Posts tagged “notes”
A Style Guide
One of the things I find surprisingly interesting is reading the style guides of different publishers or newspapers. Style guides generally cover how written content should be structured and presented. They help make single organisation seem coherent and help writers present what might otherwise be ambiguous. At the same time they can often be overly detailed, attacking the creative freedom of the author. Reading what decisions others have made regarding their styles allow me to pick and choose what to take inspiration from. Because I am in full control over what I publish here I can also make liberal use of Orwell’s sixth rule from Politics and the English Language: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”.
Continue Reading →On an American Suez
A major Anglo-Saxon power begins a war far away from home with the help of Israel and without the support of its allies. The main objective is the control of one of the world’s most important maritime trade routes, but the aggressor may have to back down — partly from the rising oil prices at home. This could either describe the 1956 Suez crisis, when Britain and France invaded Egypt over their nationalisation of the Suez canal, or the contemporary Israeli-American bombing campaign and blockade of Iran (“Operation Epic Fury”). Is the war in Iran then an American Suez?
Continue Reading →Security Studies for Individuals
Studying at the Swedish Defence University gives you an odd way of thinking, where everything can be modelled through the lenses of nuclear strategy, international relations (ir), and the tactics employed in various contemporary and historical conflicts. These are also not only subjects for the lecture hall and library, but for the lunch room and nights out on the town. Such topics are of course interesting for their own sake, but they also reveal something about how to deal with conflict more broadly — as one force diametrically opposed to the interests of the other.
Continue Reading →The Trouble with Fusion
Energy is perhaps the most important input of industrial society. Ever since the taming of fire, mankind has in some sense dreamt of a infinite source of fuel that could be used to drive all sorts of human activities — from cooking, transport, the grinding of grain, to the melting of ore. All these activities require an input in the form of abstract energy, in each case represented in another form. Where to best source this energy has however always been changing. First it was most assuredly the human body itself (through the consumption of food) but it soon extended to the use of natural forces such as the wind (presumably through things like sailing) and the power of rivers and the potential energy bound within. In the mid-twentieth century this hope turned toward nuclear fission, the splitting of heavy atoms. Nuclear power is today a fact of society — even if debate rages on about its practicality or share of grid infrastructure. A long sought answer to the problems of nuclear fission has been to instead use nuclear fusion, that produces no radioactive waste and that needs only as its original input water. But just as nuclear fission did not give us cheap power nuclear fusion will not.
Continue Reading →Trust
Choosing to trust is a decision that is much ridiculed today. It is in many cases easy to see with the benefit of hindsight that it was foolish to trust someone, but doing so in advance is of course much harder. In general we are moving in the direction of trusting less and less; exposure to betrayal is simply too high a price to pay. The consequences of this ripply out across society with tremendous impact.
Continue Reading →Russia is Not a Great Power
Russia is not a great power. It is in no way a contender for the title, and treating it as one of the “power brokers” of the world benefits no one except the autocratic regime that hinges its legitimacy on it but that has simultaneously suppressed the abilities of the Russian people to attain such a status.
Continue Reading →Three Thoughts On Crypto and NFTs
Writing this in 2026 ad (234 AdR), crypto is solidly in a “winter”. As valuations have fallen, so has the intensity of the debate surrounding the topic. I therefore feel it apt to use this opportunity to briefly write down my thoughts and opinions regarding this otherwise contentious topic.
Continue Reading →Making Beautiful Documents in LaTeX
As a political science student, writing is a daily activity. And like any serious writer who cares about their writing, I care about the presentation and look of my documents. This has evolved, particularly recently, into an interest in typography — the art of formatting and shaping text. The source of this interest was originally my discovery of gnu Emacs’ ability to convert org-mode documents into \(\LaTeX\) ones back in high–school and even today this is still the basis of my process. It was accelerated by my increasing tinkering with this very website, having to design its appearance largely from the ground up.
Continue Reading →A Beginner Guide to Diplomacy
Diplomacy is a game about conquering Europe as one of the main belligerents of the first world war. While it may on a first glance somewhat resemble Risk, the two are very different; most notably by the complete lack of random chance as well as by the fact that turns are all made simultaneously (the consequences of which will soon be made apparent). Keep in mind however that the true game of Diplomacy is played not on the map, but in the social interactions and minds of your fellow players. You will of course need to know how to navigate the map so as to figure out what possibilities you have (and to avoid being tricked).
Continue Reading →Productive Note-taking
After initially starting to use Emacs back in high school merely for programming, I naturally began to use it for other tasks such as document preparation and note-taking. This introduced me to the surprisingly large overlap between Emacs users and people generally interested in “productivity” workflows.
Continue Reading →Healthy Media Habits
I am not “on” social media. Both in the sense that I don’t have accounts on them, but even when I do I do not use them. As I have briefly mentioned earlier this has some minor consequences, but I will not discuss them here. Instead I want to describe how I have a healthy and positive (in the literal sense of the word) relationship with the internet, social media, and my smartphone.
Continue Reading →Designing Business Cards
I usually always carry a few business cards. This is quite uncommon in this day and age, with the need for remembering phone numbers having disappeared and with the ubiquity of social media for creating, sharing, and maintaining contact. But I reject the use of mainstream social media, partly for ideological reasons but also for practical ones1. This inevitably requires making certain sacrifices when it comes to what events I can participate in, on how learning about what people I know are up to, and on how I can communicate with the people in my life around me. There are some drawbacks that you might expect — you can not dm someone on instagram if you do not have instagram yourself — but there are hidden drawbacks that may not be immediately obvious.
Continue Reading →What is Technique?
In recent time I have noticed a considerable number of academic, policy, and popular works that have all covered parts of the concept of technique, without naming it as such. At the same time I have encountered numerous older writers and thinkers who were very much aware of the concept. I believe this is because of a lack of knowledge on the topic, and I have written this as a sort of “introduction” to thinking about problems of a technical sort.
Continue Reading →Land Value in the Digital Realm
Adam Smith divides the economic forces into three areas for, the profit obtained from labour, that from capital (or stock), and that obtained from land. The value extracted from land is here the natural resources of the earth, the sunshine and rain that lands there (allowing for agriculture), the timber that can be cut down, or the ore to be mined. But there is another value that can be obtained from the land.
Continue Reading →A Phenomenology of the PRC
In my musings on deepseek I wrote on the general economic environment in the prc, and how it differs from the central-planning-oriented one that has come to dominate the view in the west, even if subconsciously. Here I wish to offer a less “big picture” perspective, one that is more focused on the boots-on-the-ground perspective of travelling around China. It will not be representative of anything except my own perspective, and they will by definition misrepresent the truth as it is merely a sample size of one.
Continue Reading →A Cohesive Note-taking and Academic Workflow in Emacs
I have been using gnu Emacs for about three years now. I initially
began using it after completing a semester of introductory programming
classes exclusively in gnu Nano, with a series of shell scripts to
compile and run C# code, and to set up a trio of terminals; one for
code editing, one for compilation, and one to actually run the cli
program I was writing. I had practically created my own little system
for terminal multiplexing. This might sound like hell, and in
hindsight it was. I was not even aware of some of the abilities of
nano to perform syntax highlighting, display line numbers, indent
lines et cetera. I merely needed something quickly to write text in,
and was horrified at my classmates who had to sit idly and wait for
visual studio to start or restart after crashing, it did not help that
visual studio was not even available in platform of my choice. In the
beginning I only needed to write short programs, simple loops, input
and output and the like, and so the simplicity of nano was not in any
way a burden — in some ways it was even a boon due to its quick
startup time and lack of clunky ui. But eventually I found it annoying
having to create and resize my layout of terminals and writing long
commands to get Microsoft’s Windows-centric tooling to compile on
Linux became a chore. So I created little scripts to optimize my
workflow. Nothing incredibly complex mind you, just little fixes here
and there. When what is called “fall break” in Sweden came around I
decided to ditch Nano entirely. I had friends who used Vim, but being
a staunch hipster I decided I couldn’t copy them, at least not without
trying the alternatives.
Colophon
I think every personal blog that is somewhat custom built should have documentation written on its design philosophy and implementation. I see this as an extension of the free-software ideal; you should not only be allowed but also able to extent and modify another program to your needs. It is also useful as a way to discover other peoples’ inspirations and influences, as well as finding unique sources of inspiration for your own website.
Continue Reading →A Historical Perspective on Strategic Resources
Throughout the history of human civilization, the characteristics of strategic resources and the methods of dealing with them have changed considerably. But as our economy becomes more and more complex, and the number of materials increases together with this complexity, the application of any single material represents a smaller and smaller portion of economic activity. For this reason, the impact of any single resource on the world’s supply chains is unlikely to have as significant of an impact as they might have had in the past. It is interesting however to observe how nations have dealt with the issue of strategic resources in the past and to learn how those techniques may be used in the future to protect critical industries. Historically energy has been the principal strategic resource, but in recent time the prodution of computing machines and information processing has become increasingly important.
Continue Reading →Writing About Jacques Ellul
I am by no means an expert on Ellul, I have merely read three of his books (Presence in the Modern World, The Technological Society, and The Meaning of the City) But in trying to communicate his influence on my thinking, I have inadvertently written many times about him, albeit at an all too basic level. There are many theories claiming to explain all of human history, or at least the structure of our current society, but Ellul’s technique works because of its simplicity and deliberate vagueness. It is however this quality that makes explaining Ellul to others so challenging. Here is one example of an attempt made by me to quickly summarise the central ideas of Ellul’s technique.
Continue Reading →