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Wednesday, 1 July 2026 · LondonENع
Rayan Azhari.Sustainability · Energy · Carbon · Built EnvironmentOccasional detours into philosophy, religion or programming, wherever curiosity leads
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Article 04: Mapping the Stock: Inside the 3DStock Model and Why Buildings Resist Easy Counting

A series mining the PhD thesis on London and UK office buildings (Azhari, 2025). Key takeaway. Before you can measure energy across thousands of offices you must decide what counts as an office. The 3DStock model joins seven public datasets into one geospatial picture.

By Rayan Azhari · 11 min read · Essays
Latest Essays

Migrating from WordPress to Next.js: A Field Guide

A practical, end-to-end guide to moving a content site from WordPress to Next.js without losing your search rankings: the URL-preservation rule that governs everything, a content pipeline that survives the move, bilingual and RTL handling, the SEO and security work, and a cutover you can roll back.

· 20 min

The Knowledge Escalator

How an ordinary teenager came to out-know Ptolemy, and why the same structural progress makes every one of us more ignorant than anyone who has ever lived. Hand a modern fifteen-year-old a blank sheet of paper and ask them to map the architecture of the cosmos, and they will sketch, without a moment’s hesitation, a

· 14 min

The Qasyoun Journey Project and the Pattern It Sets

On 21 April 2026 the Damascus Governorate and the Ministry of Tourism launched "Qasyoun Journey", a tourism and heritage megaproject on Mount Qasyoun, prepared by "a team of specialised designers" with no open tender, no published brief, no costing and no impact studies. It is the second time the new Syrian authorities have commissioned a symbolic national asset behind closed doors and framed it as a national gift. This piece tests the official claims, asks whether the public or the investors are being misled, and sets out what a serious course correction would look like.

Inheriting Zeus: From the Pantheon to the Possibility Space

Inheriting Zeus: From the Pantheon to the Possibility Space If oxen and horses had hands, and could draw with their hands, they would draw the gods to look like oxen and horses. Xenophanes of Colophon, c. 570 BCE Two and a half thousand years before the science of psychology described projection, Xenophanes had already noticed

· 22 min

When Power Is Absolute and Without Limits

When Sednaya prison opened in December 2024 it forced an old question into the open: how does a state become a prison, and how do ordinary people end up running it? Drawing on Milgram's obedience studies, Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment and UN and Amnesty documentation of systematic torture in Syria, this essay argues that the answer is not better leaders but better institutions. Syria's real safeguard against another Sednaya is constitutional: separated powers, independent oversight and accountability written into the state itself.

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