Category: Inventions

There is a prevalent myth surrounding polymathy today. Browse social media or modern discussions on “multipotentiality,” and you will find no shortage of people self-identifying as polymaths while complaining about being misunderstood by a world that demands specialization. They list dozens of interests, showcase a browser with fifty open tabs, buy equipment for hobbies they drop three weeks later, and lament that society continues trying to make them “fit into a box.”

Let’s be honest: that isn’t polymathy. That is consumption wearing a costume. It is dilettantism.

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We’ve all seen them: minimalist running sandals marketed as the ultimate connection to the earth, sporting high-tech buckles, proprietary webbing, and price tags north of $100. They promise the freedom of the legendary Tarahumara (Rarámuri) runners, but often deliver little more than blisters, loose straps, and a lighter wallet.

After years of casual research and experimenting with everything from paracord to leather thongs, I found the ultimate way to tie a DIY huarache using a standard flip-flop sole. Ironically, the breakthrough didn’t come from a modern outdoor gear lab. It came from a 18th-century painting of Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin—the Aztec visionary associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe (1531). In early colonial iconography, the precise wrapping geometry of traditional footwear reveals an elegant truth: ancient design relies on tension and wrapping paths rather than hardware.

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If you have been following this blog from the beginning, you may have run into Tristano, an artificial language I developed for some of my novels. This post contains a Tristano Grammar, and here is a basic English-Tristano dictionary. But now, thanks to AI tools, I can give you much more, including an app that translates Tristano into/from several major languages. The article itself was mostly written by Google Gemini 2.5, my collaborator for refining the language, after I had taught it to read and write Tristano.

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Thanks to AI, now we have computers that can answer questions that would have been unthinkable to previous computers, including what is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. We know well, thanks to Douglas Adams’s research, that the answer is forty-two, but Deep Thought, the computer that found this answer after eons of heavy computation, was too humble to attempt formulating the question, leaving that for a future computer of immeasurably greater power, which would take millions of years to build and then to operate.

Or so it was thought. . . I happened to bump into the solution to this essentially important problem totally by chance, and so I am humbled to present it here, taking no special credit since it was only sheer luck (if you believe in that) that led me to the Ultimate Question.

So read on if you want to know. But beware: you’re probably not going to like it. . .

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This is part 3 of the series of posts on the odds that life might have arisen spontaneously, as some people believe. This time I plug the result of the previous calculations into the famous Drake equation, with rather scary consequences.

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My post on Monkeys, Typewriters, and the Origin of Life has a very active comment stream, but unfortunately WordPress has stopped admitting more long comments, hence this new post where I provide increasingly refined estimates on the numbers of monkeys on typewriters needed to come up with life without anyone guiding their fingers.

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You’ve heard it before: “This is as likely as a monkey sitting on a typewriter writing Shakespeare.” It sounds very unlikely but . . . how unlikely, exactly? In this article, I go through the math and use the result to estimate how likely it is for life to have arisen spontaneously out of a primordial soup of chemicals.

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We all remember fondly those board games of our early years: Parcheesi, Sorry!, Chutes and Ladders, and so forth. They were easy to play and a lot of fun, but in the end we outgrew them and perhaps took up other games that involved more thinking. In this article, though, I tell you a simple way to add more strategic depth to the same old games, by replacing “chance” with “fate.” Read More