Typical. You think you’ve invented something brilliant and within a matter seconds find out it’s been around for years. I’m working on a timeline to celebrate 70 years of teaching humanities at Imperial College London (I know, who knew right?) and I’ve been speculating about things that might happen over the next 70 years. One entry was going to be ‘Sci-Po (science poetry or science fiction poetry) becomes a wildly popular course’. Been around for decades! There’s even a society dedicated to the genre that’s been going since 1978. Loads about science and technology poetry elsewhere online too,

On other matters, I’ve been thinking about how one can look at things from a very great distance in the sense of removing oneself from the deluge and detail of everyday drugery and see things from afar, especially big themes, patterns, shifts, trends and so on. I know from personal experience that one way to do this (on a country or regional level at least) is to live somewhere else for a significant time and then come back. I’m sure the use of psychedelics could work too (and who knew that Imperial had a department focussed on that!?!).