I'm Jon. I travel a fair bit, eat a lot, work, and try to live my life as best I can. This page is an attempt to pull all these threads together.
I love ideas, and discussing them. I suspect I'm happiest when eating with friends, learning interesting things. Particularly about human behaviour, evolution, genetics and related fields. I've put together a list of interests below, and I very infrequently write about a few of them on my blog. I occassionally program too. I once wrote a book about Enterprise Java, and now dabble in Ruby, Swift and React Native.
I enjoy traveling, and visited approximately 50 cities in the past 18 months - mostly in Europe, but also in Africa. I'd like to travel more; it makes me feel small. The world is big, and traveling reminds me of my insignificance - and somehow that reminds me that anything is possible, in a good way. I quite enjoy taking photographs when traveling. On the other, I sometimes suffer from vemödalen, the "frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist."
I've just started to put my albums online. I wanted some way of showing photographs, while also interspersing a few words. I also use Instagram when traveling. Here are some of my favourite photographs:
Lake Garda is absolutely gorgeous. This is a reminder of that wonderful place.
Taken in Parma. I love the history attached to places like this, imagining the artist and the way people lived back then.
Recently renamed to the African Penguin. I wonder why. Wonderful little colony over in Betty's Bay, in South Africa.
Taken near Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic National Park near Port Angeles.
More representative of travel in general, I somehow enjoy this attempt to depict Sweden. I would have much preferred a picture of a cardamom bun, but I ate them all.
The animals of Africa quieten me. They're amazing. They're soon to be extinct, too. This taken in South Africa.
I love the South of France. There's a warmth that coddles you, and a fabulous attitude to food.
Representative of Scotland, where I generally live.
Here are some of my interests, in no particular order:
We're so pliable, stubborn, tribalistic and susceptible to all sorts of in-built biases. Sometimes, so narrow minded, and so ignorant of those outside of our circle of empathy. Society, culture, nature vs nurture.
I've had my DNA genotyped, learned and written a little about CRISPR, and am always in awe when learning how our genes helped shaped us. I'm even more in awe of Darwin and Wallace to have conceived of evolution without knowledge of our genes. Viruses fascinate and frighten me.
The descriptive power and reach of evolution leaves me in awe. From dinosaurs to man-made nucleotides. Natural selection, sexual selection, evo-devo, abiogenesis. So much life.
I've always had a love of mathematics, unmatched by an ability. I hope to spend some time, soon, learning more about bisimulation and co-induction, in order to investigate further the semantics of lazy functional programs.
Traveling makes me feel insignificant. It reminds me (and I need the reminding) of how small I am, of how many ways there are of being, of living, of navigating life. This is a relief. I do find not being able to communicate, a little stressful - however this is balanced with the new history, food and culture.
I've come late to history, so to speak. How insignificant we all are - how little we leave behind - and how many mistakes we repeat. It's bleak, yet filled with humanity. It is who we are, what we were.
How we think. How we think that we think. That we think we have free will, but have none. How we are many, and how fabricate a self from that. How we reason, and fail to be rational.
It's the world many of us live in, and the world I work in. It's incredible to think how it has changed our culture, for good (connecting people) and for bad (attention deficit), how it enables new forms of business, and crushes others.
I care about mental health - my own, and those around me. I have friends who help me see the wood from the trees, and friends I try and help. I have an internal operating system set of rules I try and follow to help me navigate my brain. "Spectrum's everywhere", is one such rule (reminding me not to be black & white).