Exhalation: Stories

Because even if a universe’s life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not.

Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.

All the while I thought on the truth of Bashaarat’s words: past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the a

between all of the company’s parallel versions. Predictably, some individuals became depressed after learning that their parallel selves had enjoyed successes that they themselves hadn’t. For a time there was concern that these private queries would gain a reputation as a product that made buyers unhappy. However, most people decided that they like

lucky and I’m not?” Nat saw some others nodding in sympathy. “And I realized, this didn’t feel the same as when I see other people sell a lot of jewelry in their online stores. This is different.” She turned to face Lyle. “I don’t think I’m an envious person by nature, and I don’t think you are, either. We’re not always wanting what other people ha

When the Arecibo telescope is pointed at the space between stars, it hears a faint hum. Astronomers call that the cosmic microwave background. It’s the residual radiation of the Big Bang, the explosion that created the universe fourteen billion years ago. But you can also think of it as a barely audible reverberation of that original “om.” That syl

Then I described the technique of cross-dating: matching the pattern of growth rings across different trees. I offered an example where we see an identical sequence of thick and thin rings in two pieces of wood: in one case it’s near the center of a recently felled tree, whereas in another it’s near the perimeter of a piece of timber found in an ol

Parrots are vocal learners: we can learn to make new sounds after we’ve heard them. It’s an ability that few animals possess. A dog may understand dozens of commands, but it will never do anything but bark. Humans are vocal learners, too. We have that in common. So humans and parrots share a special relationship with

experience is algorithmically incompressible.