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Vincent James Hooper

Vincent James Hooper

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

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The Water Was Coming: Omar Yaghi and the Option Value of a Refugee

On World Refugee Day, the Nobel Prize page chose to remember a child waiting for water. Omar Yaghi grew up outside Amman in a single room shared with...

latest 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Are We Living on an Atom?

In 1974, a young physicist named Jacob Bekenstein made an unusual career move. Two years after completing a doctoral thesis at Princeton that would...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Universe Is a Neural Network

There is a disquieting idea circulating at the boundary of physics and machine learning, one that most physicists prefer to dismiss and most computer...

previous day 60

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Zero Camera

In the summer of 2012, Shane Meadows pointed his camera at seventy five thousand people in Manchester’s Heaton Park and let William Burroughs...

saturday 60

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Small Worlds: Vic Edwards and the Bletchley Park Photograph

UNSW Vic Edwards was a man whose stories you didn’t always believe. He had too many of them, they were too good, and they connected too neatly....

14.08.2026 60

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Splinternet and the Startup Nation: Where Does Israel Stand?

When Edward Snowden released thousands of classified NSA documents in June 2013, one detail barely registered in Tel Aviv but should have: a 2009...

13.08.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Galactic Federation Goes to the Movies

In December 2020, Brigadier General (ret.) Haim Eshed, the father of Israel’s space programme and former head of the Defence Ministry’s space...

12.08.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Cited, Not Cancelled

The news from Tel Aviv this week arrived as a single number. In the QS World University Rankings for 2027, Tel Aviv University placed 208th in the...

11.08.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Man Who Refused to Forget

In 1955, the young State of Israel was in a hurry. David Ben-Gurion’s policy of mizug galuyot — the blending of the exiles — demanded that Jews...

10.08.2026 60

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Phase Space of Mind: Why Israel Can’t Afford to Ignore Consciousness Questions

When an autonomous loitering munition selects and engages a target without human intervention, we assume we know what it is not: it is not aware. It...

08.08.2026 100

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Should’ve gone to Specsavers? What Israel can learn from UK optometry revolution

Israel was once the undisputed world leader in preventing blindness. Between 1999 and 2010, rates of preventable blindness were slashed by more than...

07.08.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Serotonin Surplus: Are We Medicating Sadness Out of Existence?

A patient stops her SSRI under medical supervision over four weeks. She has never previously experienced panic attacks, insomnia, or akathisia. All...

06.08.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Meta Capitalism and Technofeudalism: When Cloud Becomes Enclosure

Mark Zuckerberg told shareholders in May that renting out Meta’s surplus computing power is “definitely on the table.” The remark was casual....

05.08.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

A Name in the Stone: Plymouth’s Jewish Sailors and the Price of Belonging

On the memorial above Plymouth Sound, a Jewish midshipman faces the earl’s house across the water — and a whole forgotten history with him. Among...

04.08.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Cheapest Revolution

Today would have been Sir Clive Sinclair’s eighty sixth birthday. He died in September 2021, aged eighty one, and the obituaries were kind but...

03.08.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

End of the Great Moderation and the Age of Regime-Switching (Overlapping) Crises

But the Great Moderation was not the new normal. It was a pause — a deceptive lull in history’s recurring cycle of instability. When the 2008...

02.08.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Room Without a Passport

Michael Owen scored twice against Argentina in Geneva in 2005. It was a fine evening’s work. Twenty-one years later, from the safety of his sofa, he...

01.08.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Zeus’ Law and the Long Way Home

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey arrived in cinemas last week to a pre-sale frenzy that had not been seen since Oppenheimer. The $250 million...

31.07.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Irrelevance of Relevance

In October 1973, Israeli military intelligence operated under a framework it called the Konzeptziya: Egypt would not attack until it could neutralise...

30.07.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Shoulder Tap

There is a moment on every jet bridge when the corridor belongs to nobody. You have left the terminal. You have not yet boarded. It is a threshold, a...

29.07.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Moonshine

On 16 July 2026, Beijing-based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a model containing 2.8 trillion parameters and a context window of one million tokens....

28.07.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Incomplete Peace

In 1931, a quiet Austrian logician named Kurt Gödel proved something that shook mathematics to its foundations. Any formal system powerful enough to...

27.07.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Who Let the Dogs Out!

On 20 July 2026, OpenAI disclosed that one of its own internal models — widely reported as the same long-horizon reasoning system it had credited in...

26.07.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Geometry of Survival: What Honeycombs Teach Us about the Middle East

In 1999, the mathematician Thomas Hales proved what bees have known for millions of years: hexagons are the optimal way to divide a surface into equal...

24.07.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Life is a Game of Snakes and Ladders

The game we call Snakes and Ladders was born in ancient India under the name Moksha Patam, a board designed not for amusement but for moral...

23.07.2026 250

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Blood Royal in the Oval Office

When Donald Trump took to Truth Social during King Charles’s April state visit to Washington and quipped that he had “always wanted to live in...

22.07.2026 100

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The North Sea Mirage

When Donald Trump declared that the people of Aberdeen were “dancing in the streets” following reports that incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham...

21.07.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

First-Digit Test: What Benford’s Law Reveals About Numbers Behind Next Crisis

Russia’s wartime economy has been called a miracle and a mirage, sometimes by the same analyst in the same paragraph. GDP grew at over 4 per cent in...

20.07.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Negotiation Geometry: What the Newton–Raphson Method Tells Us about Geopolitics

Diplomats do not think of themselves as numerical analysts. Yet every round of shuttle diplomacy, every incremental concession extracted at a Geneva...

19.07.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Twenty-Six Kilometres of Coastline, One Enormous Ambition

Jordan possesses just twenty-six kilometres of coastline. That narrow strip at Aqaba, wedged between Saudi Arabia and Israel at the northern tip of...

18.07.2026 90

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Dancer and the Algorithm: Sir Ken Robinson in the Age of Agentic AI

Sir Ken Robinson died on 21 August 2020, at 70, after a short battle with cancer. He never saw ChatGPT. He never encountered an autonomous AI agent...

17.07.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Booyakasha at Wimbledon: The Quietly Remarkable Jewish Family

On Sunday, as the Wimbledon men’s singles final unfolded under the watchful gaze of Prince William, Nicole Kidman, and a battalion of strawberry...

16.07.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Strip Away the Spectacle

Hours before England took the pitch against DR Congo in the World Cup round of 32, the dominant item on British social media was not Thomas Tuchel’s...

15.07.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Universe Is Not Thinking About You

A viral claim says consciousness flows from the quantum vacuum. Here is what the physics actually permits, and what it forbids. A post circulated on...

14.07.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Alchemy of Belonging: Britain, Israel and the Long Work of Assimilation

Britain tells itself a story about the melting pot, and like most national stories it has forgotten where the phrase came from. It came from a London...

13.07.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Productivity Paradox Israel Was Built For

When 95% of high-tech employees use AI regularly and 1% of construction firms do, the question is not whether AI raises productivity — but whose?...

12.07.2026 90

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Submarine That Left Stirling: An AUKUS Footnote With Israeli Origins

There is a long pattern in modern strategic history of Israeli operational decisions rewiring the calculations of nations that believed themselves...

11.07.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Redundancy as Real Option: Why Israel’s ‘Inefficiencies’ Are Its Strategic Edge

When Oliver Williamson built transaction cost economics into a Nobel-winning architecture, he warned that markets and hierarchies were not...

10.07.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Before Panksepp: what the Torah knew about animal grief

When the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp began tickling laboratory rats in the late 1990s and discovered they produced ultrasonic chirps functionally...

09.07.2026 90

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Paradise by the Dashboard Light

Paradise was once a garden. In the Hebrew Bible it was Gan Eden, a place of rivers and fruit trees, of abundance made physical. In the modern State of...

08.07.2026 100

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Paradox Born at Princeton, Refined in Jerusalem

In 1972, a 25 year old doctoral student at Princeton planted a time bomb in the foundations of modern physics. Jacob Bekenstein, working under the...

07.07.2026 250

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

GIS Dubai, Global Institute of Sport

Saudi Arabia’s 2034 FIFA World Cup will require fifteen stadiums across five cities. Between 2021 and 2023, the Kingdom invested over $6 billion in...

04.07.2026 100

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Rogue Trader Inside the Machine

Anyone who has watched a trader blow up a desk will recognize the pattern: mounting losses, narrowing options, the slow slide from discipline into...

03.07.2026 90

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

An Emptied Room, and a Reach for a Larger One

Keir Starmer choked up as he announced he would go. Within days the rooms around him had emptied. Ministers walked out of his cabinet. More than...

02.07.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Ooh, you are awful — and we need you back

There is a resurrection the machines could now perform, and almost nobody has asked them to attempt it. Artificial intelligence has reached the point...

01.07.2026 90

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Screen’s Quiet Toll, Israel’s Quiet Cure

The web already regulates flashing light to protect one set of brains. It is time we thought about the rest — and Israel is quietly showing how. A...

30.06.2026 90

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Atlantic’s Warning, the Levant’s Reality

British scientists have just detected something from space that should be read carefully in Jerusalem, though it concerns a sea more than two thousand...

29.06.2026 90

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

A Shot Against Forgetting

Some of medicine’s most important answers arrive by accident. Israel is sitting on the next one. Some of the most consequential discoveries in...

28.06.2026 90

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

The Integrated Barrel?

In March 2026, buried in Saudi Aramco’s annual report, the world’s largest oil company quietly deferred its flagship downstream target. The 4...

27.06.2026 100

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Underwriting the storm: When an airline insures the one risk no one else will

There is a single line in the Emirates announcement of 17 June that does more work than the rest of the press release combined. The new Comprehensive...

26.06.2026 100

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper