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The most intriguing thing for me about this alternative way of looking at The Great Wave is that I had never before realised there were boats in it!

Here's the original (first photo) and flipped (second). The idea is that since Japanese is read right-to-left, English speakers accustomed to left-to-right reading should see how it looks flipped, where it looks more like the boats are heading into the intimidating waves.

Marco Arment https://mastodon.social/users/marcoarment/statuses/116954557417955851

Watched: Billion Dollar Brain 🎥.

The third Harry Palmer film, and considerably more bizarre and confusing than the the first or second. Also a Ken Russell film, so that’s probably why. A mad Texan oil billionaire with a private army tries to trigger a third world war, basically

That BBC self-ad at half time of the World Cup Final was OK, but Mitch Benn did it better years ago with ‘I’m Proud of the BBC’ (YouTube link).

📚 Books 2026, 16: Use of weapons, by Iain M Banks

I’ve been listening to a podcast recently, The Culture Books Podcast (they don’t seem to have a proper website, just that Libsyn page and a Facebook one). An Australian couple read through the books and talk about them, chapter by chapter. He (John) has read them before; she (Sheridan) has not, and doesn’t read much SF. It’s quite fun, and encourages the listener to join in the rereading. I got through their episodes on the first two, and might have started either, but I’ve mislaid my copy of Consider Phlebas for the moment, and didn’t fancy The Player of Games.

But a few episodes into Use of weapons, I knew it was time to interrupt Moby Dick again and get back to The Great Banksie Reread. Wherein I see I haven’t read any since September 2023! Shocking!.

There are two of his non-SF books I’ve never reread: Stonemouth and The Quarry. Though I saw the TV adaptation of the former.

Anyway. Time, it does go on. When I last read UoW it was 13 years ago. How does that happen? Just day by day, I guess.

There is nothing not to recommend about this book, unless you’d be thrown by simultaneous stories being told, one going forward in time, the other back. The only slight weakness I felt this time was the absence of time with the characters after the big reveal. But to have such time would probably undercut the whole thing, so I’m sure it was the right choice.

I have no idea how Dave Winer comes to this conclusion:

One of the silver linings of AI use is that it makes you a better writer.

Especially when one of the main things people (at least non-programmers) tout it for is doing your writing for you!

Watched: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 🎥.

I was sure I hadn’t seen it before, but I remembered some scenes as they happened. I have a vague memory of a DVD in a holiday house, perhaps. Partial falling asleep may have been involved.

It’s daft but fun in places.

📚 Books 2026, 15: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

I interrupted Moby Dick because I had a hankering to reread Illuminatus!, which by measure of number of reads must be my favourite book. I blogged about it in 2018 and 2015.

Endless fun, if you’re the type of person that a) rereads books at all, and b) likes spoofs about world-controlling conspiracies that are written in a breezy style that will have you in the mind of a squirrel in Central Park in one sentence and of a hippy journalist in Mad Dog, Texas the next. (I checked: sadly, Mad Dog, Texas is not a real town, though there is a ‘British pub’ called Mad Dogs in San Antonio.)

This from @JohnPhilpin sounds like reviews by John Clute in Interzone back in the day:

👁️ That moment when you open a blog post and you need to look up 4 words just in the first sentence.

Source: https://john.philpin.com/2026/06/25/that-moment-when-you-open.html

Well that was a bloody waste of time! Don’t know why I stayed up for that.

Minute Cryptic - 24 June, 2026 “Hermit perhaps returning alone, wandering city” (9) 🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 0 hints – 3 under the community par (81,255 solvers so far). www.minutecryptic.com

Tough one, this. My first instinct was right, but I made a wrong guess.

This is what we’re faced with as the year hinges into its second half. Astronomically, if not by the calendar.

Just realised I hadn’t added Moby Dick to my Currently reading’ list. I’m only about a third in, totally loving it, and wondering why people think it’s hard. 📚

God, there are a lot of Scots in Boston! Listen to that!

Selfish Genetics but No AI

As I said, we went to see Richard Dawkins at the Barbican last night. He was being interviewed by Rowan Hooper, a geneticist, New Scientist writer, and the author of Togetherness.

The reason for the event was the celebration of fifty years since The Selfish Gene was published. The talk, as you might expect, was all about genetics, and the book and its effects over the time. Dawkins is amazingly sharp at 85. He impressed me with just how many names he remembered — of people, books, and species. It was very impressive.

The most interesting part for me was his explanation of what he calls the ‘extended phenotype’ (also the title of one of his books), which explains how the things organisms build or do form part of the carrier of their genes. For example birds' nests. They are not part of a bird’s body — its phenotype — but the better a nest is, the better the bird’s chances of survival and the passing on of its genes. Other examples include parasites that affect the behaviour of species they inhabit.

As I sat there in the Barbican Hall, which is more familiar to classical music performances, I wondered if humanity’s extended phenotype — or rather we’d need a word that matches phenotype at the species level. — includes the construction of better concert halls, of culture more generally. There’s an idea there, I’m sure, but I’d need the brain of a Richard Dawkins to formulate it fully

In the second half there was a Q&A. We had to submit questions using the Slido web app, which removed the ability for ‘This is not so much a question as a comment’ and other long-winded interruptions, but felt a little disconnected. I submitted a question, but didn’t expect it to be used, as it was a big switch from what the event was about, being about Dawkins’s recent thoughts on ‘AI’ (archive.is link), which I wrote about before. Questions were restricted to 160 characters, which seems shockingly short nowadays. I managed to condense mine down to:

You wrote that you believed AIs are alive. If a computer model of the climate is not the climate, is a computer model of some part of a mind a mind?

Which gets at the question, keeps the analogy, but doesn’t quite express all I wanted.

No matter, it was a very enjoyable event, and there’s no way Dawkins has lost his mind.

Going to see Richard Dawkins at the Barbican tonight. The title of his talk is ‘Genes & the Meaning of Life’. It’ll be interesting to see — among other things — if his beliefs about the aliveness of ‘AI’ have changed.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 🎥 is a lot funnier and also more compact than I remembered.

More compact, because in my memory the business of trying to decode ‘POE’/‘OPE’ etc, went on for much longer than the few seconds it actually takes. And trying to get through to the President on the phone: that just happened offstage, no messing about with underlings.

An aside: there’s a line, ‘He made a payphone call to the Pentagon’, in the Clash’s ‘Ivan Meets GI Joe’, which I realised is almost certainly a reference to this.

There was also far less of the titular doctor and his attempts to suppress his Nazi instincts than I recalled.

In contrast, I thought the final scene of the bomber on its fatal flight went on a bit too long. But who am I to judge?

If you haven’t seen this film, you owe it to yourself to watch it.

Sad to read of the death of Anthony Head (or Anthony Stewart Head, as he always used to be credited).

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