Ahem…

2026-08-18T11:00:00+03:00

Call me Heruy. Ishmael doesn’t say anything at all about where his name came from, he just insists we call him that. I on the other hand feel the need to say a bit about mine. Heruy or Hiruy is the name my grandfather gave me. It is Ge’ez for ‘the Chosen One’ or ‘the Exalted One’. He gave me two books when I was very young, Earth Science: A Modern Approach and Modern Science: earth, space and life, and on the title page of both he had inscribed, with a fountain pen and a cursive that is so distinctive and typical of someone who used to write with bamboo sticks, ‘To my step-boy, Hiruy’. My father was quick to observe that his father had made a mistake and meant to write ‘grandson’ and not ‘step-boy’. Lexical errors aside, both men, the junior being a Professor of science, had a non-conformist way of interacting with the world and a burning passion to learn about and explore it. And it has been, under many different guises, a recurring theme in my life. Living in a country where freedom of expression is yet to unshackle itself from the grips of tradition, it is the one state of mind that tends to keep the spark of thought alight. Like all love that can be deemed true, the one I have for my country is incongruous; composed of seemingly antithetical or adverserial components. But forgive the stubborn engineer in me for daring to dismantle such a sublime and elusive a thing as love.

When I taught myself how to program in high school, I didn’t think I would end up doing it for a living. More precisely, I didn’t foresee that I would be using it to conduct the profane act of translating business logic to software programs. I thought of it, and still think of it, as a mode of expression; like poetry or mathematics; A medium through which the ideas that most intrigue me could be beautifully expressed with and simulated by; Nature, complexity, life, intelligence and consciousness. Their unifying theme being simple constituents and simple rules resulting in complexity. Themes, unifying ones, are becoming a unifying theme in this writing, Dear Reader and recurrence too has been a recurring one.

The writings and systems to come will be embeddings in a high-dimensional space of ideas, in which some of them will be spatially closer to each other than others; their geometry describing their meaning; they will employ different modes of expression; and seen from close range, they might seem incongruous; they might look adverserial or antithetical; but upon careful investigation, seen from a higher level, they become isomorphic with each other. But do not be mislead into thinking that I am delineating levels of description, Dear Reader. The opposite. Every level reveals a different isomorphism, a different thread, a different expression that when woven by a unifying theme forms one Eternal Golden Braid.