This is the personal archive of Ayoub Khallok, a notebook of essays, research, lessons and notes from books, about how reality works, from the laws of nature and the history of the universe to the systems people build and the ideas that shape our world.

Learn widely. Think carefully. Build things worth sharing.

“Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.”

Confucius

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.”

Carl Sagan

Michael Faraday lecturing to a packed audience at the Royal Institution

Why I decided to learn in public

By Ayoub Khallok

Publishing unfinished thinking is uncomfortable. It is also the fastest way I know to get better at anything. For a long time, I learned in private. I read, took notes, built small projects and kept almost all of it to myself. It felt safer that way. Nobody could see the half-finished work, the wrong turns, or the things I did not understand yet. If I changed my mind, no one knew I had ever held the earlier view. more

20 October 2026 · 4 min read

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Research

Small figures gathered around a campfire under trees beside a river at night
Figures around a Campfire, from the series Seven Landscapes. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

By the fire

Soon: music worth listening to by the fire, from old ballads to the classics.

An engraving of the Columbian iron printing press
An engraving of part of Charles Babbage's difference engine
Charles Darwin's first sketch of an evolutionary tree, headed “I think”
A drawing of the craters and plains of Mare Humorum on the Moon
See what I'm buildingSoftware, research tools and design work, each with notes on how it came together and what I would change next time.What I'm doing nowBuilding this archive, and reading about the biggest questions: why the universe can be understood at all.See the Now page