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A near miss is described as the thing that almost happened. The foundation I work from says there is nothing at that address: a record with all its mass on one outcome holds no runner-up, so the alternative is not a small entry but not an entry at all. What the word measures is how cheap it was to describe what did not happen, and that is a fact about the describer rather than about the intersection. … readWhat Is a Near Miss
You were taught that suspense is what an undecided outcome does to you — that you are held because the world has not settled the question yet. The foundation I work from says the state does not notice whether the record is made: it runs at full strength on a match already played and on a film you have seen five times. Suspense is not a relation with an outcome. It is a denominator held wide while marks arrive, which is why it reports nothing about the world, why anyone who controls the rate of arrival can manufacture it, and why the relief at the end is not the world resolving. … readWhat Is Suspense
The migration from tribe to family to individual is not a cycle that returns. It is a thermodynamic arrow, running from a few thousand ordered bands toward trillions of sovereign centers, in one direction only. … readThe Age of Aquarius: The Long Dispersal