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.
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
In which I interrupt a major work to reread a favourite (again), this time inspired by a podcast.
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
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. 📚
📚 Books 2026, 14: A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. M. Miller
A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of those books I’ve known of for years, known it was one of the classics of the genre, but never got round to reading, for one reason or another. But it caught my eye in a Canadian bookshop last year, and now I’ve got round to reading it.
I’m not sure I knew it was a post-holocaust work; nor did I know — though maybe the title should have been a clue — that it was so religious. So I started reading it mildly annoyed, I think, and became considerably more annoyed at the end of the first section (of three), when (and spoilers ahead) the main character, whose life in the monastery we’ve been following all this time, is killed.
Well damn. I didn’t expect that.
And then there’s a time jump of several centuries. OK, that’s one of the great things you can do with novels. We’re still with the monks of Saint Leibowitz, mainly, but technology is starting to pick up again. The fracture North America is forming into new kingdoms and tribes.
The third section begins, ‘There were spaceships again in that century…’ Which I really didn’t expect. Several centuries further on, technology’s back up, oh, and hey, we’ve got nukes again! The things that caused all the problems in the first place.
Of course, people know that now, so they won’t use them again, of course. Of course. But better get some monks an priests offplanet to the colonies, anyway. Gotta take the Word of God to the stars.
Which sorta kinda seems to be the message of this book? The Catholic church will endure and Christianity go on, even if The Beatles didn’t? Actually maybe they did, they just aren’t mentioned. It’s not like it was an anti-Lennon tract, it was published in 1959!
Anyway, yeah, it was fine, I didn’t love it. I’m just about to read an erudite piece about it, so I might get back with more.
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).
We watched North by Northwest 🎥 a week or two ago. Somehow I’d never seen it before.
Let’s discuss the famous, poster-worthy, famous scene. Clearly if you believe someone is a government agent about to bust your soviet spy ring, you have to assassinate them. And what better way to do that than trick them into catching a bus to a bus stop on the open prairie, miles from anywhere; and then chase them with a crop-spraying plane and try to shoot them from it?
Many better ways. Many, many better ways.
I didn’t realise Hitchcock was making a farce. Well, maybe that’s unfair. It’s a kind-of spy story, it’s kind of a romance, it’s pretty funny in places. In fact, its main flaw may be that it doesn’t really know what it wants to be. And that it spells things out too much. We, the viewer, can work some things out: have a little more respect for us, Alfred.
All that said, I enjoyed it quite a lot.