one monkey + one keyboard

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David Foster Wallace's infinite seriousness

Did you know that David Foster Wallace wrote a book about actual infinity? Like many people, I was aware of David Foster Wallace because of Infinite Jest. His very long and difficult novel/memoir that is widely admired and rarely read. I had tried and failed myself. Wikipedia classifies it

What 18,000 Files Taught Me About the Future of Digital Knowledge (And Why I Sent Robots to Spy on…

By: Caspar Addyman  Published: August 29, 2025

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The Pixar Book of the Dead - Bardo Thodol

I was listening to the Tibetan book of the dead as an audiobook. There's some vivid and scary imagery, so I asked ChatGPT to walk me through it. So that I didn't have nightmares, I asked to draw it, as if it were a Pixar movie.

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The Catch

The Old man sat by the river, watching the sky turn the color of ash. His hands were rough, and the rod in his grip had seen better days. The boy beside him was quiet, looking at the water with wide, expectant eyes. "It takes patience," the old

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The Evil Twin Hypothesis

As everyone knows, one twin is always evil. It's such a common theme in literature and popular media that it has to be true, doesn't it? Whenever there are twins, one of them is likely to be evil. But why is this? Myself and a colleague

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The Meaning of Life - GPT-4o responds

Long time readers of this blog will know that in 2003 I wrote to every professional philosopher in the Britain, asking them the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Just now, I asked GPT-4o for it's answer. Dear Caspar Addyman, Thank you for your intriguing and refreshingly

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Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash was often rash. But on Animals he's unparallel'd.

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Futility and Boredom

Elle Hunt has written great piece in the Guardian on 'Why it is good to be bored'. It starts in the vivid boredom of her own childhood I remember my first experience of boredom as vividly as my first kiss. The recollection is so clear I thought I

Life, the universe and Markov blankets

Forty years ago, on 8th March 1978, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was broadcast on BBC Radio for the very first time. I personally…

Babies and emotion

This weekend I was delighted to receive a beautiful copy of Schadenfreude by Tiffany Watt Smith. It is not an Unbound book but it does…

Saw this on Twitter recently.

Instead of:

I mentioned on the Telegram list that maybe alternative voting structures should be considered?

A compromise between these might be a logarithmically weighted voting structure so that n BLT = log (10n) votes.

A time before smiles?

This is the first chapter from my book The Laughing Baby, coming soon from Unbound.

Music to make babies laugh

How two psychologists and an army of babies helped Grammy winner Imogen Heap to write her new happy song for babies.

12 lessons in happiness you can learn from laughing babies

Morning Gloryville make people all over the world happy with morning raving. I wrote them a guest blog post about happy babies. This is it.

I agree entirely. In fact, this is almost exactly what i say at the start of my book.

https://unbound.com/books/the-laughing-baby/updates/happy-birthday-to-the-laughing-baby

As one happy baby specialist to another, I say congratulations and good luck to Dr Karp and his new…

Mind you, a $10M investment puts the £10,000 I’m trying to raise for The Laughing Baby into perspective…

Laughter makes the impossible possible. Just ask a baby.

Laughter makes life worth living. It makes impossible situations possible. Just ask a baby. Imagine the scenario; You have just been…

How to take your first steps in baby science or baby theatre

Imagine for a moment that you wanted create a piece of theatre to entertain babies or a scientific experiment to test their understanding…

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The universe of Marian Medina Cuesta

I can not really afford to be a patron of the arts. But thanks to my wonderful friendship with the artist Marian Medina Cuesta I have been able to make a childhood dream come true. [caption id="attachment_1756" align="alignright" width="212"] LIke

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Where are all the aliens?

Where are they? Well, I think I know. I believe in aliens. I believe we aren't alone in the universe, or even in the galaxy. And I am not alone. 52% of Brits and 54% of Americans agree. It's 56% in Germany. And I've

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Further proof that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab are at it again, providing more proof that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is real. As we reported back in 2012, their previous supercomputer simulations showed that spaces is filled with invisible magnetic spaghetti and planetary meatballs. In their new work they speculate that planets

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Google's hallucinating neural networks suggest psychedelic experiences are spooky but not supernatural.

I have always believed psychedelic visions from ayahuasca etc. are not supernatural. Google just proved it. Computer image recognition has transformed out of all recognition in the last few years thanks to deep neural networks and massive sets of training data. We train an artificial neural network by showing it

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Vipassana - vaguely sensational.

Two weeks before Christmas I went on a 10 day silent retreat on a former farm in Hereford. Or, as one friend describes it, Meditation Boot Camp. It certainly was tough but now I've had a few weeks to recover and to see the effects in everyday life

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The best essay on the meaning of life I've ever read.

As you may know I once asked every philosopher in the UK about the meaning of life. It was a slightly depressing experience. Only 22 out of a possible?644 replied . Those replies were great. Being philosophers they didn't actually have any answers but they certainly questioned my