Academic qualifications and experience: I have a Bachelors degree in mechanical engineering (meh...) and a Masters and PhD in astrophysics (great!) I was a climatologist (interesting but meh...) for a couple of years after my PhD. Between the engineering and astrophysics, I qualified as a lawyer in the UK (OMG appalling...), and that was when I started screaming inside my mind. Given overlapping waves of recession, during my two years of proofreading and office gopher I did a lot of reading in the sumptuous toilet, and saved up dinero to go into astrophysics. At which point the screaming stopped temporarily. Unfortunately I had to find a job in the so-called real world, and that was how I found myself working in law enforcement. The screaming restarted....

Nearly two decades later, I am a harmless drone in the British public sector, still silently screaming, but from behind a desk. I spend 80% of my time chasing up other public sector drones to get them to do their jobs - just basics that shouldn't need chasing up.

Liz Gilbert explains that no artist should have a career to support his vocation. The idea is to not kill your art with the death of your spirit or the pressure to pay the bills. I no longer work night shifts, but when my morning alarm sounds I still wearily drag a persona from a drawer and force it on my tired body.

What feeds my spirit is learning, thinking and writing. I sometimes pen haiku, and occasionally attempt to assemble a well-structured - or any - novel. Even if my future novels are awful, I will gladly self-validate the shit out of them.

This little corner of the Web is where I try to fling up any interesting (at least to me) thoughts about anything, for example about the burgeoning area of Artificial General Intelligence.

I should preface with the fact that I’m not an AI person. I was a programmer in that most of my Astro PhD involved writing C code to invent models of magnetic reconnection, but as far as AGI goes I’m an interested observer and reader.

Bracken & Bees