There Is No Possibility of Reading Anything Interesting Here

Firstly, let me apologise for the lack of posts on the blog recently. Unfortunately, a bout of chronic illness has altered my priorities, although I'll try to keep posting, if anyone's reading. Third Stone From The Sun With apologies to Jimi Hendrix, I'm focusing upon Earth and the place of the human species within the biosphere. There are roughly seven billion of us around and this number is projected to grow wildly by the end of the century. Put simply, that's a lot. We live on a blue-green marble, with the emphasis upon the blue bit, i.e. water. One of the stand out things about humans is being both primates and one of the Great Apes, we're remarkably good at dealing with and surviving in water. Unlike most primates and more like cetaceans (whales and dolphins) we exhibit the 'diving reaction'. That's to say, when we stick our faces in water, our blood pressure, breathing rate and pulse decrease rapidly and our heartbeat slows as our body sh...

I was born 'out of time'; that's to say, thirty years too early. When growing up, I had an eclectic mind. I was interested in a lot of subjects and was fascinated by finding how lessons in one subject could be applied to a completely different subject. I loved exploring the connections. This meant that I pursued many subjects and didn't really concentrate on one to the exclusion to all else. I continued that throughout my higher education and try to do as much of this as I can in my working life.  My biggest successes at work have been when I can combine knowledge across sometimes disparate subjects to design innovative solutions and it's the part of work I enjoy most: It really doesn't feel like work. At least two of my bosses have commented that my chief skill is "...seeing connections that other people don't see..." (I paraphrase). The problem for me, is that I get to do so little of this kind of 'work'. Modern IT is still very silo-...