When I was about ten, I used to lie on the passage floor, in front of the set of Encyclopedia Britannica, doing what we would now call a ‘deep dive’. I’d get an infatuation with some subject, look it up, then trace it back, volume after volume. There was, of course, no Internet then. And a kid had a fairly limited source of Information.
Now with access to the vast number of academic papers, books and websites available on -line, when I start to read a scientific paper, the second page I go to, is typically the start of the References. I’ll only be a fraction of the way into the paper, before I’m hunting down copies of papers that were incorporated in the paper I’m trying to absorb. But those papers have References as well. Rinse, Repeat, and all-that. I’m still doing deep-diving!
It’s hard to summarise easily what I get infatuated with. Geology, History, Ecology, Prehistory, Archaeology, Climate, Supernatural, Identity…. But at the back of my mind, I’m usually trying to make connections. It’s a big system, after all.
For the very first posts I made, I stuck to something mundane, just to get to grips with the medium. I was living in Nanjing, China, and every night I’d head out to try and find a new place to eat. I blogged about where I ate, and made a map of where the place was (Cheap Eats in Nanjing!). The basic plan was to do a final post, with all the places I’d been to on one map. The Connection! Somehow it didn’t quite happen. Partly it was because stuff was happening so fast in Nanjing, that places I had written up, were gone a few months later.
So from a Food/Travel Blog my game has upped a bit. There’s some Science Communication in it, but just some simple Travel Tales as well, but mainly it’s just stuff that interests me. It’s a range of stuff I deep-dive into. I hope you find some of it interesting.
And feel free to drop me a line. If you don’t hear from me (I haven’t yet managed to stop Yahoo from Spamming stuff from my own website!), please try via social media.
Mike