A motley collection of ideas
Where history, politics, and speculation blur together. Step into the in-between — a space for thoughtful exploration of murky facts, forgotten narratives, and the curious patterns beneath the surface. Sometimes historical, sometimes political, sometimes conspiratorial — always with a raised eyebrow.
According to the Gregorian calendar, today is August 17, the day of Hyacinth. Exactly 48 years ago, the TIT Budapest Planetarium opened in Népliget, and also 48 years ago, the Russian nuclear icebreaker Arktika broke through the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean basin for the first time in the history of navigation and reached … Read more
After Ákos Hadházy staged his liberal–sorosista jamboree outside the paternal farmstead of the esteemed General Doctor Prime Minister’s illustrious father, Telex.hu has now sunk its teeth into the same carcass. One of the liberal online media dreadnought’s unnamed readers — presumably with a passing disregard for aviation laws (link in the comments) — sent up … Read more
Morning on the radio, Péter Zentai was philosophizing that the key question of the future will be: will humans control artificial intelligence, or will artificial intelligence control humans? I thought, let me ask ChatGPT—after all, who on Earth would know the answer better than an AI? In response, the AI wrote a short essay. Here … Read more
By “positive feedback” (positive feedback, Positive Rückkopplung) we mean a process that excites itself. The elements of a system interact in such a way that the process which triggered the effect becomes ever stronger. This phenomenon occurs in technical devices, in biological systems, and in society as well. For example, everyone has probably experienced the … Read more
This morning I thought of Professor PJT, a born techno-optimist. We never really liked each other, but we respected each other’s opinions—and perhaps quietly irritated one another too. Mutual sympathy was certainly not helped by the fact that my better half didn’t hesitate to rub it in early on that she was an ecologist, from … Read more
Lately, the Hungarian press has been full of reports that the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and the Ukrainian police have arrested a 28-year-old local resident who, on the night of July 16, 2025, set fire to the Greek Catholic church in Palágykomoróc and wrote anti-Hungarian slogans on its wall. Palágykomoróc (in Ukrainian: Паладь Комарівці) is … Read more
I wrote this opinion piece in the summer of 2025 about the Tisza Party and Hungary’s prospects, based on what I knew at the time. History will show just how far off I was… This morning on the radio, Stefano Bottoni (an Italian-Hungarian historian, expert on Eastern Europe, and persona non grata) spoke about Fidesz. … Read more
Today would be Ernest Hemingway’s 125th birthday. His love for cats was legendary—his home in Key West is now a museum and still hosts a large colony of around 60 cats, famous for their extra toes, known as Hemingway’s polydactyl cats. Cats typically have five toes on their front paws and four on their back, … Read more
In 2014, the Csepel spark telegraph station turned one hundred years old. The equipment transmitted messages from both Béla Kun and Lenin. I decided that for the 105th anniversary, I would build a spark transmitter myself. Csepel spark telegraph radio station The construction of the Csepel spark telegraph radio station, which marked the beginning of … Read more
Dr Pál Veres was the favourite sexologist of socialist Hungary without being a sexologist. He was a newspaper photographer, journalist and Hungarian history teacher, and only graduated as a doctor at the ripe old age of 56, when he was already well known for his popular articles in the Ifjúsági Magazin. He became famous for his radio programmes in which he referred to fucking by name. One of his listeners once asked him if it was possible to masturbate with a vacuum cleaner. Uncle Pali’s answer was succinct: “It depends on which end: the one that sucks or the one that blows?”