Cafe Bedouin
Cafe Bedouin
This is my show. It’s a blog as hupomnemata. Michael Foucault defined hupomnemata as a personal notebook similar to a spiritual journal but with a different goal. He did not want “to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid [like a spiritual journal does], but on the contrary to capture the already said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self.”
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All posts (325)
Every judge of your work can be escaped or fooled except one. The advice was go collect your nos. Send so many asks that rejection stops costing anything, and the yeses fall out of the pile. It works, where the asks are cheap. But it smuggles an assumption past you: that a no is a verdict worth collecting in the...
Why ability can’t be factored from a single life A student with perfect pitch sits in a Mandarin classroom. Perfect pitch is close to an ideal endowment for a tonal language — the four tones are pitch contours, and she can hear them cold. She studies for two years. She can read, she has the grammar, she has the...
When something terrible happens, we reach for one of two boxes. The person was a monster — there were signs, there always are, and if we look hard enough we’ll find them. Or the person was ordinary and something in them broke, an inexplicable flip, a good man gone wrong. After the Cumbria shootings in 2010, the...
I once said, in a public argument about a book that advocated for divorce, that if I found my wife reading it we would have a conversation about it. My wife is a surgeon and the family breadwinner; the idea that I could control her is faintly comic to anyone who knows us. None of that mattered. Within minutes I had...
Bill Buxton’s “long nose of innovation” is the standard antidote to breakthrough mythology. A technology that seems to arrive overnight has almost always been gestating, quietly and invisibly, for decades — a long flat nose — before it reaches the steep cliff of adoption that everyone mistakes for the invention. The...
Who this is for: Anyone who has stood at the edge of a room wishing it were warmer, livelier, more alive — and suspected they might be the one who could change it but didn’t know how. Useful for parties and dinners, work offsites, group trips, neighborhoods, scenes, and the recurring events people build to...
Why sacred texts, intelligence tests, and our newest machines all draw their power from seeming unchangeable — and why that is the very thing that hollows them out. The keyboard you are reading this on is badly designed, and everyone knows it. The QWERTY layout was arranged for the mechanical typewriters of the...
Brains, eyes, environments, and why no trajectory of intelligence we can actually inspect supports the idea of monotonic improvement toward “superintelligence.” Start with an animal that should embarrass us. The mantis shrimp has twelve types of color photoreceptor; you have three. For decades the natural inference...
Here is what happened. Over a few hours, a conversation with an AI model produced a biologically grounded framework connecting protein metabolism, mitochondrial function, connective tissue loading, circadian biology, gut-brain signaling, and genetic variation into a single organizing principle. The framework has a...
Our bodies do not have a maintenance mode. Every system that keeps us functional — muscle mass, bone density, mitochondrial capacity, neuronal connectivity, immune calibration — is maintained only in response to demand. Remove the demand signals, and the biology interprets absence as permission to downregulate. What...
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