I have been thinking a couple of minutes about how best to qualify this blog. Maybe “chaotic” and “anarchic” are too strong, but “mixed” and “diverse” are too weak. It is certainly heterogeneous, as it covers very different subjects and languages and often hesitates between “serious” and “not serious at all.” If you click the “Home” button you’ll find the main categories: “Serious”, “Vaguely philosophical” and “Not so serious”¹, plus two categories which I have added as an afterthought, “Bonina”, the place where I live, and “Eifel”, which contains a thorough geographical and historical study of weddings in the Eifel region of Germany, Belgium and Luxemburg. The oldest posts were written in 2009².

Some people have suggested that I should keep the “fun” and “serious” sections separate and publish two blogs instead, because, so they say, I am  serious scientist working in a serious institution and I’ll scare the serious readers. The advice makes sense, but I nevertheless won’t follow it, because I am one person, and also because managing more than one blog would be a major drain on my time, even though I’ve been retired for quite some time now. Some posts, especially the “serious” ones, sometimes require weeks of work. Let me quote from the Wikipedia page of Kazuo Ishiguro, one of my preferred writers:

People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else. Temperament, personality, or outlook don’t divide quite like that. The bits don’t separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something that will become more common in the latter part of the century—people with mixed cultural backgrounds, and mixed racial backgrounds. That’s the way the world is going.

Readers that are scared or just put off by my adopting this “holistic” approach are invited to move on to some more serious place, of which there is no shortage. I sometimes go there myself!

I basically write about subjects I am interested in, such as geographic (including climatic) determinism, causality, the water chestnut Trapa natans, environment, the nature of and the way in which innovations are adopted, human evolution, the future, the neolithic transition, linux, the ecological raison d’être of the concept of god, buckwheat,  etc. These subjects are all somehow related. Even human evolution is now tangible to ordinary people because DNA analyses are commonly used for genealogical work³.

I have been making notes about many subjects for along time, well before someone invented the internet. Some of this does not really age, such as a little collection of programmes about catastrophe theory or funny experiments with spirals. What I am undertaking with this blog is obviously a long-term exercise, and the structure has changed over time. For instance, if I decided to write a post about catastrophe theory (see below), I would in one way or another put it together with the note on Pandemics and tipping points (published in 2012)!

Under the visible posts and pages, there is a queue of others waiting to be published, sooner or later, when they reach some level of maturity. I then change their status from draft to public, but I continue editing them, and adding and expanding sections as I come across interesting material. I often change the date so that the recently modified posts become… “recent”.  I would prefer a system where the ordering is imposed by the blogger rather than the date, Maybe I’ll eventually adopt fictitious dates, or  I may find a WordPress theme that does not use dates as the main criteria for classifying posts.

“Inspiration” comes mostly from my reading: book of all kinds, general scientific magazines (La Recherche, Scientific American, Nature and Science, some scientific journals,  plus newspapers, including the Wallstreet Journal when I cannot put my hands on anything else on an airplane), weeklies, the internet and many articles some friends and colleagues who know my interests keep sending me. Of course, even the Wallstreet Journal has some interesting papers – when they are not about politics -, and I have kept some in my archive (read: hard disk). I find it great that we can now collect things without occupying physical space, even if this eventually leads to the problem of classifying files and locating them when needed. I very much agree with Krzysztof Pomian about the importaqnce  of collections, museums and their organic link with Science, as well as the role they have played in the development of Science.

Where is this taking me? I am not sure, but I like the blog because it offers a simple and tidy interface, helps categorising thoughts, as I said, and also because it “materialises connections” through hyperlinks.

Notes

1. This does not mean that the “fun” posts are not serious. Some of them are, but they mostly adopt a light and humorous tone, sometimes bordering on derision. ↩︎
2. Before that, I had a genealogical blog (created in 2000) with my nephew Philippe. For some mysterious reasons, this blog remains active and mostly functional. The site is called René Gommes’ genealogy homepage. Many points would need updating, for instance the contact address, but I seem to no longer have access to the site. ↩︎
3. Genetically I belong to the old palaeolithic background population of Europe. My male ancestors were part of the La Tène-Hallstatt iron age culture. I am basically Celtic (of the tribe Treveri), even if my father had been assuming for no better reason than the language that we are “Germanic” (Wir sind Germanen). Wikipedia tells me The Treveri (Gaulish: *Treweroi) were a Germanic or Celtic tribe of the Belgae, thereby conveniently not taking any position! ↩︎