A sporadically updated note about stuff that’s currently exercising my mind.
Last updated: July 2022
Darwin book
I’m around 88,000 words into the first draft of my second book, Through Darwin’s Eyes. It’s about how Charles Darwin looked at the world, and about how he enabled us to look at the world in a new and better way.
Other writing
- I’m making a concerted effort to spend less time providing ‘content’ for our social media overlords, and to get back into the habit of writing and publishing regular sideline pieces on my own website.
- I’m also sending out my regular(ish) Rich Text newsletters about once a month. I recently wrote an unnecessarily long explanation of why I’d like you to sign up to my newsletter (or RSS feed) (one sentence summary: if you only follow me on Facebook or other social media, you’re probably not seeing most of the stuff I put out.)
Reading
- Here are the books I’ve read so far in 2022.
- My newsletters provide links to some of the stuff I’ve been reading online recently. (Did I mention you should subscribe?)
Note-making
- In 2021, I learnt about the Zettelkasten note-making system, and quickly became besotted with the wonderful Obsidian app, which helps me make far more useful notes. I continue to make use of my Obsidian ’vault’ on a daily basis, and cannot imagine working without such a system.
- If you’re at all interested, here are some sideline pieces I wrote about note-making, arranged in chronological order.
- As well as making notes to help with my Darwin book, I’m also making notes about a whole bunch of topics that also happen to interest me. I find these notes are beginning to interact in interesting ways.
- Other topics I find I’ve been making notes about include thoughts on factual writing, and vestiges of things that have so far escaped the entropy—a recurring theme in my first book, On the Moor: science, history and nature on a country walk.