Patterns that Connect: AI, Management, Metaverse, Quantum, Philosophy, and Physics

  A technology and economics assessment — September 2026 Copyright: Sanjay Basu Sitting through the panels at Datacloud USA and Metro Connect Fall in Austin this week, from the Nuclear for AI Summit to the site-selection and power-procurement sessions, I came away convinced that the industry is still conflating two very different timelines, and the conference stage did little to separate them. The energy on the floor around nuclear was real and, I think, largely justified. Firm, carbon-free, co-locatable power is exactly the solution that hyperscale AI wants, and behind-the-meter generation is the one credible path around interconnection queues that now stretch past five years. But too many of the discussions treated announced SMR gigawatts as if they were bankable capacity rather than options on a 2030s bet whose economics remain unproven. Every unit built anywhere in the world so far has cost more and arrived later than promised, and NuScale should still be haunting these rooms. ...

A review of Michael Pollan’s A World Appears Press enter or click to view image in full size   Copyright: Sanjay Basu Michael Pollan has spent much of his career investigating things we imagine we understand until he persuades us otherwise. Food, plants, drugs: under his patient scrutiny, the familiar acquires an unexpected strangeness. In A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness , he takes this method to its logical — and most ambitious — destination. His subject is no longer something we eat, cultivate or ingest, but the very apparatus by which anything becomes a subject at all. Consciousness is an audacious choice for a writer whose great strength has always been mediation. Pollan is neither neuroscientist nor philosopher, and he makes no pretense of becoming one. Instead, he occupies his customary position: the intelligent outsider wandering through territories of expertise, asking deceptively simple questions and translating the answers for the rest of us. The difficulty ...

Copyright: Sanjay Basu On Terence Tao, six ideas that have been quietly running the world for four thousand years, and what happens when the machines start doing the easy parts I have had a long and complicated relationship with mathematics, and I want to be precise about which parts were love and which parts were hate. The love was the concepts. I could see them. Somebody explained a derivative to me once as a rate of change and I did not need three worked examples afterward. I felt the thing tilt. Years later when I understood that a matrix is a machine that stretches and rotates space, and that eigenvectors are just the directions the machine cannot be bothered to turn, I sat with that for about a week and was insufferable at dinner. Probability made sense to me the first time somebody framed it as bookkeeping for ignorance. I have never had trouble with the ideas. The hate was the exam hall. My marks were a scandal. Not a catastrophe, which would at least have been dramatic. A scan...