I just finished Richard Dawkins’ 2024 book “The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie”. Another great book. Dawkins rarely misses, although the older I get the more I want a tl;dr. This was a shorter book of his, but it felt a little repetitive and a little long. Anyway, the premise is that you can look at the genes of something alive as a snapshot of what the pressures of its evolutionary past look like. From the genes, we could reconstruct the environment that shaped the current instance of the creature or plant or whatever you. ...

My eldest practices sabre fencing and the competitions can be quite brutal. A “bout” is basically a dual. Hard physically and emotionally. Many of the kids are roughly equally skilled and it often comes down to mindset on the day. Like most competitions, I would expect. Here’s a cool pic from wikipedia: In one competition, last year, I made a comment, something like: “There exists a series of steps or moves you can make in the next bout that will allow you to win. You just need to think about what those steps are. Find them. In fact, there exists many paths of varying lengths, many series of steps to victory.” ...

I’m writing constructing another novella. This one on the history of Port Phillip as told by research into a sea monster. It’s fun. It’s not literature. It’s not even great story telling. But I’m having fun. It’s also so easy to think and rethink every little thing without making forward progress. Progress in the form of pages and chapters. Work product. Not meta work product. I must remind myself to get down the first draft as fast as possible. ...

The older I get, the more annoyed I am with my fellow humans. My first thought is that I need to meditate more. I need to slip in a thought before doing something stupid. Alternately, I can use the annoyance. The annoyance is the way, the path. This reminds me of Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way. Great book, and a great title based on a quote from Marcus Aurelius: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” ...

I read “The Life and Adventures of William Buckley” yesterday. It’s really something. Even embellished by an overzealous writer/editor, it’s really something. It tells of William Buckley, a British soldier who fought Napoleon in Holland, got caught with some stolen fabric and was sentences to transportation in Australia. He was part of the Sullivan Bay settlement which only lasted a few years before failing and everyone heading to Hobart. He ran away before the trip to Hobart then managed to live among the native Aboriginals for 32 years. ...

I purchased a copy of Picnic at Hanging Rock for my eldest. It’s a classic gothic-horror set just outside Melbourne. Here’s a one paragraph synopsis of the book from DeepSeek: On Valentine’s Day in 1900, students from Appleyard College, a strict Australian boarding school, picnic at the ancient and eerie Hanging Rock. Four girls—Miranda, Marion, Irma, and Edith—along with their teacher, Miss McCraw, venture up the rock, only to vanish mysteriously amid strange occurrences: watches stop, time seems distorted, and Edith flees in terror with no explanation. Irma is later found unconscious with no memory, while the others disappear without a trace, sparking a frantic but futile search. The school spirals into chaos, with one student dying under suspicious circumstances and the headmistress unraveling, all while the rock’s ominous presence lingers. The novel ends ambiguously, leaving the fate of the girls open to supernatural interpretations—time slips, alien abductions, or the rock itself consuming them—heightening its haunting, Gothic atmosphere. ...

I am watching the TV Show “Dune: Prophecy”. It looks good, is well acted, but the story is thin at best. Nevertheless, it’s scifi and my options are few. It’s set 10k years before Dune and some thousands of years from now. Okay… I was thinking: Wow, it would be so very cool if we, our species, can spread out among the stars and cause trouble for tens of thousands of years without killing ourselves off. ...

Thinking again on describing the monstrous. As we did with Area X. Let’s pull some descriptions from Lovecraft’s classic The Call of Cthulhu. Not the statute, the actual monster from dreams and the encounter. From the dreams of the insane in Part I …a gigantic thing “miles high” which walked or lumbered about From the investigation of the cult in Part II: He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition. ...

I was reading A Beautiful Mind yesterday and tripped over a lovely exchange between John Nash and John von Neumann. It’s a great book, a great movie too. Highly recommended. I’ve also read countless books on the scientists and mathematicians of the era and always love hearing more stories about them. Anyway, they’re both at Princeton. Nash had his great idea and rushed off to tell the great von Neumann about it. ...

I read Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life” yesterday. It’s great. Many times I was nodding, smiling, agreeing. It captures a lot of the craziness of sitting in a room alone for months working on a thing. In her case writing, mine too, but “writing” could mean code or non-fiction or fiction. It’s the same thing though. It’s exhilarating! “Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even write and publish anything you please about any governments or institutions, even if what you write is demonstrably false.” ...