Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I’m currently a Trinity–Cambridge researcher at the University of Cambridge, pursuing my PhD on the development of climate models. I’m also a researcher on the Cambridge ThinkLab group examining the credibility of AI models. My background is in condensed matter physics, which previously led to my research in astrophysics studying a type of eruptive variable star, and that in turn helped broaden my interests in the fascinating field of the history of science, about which I remain very passionate today.

I’ve enjoyed writing for as long as I can remember and I write on my website about a wide range of topics, but mostly centred around science, technology, history and society. I also run an infrequently despatched newsletter that discusses similar themes. In my spare time I make photographs and engage with my local photography club, read a lot, punt on the Cam, ride my Brompton, take long walks or participate in the Cambridge Union, which happens to be the world’s oldest debating society.

What’s the story behind your blog?

To be honest, it’s quite unremarkable. I first came across the idea of a weblog through an explainer in a physical magazine. My earliest website was a bunch of hard-coded html pages uploaded to my ISP’s free subdomain. I eventually moved to LiveJournal and then to Vox, which had just been launched (and about which I still have fond memories). In 2008 I moved to Wordpress, because that’s where seemingly everyone was, and I stayed there for about eight years. Between 2016 and 2018, in search of better alternatives because I had started to feel Wordpress was bloated, I tried Kirby and then Hugo and finally Statamic. Over the years my blog has had many names, all of which are best forgotten. Today it’s eponymous.

My perennial motivation has been the joy of seeing my thoughts printed on screen. The general structure I have on my website now, besides my ‘notes’, has been the structure I’ve had since the early 2000s. (My notes were on Tumblr.) Besides all that, I like that in my website I have a safe space in which to engage with a multitude of ideas and sharpen my thinking through my writing.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I’m starting to get the feeling all my answers are going to be unremarkable. I don’t really have a creative process mostly because I don’t force myself to write at specific intervals for my website and because I find I do not work well with ‘knowledge gathering’ disconnected from a purpose for that knowledge. What this means is that ideas incubate in my head as I read things, and over time one, or a set of ideas, will reach critical density, prompting me to write something. Consequently, by this point I usually know what I want to say, so I just sit down and write it.

I already do a lot of writing as an academic and deal with plenty of deadlines, so the last thing I want is to replicate that environment on my personal website. As a result some things I do tend to be polar opposites: I keep no schedule, I give myself no deadlines, and I publish my first drafts – warts and all – with little proofreading, or throw away entire essays at times. This is not to say I never refine my writing, but I generally try not let a sense of perfection get in my way. I also, therefore, permit myself plenty of addenda and errata.

I write in BBEdit and publish from BBEdit using SFTP. I have a bunch of scripts, clippings etc. on that wonderful programme and am yet to find an equal. If I am on my mobile I use the dashboard built into my site, but usually only for fixing typos and not for typing entire essays. I may type entire notes this way, however, because notes on my website are usually quite brief. And if I ever want to make note of something for later or return to a webpage, I either save it to my Safari reading list or make a note on Apple Notes. However, I rarely make separate, atomic notes anymore (I did try to at one point), choosing instead to write a few lines summarising a source and saving the source itself. In case of my RSS subscriptions (I use NetNewsWire) I star posts for later reference but prefer to read on the actual website, as the writer intended.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I can write anywhere but there certainly are some things that make writing a more pleasant experience. Good music has no equal and I prefer classical music (which varies widely from Mozart to George Winston) or ambient works like those of Roger Eno and Enya; if push comes to shove, anything without words will do. I prefer quiet places, places from where I can see the natural world around me and a warm cup of coffee, none of which are absolute necessities. The environment on my computer is probably a bit more controlled: I like to write on BBEdit, as I said before, and in full screen with, perhaps, Safari on a neighbouring workspace.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

My website is hosted on a VPS with Hetzner, which I also use to self-host a few other things like a budgeting software, a reference manager, Plausible and Sendy. It runs on Statamic and is version-controlled with Git. My domain is registered with Cloudflare. In the past I used mostly shared hosting. I also maintain an updated list of stuff I use daily on my website for some inexplicable reason.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

1. I would not waste my time on targeting niches and optimising for search engines, given my intentions with my website. I thought they were intended to grow traffic – as they are – but I came to realise that was not the sort of traffic I valued.
2. I would prioritise platform agnosticism so I can move to better platforms in the future, should I choose to, without losing any of my work. I have lost much of my writings when jumping platforms in the past because I had to move my content over manually and chose to move select writings to save time. (Or was it because I was a bit lazy?)
3. I would probably not delete my old work as I outgrow them, choosing instead to keep them private. I have, peculiarly and thoughtlessly, deleted my work at regular intervals multiple times in the past.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

It costs me about £5 a month to run my website, including daily automated backups. I neither generate revenue through it now nor plan to in the future.

I do not have thoughts on people monetising their personal blogs. However, if their attempts at doing so involve ruining their writing, presenting misleading content or plastering ads all over their page, I might not be inclined to return to their site or recommend it to others.

I know how wonderful it felt when people showed support for my website through small donations so I like to give similarly when I can afford to do so.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Amongst those who have not already been interviewed on People & Blogs, here are four people who are far more interesting than I am: Juha-Matti Santala, Pete Moore, Melanie Richards and Anthony Nelzin-Santos. (This in no way means there isn’t a fifth person more interesting than me.)

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I feel a strong urge to apologise for my responses but I’ll instead take a moment to nudge people to subscribe to my newsletter if that’s something they’d like, or visit my website and start a conversation with me about something either they found interesting or with which they disagree.

If you have 30 min to spare, head over to ncase.me/trust/ for an interactive website designed to illustrate the evolution of trust according to game theory. But if you have less than 30 min, here’s a ‘tediously accurate scale model’ of the solar system that is the internet edition of Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot.

Besides all this, I’d encourage people to help build a better, more inclusive and kinder world for everyone by engaging meaningfully both online and offline (although not at the cost of your own mental health). Slow down, read more books and please don’t lose your attention span.