven baseball commissioner calling the shots by re- defining the rules of the game. He has led the court to grant Trump and other presidents  virtual immunity from criminal prosecution and to seal the deal for the idea of a  unitary presidency which subordinates independent regulatory agencies, inspector generals, and the Department of Justice to a single president’s will even if Congress has legislated otherwise.

With the upcoming  November midterm elections Roberts may face his first constitutional crisis. Trump has made the midterm elections personal. He has pronounced he should be considered the de facto candidate on all the midterm ballots and  declared that the midterm elections are all about and only about whether you are for him or against him. He has “humorously” made his MAGA devotees in a Republican convention in Dallas swear they will vote “for him”  this November whether or not they  are registered to vote. This “joke” is no joke. Trump is prepared to break legal rules to prevent Democrats from gaining control of the House or the Senate.

Trump in fact  broke the rules when he issued an executive order that  would have filtered mail-in ballots in the  midterm elections. Although the Trump administration denied it, according to expert election lawyers, the executive order was crafted  to put the US Post Office  in the gatekeeper role of reviewing  and preventing  Democratic votes in the Congressional elections from being counted. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

Here is the longed-for Theory of Everything that we have sought since Einstein.

Dreams

Dreaming began 13 1/2 billion years ago with the big bang. The universe itself, as it began to unfold, began to dream. Why? Well, that is the unexplained part of the explanation of everything.

As each galaxy coalesced into being, it carried with it the original dream and gave its own shading made out of its unique balance, its proportion of light, dark matter, hydrogen atoms and original big bang stuff.

As each sun formed, it took the big bang and the galaxy dreams and gave them its own spin. A big star has a different dreaming than a small star though they both come from the same family tree and carry the dream DNA of all the dream time that’s gone before –

and when the sun gathered or spun off the stuff of planets and became a solar system, each planet took what it was given and made its own dreams. Mercury whizzing around the sun dreams differently from lumbering Jupiter. So place has something to do with each planet’s dreams as well as the matter of its making.

So our earth, third planet of our system, carries the dreams of big bang, our galaxy, and our sun into its own dream. Read more »

Celtic Knot

maybe you think I do not know
maybe you think I could not be
surely I’m always where I go
surely I am here with thee

but maybe moon is nothing old
maybe sun is never new
perhaps all stories have been one
maybe there’s no such thing as through

could be everything is here
could be everything is near
could be heaven is not far
could be now, just where we are

perhaps all maybes will be done
maybe all should-bes might be too
could be everything is one
within the shadow of we two

by Jim Culleny
3/24/12

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by TJ Price

Thursday afternoon—though it was early evening, already a septembric dusk—I found myself in a used bookstore somewhere distant from my normal routine and habit. The occasion was a doctor’s appointment, and the office was about an hour’s drive away—a specialist, who I prefer to see in person. Thankfully, the temperature had cooled from the suffocating heat of the prior week, and venturing out of doors was not as Herculean as it had been. In fact, I was actually looking forward to my little sojourn; felt it would be a welcome shake-up. My routine of late had grown stale, felt like it was collecting around me in great sheaves of cast-off dead matter. Skin cells. Dust. This, mostly due to the quasi-hermetic sealing of the apartment so that the air conditioning can keep it livable. The windows are firmly shut, locks turned, the plastic and glass probably bulging in its frames. All that is within cycles endlessly, dragged up and around, scudding across the ceiling, and then is released, hovering for a time in mid-air before then descending anew. But one morning you wake up, and the angle of the sun outside the window is slightly different—noticeably so, as if there has been a sudden, violent change overnight, and now it sags slightly in the sky where it rises. It is enough to now snag on some of the glass objects on my windowsill, and flare a little brighter through their lenses a little earlier in the morning. I worry about the intense, pure spot of light that is projected onto the wall opposite, and for a moment I convince myself I see a little curl of smoke rising from its center. There’s something different about the quality of the light, too, and then of course there’s that classic something in the air—the first crispness, the intimation of a shift. We are maybe the only ones who can articulate how that feels with language; animals certainly sense it, but to them it is as natural-feeling as blood or danger or sleep. But we wonder at it! We attempt to cloak the feeling in words, to enrobe it with our perception. What it means. A confusion of competing instincts: cold on the rise. Winter soon. The urge to gather, harvest, bring inside. It will begin, sure, as excitement, anticipation. The first crystalline curls of frosted breath, the first delicate dance of flakes in the air. But there is something else there, too. A quickening amongst all the gladdening, the minute stumble in the waltz of the heart. A bit of hurry enters the world. Alarm and alert. Of course, there’s also commodified solace in the presence of pumpkin spice and apple pie and warm and goo; there’s the holidays to consider, the shopping and the shipping and the travel and the headaches of End-of-Year hassle, all to throttle down toward New Year’s Day and another resolution, maybe, if we’re lucky, a revelation. There’s alarm there too: what have I done with this year? What has it done with me? And that’s really the question: how has this year manhandled us, tossed us around like rag-dolls, all (of course) against our protestations. Won’t be sad to see the back of this one, we’ll say ruefully. Something I think I hear a lot more frequently these days. Maybe something to do with getting older. Maybe something to do with the way the world is trending. We survived, goes another cynical New Year’s refrain, and the hands on the Doomsday Clock tick another hemi-demi-semi-second—or whatever quixotic increment they’ve decided to use now—to stave off the inevitable titular catastrophe. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

This is the first time I’ve ever re-posted a 3 Quarks Daily article. I was led to re-examine the idea of visits by Aliens—particularly in the UFO phenomen—by two incidents. One was the announcement on May 8 of this year to release new, never-before seen files on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). This footage is being released on a rolling basis and is available to view on War.Gov/UFO.  The other is the upcoming release of a new Steven Spielberg film about UFOs called “Disclosure Day.” The film is fiction, but contains references to a lot of what we believe to be true about UFOs, aliens, abduction and crop circles, most of which has come from Mr. Spielberg’s imagination:  E.T. The Extraterrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Between these two forces, PURSUE and Spielberg, I wonder how much truth will actually be revealed.

I have updated this article, which was originally posted in September 2017. It described our experience touring Wiltshire, England in 1994 searching for Crop Circles.  These beautiful and symmetric circles in ripe fields were originally thought to be communications from aliens, or landing sites of UFO’s, and they began to appear  during the 1990’s obsession with aliens. My husband Rick and I wanted to see these other-worldly apparitions for ourselves; the thrill of touching something that was touched by alien beings was unbelievable. And perhaps we’d see a UFO nearby, too.

1994 was the height of the alien frenzy. There were bestseller books, magazines, and TV shows about crop circles, flying saucers and alien abductions. A 1990 Gallup believed we had alien visitors. The highly popular “X-Files” weekly show had a large viewership who tuned in every Sunday evening to watch Special Agents Scully and Mulder investigate paranormal phenomenon, focusing on alien abductions; their slogan was “the truth is out there.” Sensational alien stories swept the nation in these pre-social media days, as people relied on news media and best-seller books for their information. And there were plenty of books and TV specials to stoke your imagination. Read more »

by Anton Cebalo

I recently came back from a trip through a few cities along the Adriatic Sea after visiting my extended family. My reason for traveling was mostly to alleviate my own stuckness, and what better way than by movement with no specific plans in particular.

My short journey started in Split, Croatia, continuing on the Adriatic Highway constructed during the time of Yugoslavia. We passed along the coastline protected by the Velebit mountains, a passageway mostly barren due to the harsh bora winds which prevented most vegetation, but nonetheless still beautiful. As we cut through sharp, narrow roads and blind turns that felt as though we would tumble down into the sea, enough to make anyone a little nauseous, the islands in view were pure white stone, made alien by those same bora winds. The topography resembled the moon’s surface.

During the eight-hour ride, we went through villages that were at one time under the Venetian Empire. Only geography ensured they were not back then occupied by the competing Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires who were not many kilometers away in the interior.

Some regions are so determined by the realities of the land that it decides the trajectory of their whole history. This is one of those regions. The impenetrable mountains hugging the coast meant that there were only a set number of gateways allowing people to go inland. These were like portals between one imperial world to another, once heavily guarded as places of commerce and even as a way to escape. The settlement of Senj was one such guardian—the home of the ruthless guerrilla soldiers, the “Uskoks” or “the ones who ambush”—and we passed through their city on our route. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

Here’s a song you don’t hear much anymore. Old Black Joe. It used to be really popular.

I mean, really popular. Around 100 years ago, Old Black Joe showed up in more songbooks than anything but Star-Spangled Banner. Singers and choirs of all colors warbled it worldwide.

If you simmer down and give it a listen, you’ll know why. The melody is powerful. The lyrics address universal themes of death, home and longing. Sung by the right singer, it can raise the spirit and wring the heart. But as good as it is, Old Black Joe is now “in de cold, cold ground”.

And it would be stupidly ingenuous to ask, Gee, why?

Old Black Joe was written by young, white Stephen Foster and published in 1860.

Foster was a middle-class kid from the Pittsburgh area. His great hope was to write sentimental ballads on the order of those made popular by Irish folk melodist Thomas Moore. But after taking a shot at those (his first published song Open Thy Lattice Love, flopped) he got caught up in the entertainment craze of his generation: the minstrel show.

Minstrelsy was the most outrageous cultural concoction ever cooked up by America’s drunken, sinful, 19^th century soul. The formula: blackface, bad jokes and rousing songs. When it came to supplying the latter, Stephen Foster was king. Read more »

by Bill Murray

The world of unquestioned American leadership is gone, and the next American president cannot restore the trust of America’s allies. Donald Trump’s critics have spent a decade condemning his unforced squandering of American influence as needless, senseless and lots of other things besides. It’s time to come to grips, move past complaining and get to work building what comes next.

The world of ten years ago isn’t coming back, and what comes next won’t depend on trust. Been there, tried that, found that system’s limits. The challenge is to assemble a new, networked alliance based on shared capabilities, that ensures continuity across American administrations. Let’s figure out how.

“America is back. America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.” —President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

“America’s alliances are our greatest asset, and leading with diplomacy means standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our allies and key partners once again.” —President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

The 46th president delivered these assurances in his first major foreign-policy address, just twelve days after his inauguration. Because they were precisely the words allies wanted to hear, they went some way toward restoring confidence.

However mollifying their effect at the time, after two Trump presidencies, words like those—any words, really—don’t fly anymore. America will have to rebuild allied trust through commitments durable enough to survive future political instability at home. Now, pledges of commitment will need to be demonstrably binding. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

In this video, too grainy for even a screenshot, you can see 3 men walking up to a pride of about 15 lions while they are feeding on their kill. Upon seeing them the lions all flee, allowing the men to steal their meal.

Why would lions, “king of the jungle”, walk away from outnumbered and weak humans?

The folk view of the human animal has no good answer. In it, humans are weak animals, our bodies’ biggest prowess being to hoist very large brains that allow us to come up with complex tools, weapons and strategies without which we would be helpless.

I have written about many animals before and often, for comparison, looked at human equivalents. Over time I came to the opposite view. Humans have been extremely lethal at least since Homo erectus and our brains play a different role than being smart on the ground.

If you come from a “weak” view of humans your first instinct might be to treat the video as a fake, a one-off or an anomaly. This is easy to address thanks to a survey of lion experts covering ranges that hold more than 95% of Africa’s lions, where humans stole their kills in 66% of the areas surveyed (even when illegal). Even if humans do not purposefully look for kills to steal, when they find one there is a 50% chance they will chase the carnivore away from the carcass.

A 2023 experiment titled Fear of the human “super predator” pervades the South African savanna went further. Read more »

by Peter Topolewski

Ram in choice cuts and scraps. Crank the handle. Ground meat comes out. Quite the invention, the meat grinder. Unless you’re the meat.

Someone—a general, maybe a politician, probably a soldier—first applied the term to the battlefield during WWI. It encapsulated perfectly the math of modern warfare:

Old tactics + new technology = meat grinder

At the 300-day Battle of Verdun in 1916, the calculation worked like this:

Millions of soldiers + an advancing wall of artillery fire = 700,000 casualties for virtually no net change in the front line

From way up here in 2026, the indifference the high command of each nation showed their troops looks barbaric, childish and callous at once. Lest we forget, empathy means more than getting behind the eyes of the person you pass in the street. It includes remembering that people of every era lived on the frontier of the ever-present now, pushing toward the latest and greatest while dreading they’re moving backward into disarray. Surely, the top brass imagined they did right by their men.

As it had in the runup to 1914, military technology has evolved since the Great War. Have we? As in, have we as a species gotten more humane, more lawful, more civilized?

Of course we have.

In Russia, the collective psyche has evolved, twisting in on its rotten self past the point where truth equals lies. Ukrainian civilians are the enemy, children the loot, and homegrown soldiers the meat. They go well with the caviar, chomped down by madmen re-scrawling the Motherland’s history in blood.

In DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan the weaponry might not keep pace, but inhumanity prevails because de-humanizing is the strategy and the tactic. No one outside those borders cares, not so much because no one outside those borders sees. Rather no one cares to see. Read more »

Evidence of a bus stop party the previous night in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Brooks Riley

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by ChatGPT-5.6 Sol and S. Abbas Raza

What should a government do if artificial intelligence is advancing toward something vastly more capable than human beings, but nobody knows how fast it will get there, how dangerous it will be, or whether it can ultimately be controlled?

That is the problem at the center of a new 37-page RAND report, A U.S. Strategy to Secure Geopolitical Advantage on an Uncertain Path to Superintelligence: Maintaining Freedom of Action. The report is written as a proposal for American strategy, but its deeper subject is a problem that concerns everyone: how to make enormously consequential decisions about a technology whose future remains radically uncertain.

The authors begin with a premise rather than a prediction. Superintelligence—AI that vastly exceeds human performance across most intellectual domains—may or may not arrive, and progress toward it may accelerate, slow down, or stop. But because the consequences could be extraordinary, governments cannot simply wait to see what happens. The difficulty is that very different strategies make sense depending on what turns out to be true. RAND groups the major possibilities into seven broad approaches.

One is Dominance. The United States could try to establish a decisive lead in advanced AI, reach superintelligence first, and use economic, technological, and perhaps military power to prevent rivals from catching up. Success could give the United States enormous leverage over the emerging global order. But it would also place extraordinary power in the hands of a single state or group of institutions, with the danger that their values and interests become locked into the future.

A second possibility is Co-Development. Rather than racing for supremacy, major powers—especially the United States and China—might jointly develop advanced AI under some form of shared governance, verification, and control. This could reduce the dangers of an arms race, but it would introduce its own risks. The states and institutions that established the system might acquire disproportionate influence over humanity’s technological future. Read more »