General

I already owed Sean Carroll a proper post. When I wrote A New Universe All Throughout The Day I admitted, almost in passing, that he was the person who really led me into taking the many-worlds interpretation seriously rather than treating it as a science-fiction gimmick. Then two New Scientist videos landed in front of me within a few weeks of each other - one titled We May Never Understand Reality and one titled Why Quantum Physics Says There’s a Multiverse - and I realised I had been circling him for months without ever writing the man down. This is me doing that. ...

TL;DR Grand Theft Auto VI now launches on November 19, 2026 for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, after slipping first from 2025 to May 26, 2026 and then to November. No PC at launch. Development is widely estimated at $1 - 2 billion, with some reports of total production and salary spend climbing higher still - comfortably the most expensive game ever made, and arguably the most expensive single piece of media ever produced. For scale: GTA V cost roughly $265 million, has sold around 225 million copies, and made well over $10 billion across twelve years. First-year revenue forecasts for GTA 6 run from about $3.2 billion to over $7 billion, and Take-Two’s own FY2027 guidance points at $8.0 - 8.2 billion in net bookings. Pre-orders reportedly cleared $1 billion in the first hour. The thing now behaves less like a product launch and more like a small economy switching on. I’m a hobbyist who plays games and likes numbers, not an industry analyst - so treat this as one curious observer doing the arithmetic out loud. I should be upfront: I am not a games-industry analyst, and nothing here is insider knowledge. I’m someone who has sunk an embarrassing number of hours into Rockstar’s worlds over the years and who finds the economics of this particular launch genuinely hard to get my head around. GTA 6 has crossed a threshold where a video game stops being comparable to other games and starts being comparable to infrastructure projects. That shift is what I want to pick at. ...

I have written about one of Max Tegmark’s ideas already - the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis - and in doing so I admitted he sits at the top of my favourite physicists list. That post was about a single claim. This one is about the man, and about the thing I find more interesting than any individual theory of his: the through-line. Tegmark has spent a career moving steadily inward, from measurable cosmology toward the deepest possible questions about what reality is, and the move never feels like a physicist losing the plot and drifting into metaphysics. It feels like someone following the maths until it runs out of floor. ...

In Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? I admitted to an instinct I have never quite been able to shake: that the laws of physics are discovered rather than invented, and that mathematics might be genuinely fundamental - not a human language we lay over reality, but part of the bedrock. I said that if we ever reach base reality, maths is the thing most likely to get us there. I left it as a feeling. This post is me taking that feeling and seeing how far a serious physicist has been willing to push it. ...

“Are we living in a simulation?” is one of those questions that sounds like late-night dorm-room talk and then turns out to have a serious literature behind it. The honest short answer to “how likely” is that nobody knows, and that the question may not even have a clean numerical answer. But that is not a reason to wave it away. The reasons we cannot confidently put a number on it are themselves interesting, and they tell us something real about the limits of probability, the nature of consciousness, and what counts as science. ...

TL;DR A child born in 1700 inherited a world barely changed from their grandparents’; a child born today may see more transformation in 30 years than the 18th century saw in a century Moore’s Law drove ~50,000,000x transistor growth since 1971 - exponential growth is geometry, not hyperbole The transistor (1947) collapsed barriers to innovation: talent, equipment, communication, and capital AI is the latest accelerant on an already-exponential curve - the question is how we shape it, not whether it happens We are the first generation to face civilisation-scale choice at this speed A child born in 1700 inherited a world barely changed from their grandparents’. A child born in 1900 saw horses give way to automobiles, then aircraft, then space travel within a single lifetime. A child born today will witness more transformation in their first 30 years than humans experienced across the entire 18th century. ...

I have always had this strange gut feeling that the universe is, in some sense, new all throughout the day. Not new in the dramatic science-fiction sense, where everything resets and starts over, but new in the sense that reality seems to keep unfolding into fresh versions of itself depending on what happens next. A conversation goes one way instead of another. You decide to go out, or stay in. You send the message, or you leave it unsent. Tiny differences, and suddenly the entire shape of the day changes. ...

TL;DR The deepest question in cosmology: why is there something rather than nothing? - physics explains how the universe behaves once it exists, not necessarily why it exists at all Physicists’ “nothing” is not absolute absence - quantum vacua still have fields, rules, and structure Elegant physical laws and mathematics may be discovered rather than invented - part of why anything could exist Consciousness may be fundamental or emergent; either answer changes what a complete explanation would require I am a fascinated amateur, not a physicist - treat this as thinking out loud, not a verdict One of the strangest facts about reality is that there is any reality at all. ...

A celebration of timeless television that shaped British culture and influenced generations of viewers. From groundbreaking science documentaries to revolutionary comedies, these shows defined an era of broadcasting excellence and remain watchable and enjoyable today. Tomorrow’s World (1965 - 2003) Tomorrow’s World was a groundbreaking British television series showcasing contemporary developments in science and technology. The show introduced viewers to innovations and futuristic concepts, making it one of the most influential science programs in British television history. ...

About The Hindley Street Country Club (HSCC) is an Australian group founded in 2017 by arranger and producer Constantine Delo. The band specializes in innovative cover arrangements that have achieved massive viral success through social media. Starting as a group of Adelaide musicians recording re-arranged covers, HSCC uploads fresh videos weekly. What sets them apart is their creative approach to arranging classic funk, soul, and R&B tracks with unique instrumental combinations and energetic performances. The formula has resonated globally, earning them over 540 million YouTube views, 940,000+ YouTube subscribers, and more than a billion views across all social media platforms. ...