Mehkurydiaries

The Church can avoid political parties. It cannot avoid politics. The moment faith says a human life possesses dignity, somebody will eventually ask what that dignity should cost the state. A hospital bed has a budget. Palliative care requires policy. Poverty survives through decisions. War arrives carrying official signatures. Even silence must pass through a polling booth. During his recent visit to France, Pope Leo criticised the country’s new assisted-dying law. Asked whether he had entered politics, he drew a useful distinction: he had not joined French party politics; he was teaching what the Church believes. That distinction matters. A pulpit should not become a campaign office with better acoustics. Clergy should not baptise candidates, launder corruption with prayer or convert congregations into voting blocs for whoever donated the loudest generator. But neutrality can also become a costume for cowardice. When laws concern life, death, poverty, disability, migration, p...

Nigeria is 66 this year. At 66, a person is called an elder. A nation is still permitted to describe every failure as growing pains. History is a generous landlord. On 1 October 1960, the British flag came down and Nigeria’s flag rose. Political control changed hands. The harder work began: turning sovereignty into capacity. That work remains unfinished. In this year Independence Day address, President Bola Tinubu said the struggle was never merely for a flag or anthem. It carried the promise of opportunity, dignity and a better life. The Constitution is even less poetic. Sovereignty belongs to the people. Their security and welfare are the primary purpose of government. Not a charitable side project. The primary purpose. A country may control its borders while its citizens remain tenants inside it. When families must privately provide electricity, water, security, education, healthcare and sometimes the road leading home, the citizen carries a small government on his back. The...

I have a productivity problem that wears respectable clothes. Give me a research question or a piece of software refusing to behave, and three hours can be eaten alive before I notice the bones. Meanwhile, applications, emails and administrative work stand outside knocking like creditors. The embarrassing part is that I am not wasting time. I am working. That is what makes the deception convincing. Psychologists call one version of this productive procrastination: replacing an important task with another useful but less important one. The desk is busy. The priority is still starving. Research also describes flow as deep absorption in an activity—focused, rewarding and almost effortless. Flow can produce excellent work. It can also make time disappear with the efficiency of a trained kidnapper. The danger begins when we confuse absorption with discipline. The work I love offers immediate rewards. A stubborn bug can be defeated. A research problem can surrender a new idea. Pro...

There are numbers too large to be allowed to remain rumours. In Borgu, Niger State, residents say hundreds of people were abducted during coordinated attacks in August. Some estimate about 600. A youth association now says the number may be close to 700. The authorities have not supplied a verified figure. One month later, families are still asking the country to count the people it failed to protect. That should disturb us almost as much as the kidnapping itself. Counting is not paperwork performed after rescue. It is the beginning of rescue. You identify who is missing, where they lived, who saw them last, their ages, medical conditions and families. You build a record strong enough to resist forgetfulness. A person who has not been counted is easier for power to misplace. Nigeria is usually comfortable with large numbers. Billions are budgeted. Thousands of officers are deployed. Committees multiply faster than rabbits with government stationery. But when citizens disappea...

I have stopped treating likes as the only evidence that a post lived. Earlier today, I searched my name. A search engine introduced me back to myself: researcher, founder, writer, builder. The summary was not assembled from one viral moment. There was no viral moment. It was built from breadcrumbs. A paper here. A product there. A profile, a blog post, an argument, a public trail. Social media trains us to judge writing within minutes. A post limps towards six likes and is pronounced dead before dinner. Yet search works on a different clock. Google describes the process plainly: crawlers discover pages, indexing systems analyse their contents, and retrieval systems serve material judged relevant to a later query. Its AI search features also draw upon indexed web pages. A like is a reaction. An index is memory. That memory is neither perfect nor guaranteed. Search engines may ignore a page. AI systems may misunderstand it. A machine can repeat an error with excellent grammar and alarmin...

I once joked that when humanoid robots finally enter our homes, I would simply sign into my ChatGPT account and meet the same assistant in a body. The joke has refused to remain a joke. Home humanoids are no longer waiting politely inside science fiction. 1X says its NEO robot will begin entering consumer homes in 2026. It is built to learn household tasks and can receive remote expert supervision when its autonomy meets its limits. The obvious story is that robots have acquired hands and legs. The stranger story is that they may also acquire our history. If a future humanoid can inherit the assistant account already living on your phone, it will not meet you as a stranger. It may arrive knowing your unfinished projects, recurring jokes, preferred tone and the peculiar hour at which your mind starts producing book titles instead of sleep. The machine may need a map of the kitchen. It may not need an introduction to you. We usually locate identity inside a body. Artificial intell...