This is me. I am usually hairy, windblown and slightly dishevelled. I have a beard because it saves time otherwise spent standing in front of a mirror, and I trim it with scissors when it gets annoying. I get my hair cut when I happen to see the barber open as I drive by, or when it really annoys me. I prefer to dress casually and read seriously, rather than the other way around. The sort of people I want to impress do not care that much what clothes I wear, and if they did care, I wouldn't want to impress them.
Given the choice, I would sooner be outdoors somewhere, preferably away from large numbers of people, listening to good music, and either reading a good book, or planning some writing task of my own, or wandering along, poking my nose in a creek, looking under stones, and generally annoying the wild life. That said, I also enjoy being indoors, fossicking for facts on the Web. I have a curious mind (my detractors and friends all say that, though with different intonations), but more of that later.
My real passion in life is science, any sort of science — in the photo seen here, I was out looking at some interesting rock falls not far from my home on Sydney's Northern Beaches. But any sort of science or technology gets my immediate attention, and that is why I mainly write about science-related topics.
Christine (hereafter referred to as Chris) and I were married in 1969, and she has put up with me ever since. We have three children, one a solicitor (that's a lawyer, if you are American), one is a post-doc in ecology, one a biotechnology doctoral student, working on yeasts. We both used to be science teachers, though I also taught computing.
I grew up not far from where I now live, I went to school near here, drifted into teaching which I greatly enjoyed, and then into "Head Office" where I did not want to be, and became a sort of boffin, so to keep myself honest, I got involved in writing teaching materials, and that became textbooks. Then I found a case of fraud in science while I was working on an idea for a book. That led to me starting to do radio work when I was invited to do a talk on it, and things progressed from there.
From there, I moved to the Powerhouse Museum, but the excellent people I went to work for moved on, and were replaced by disastrously second-rate people. I suppose the new people gave me a good model of bad management which stood me in good stead when I was head-hunted into a management consultancy. Still, that was no way for a science-loving story-teller to make a living, and I left to do some serious writing. And ended up at the Australian Museum for several years.
I then got back into teaching in the classroom, but in mid-1999, I left to join an encyclopedia company. So my day job was mainly about writing on science, technology and mathematics, but I also worked on other innovative projects — and when I get home, I wrote other things. Now I just write what interests me, but I tend to chase the odd interesting thing wherever it leads.
So when you read what I have to say about goitre, for example, you will also be able to see the painting which appears as a thumbnail on the left, Resurrection, by Piero della Francesca, in which Piero is one of the sleeping guards (you can see him here on the right), something we know because the guard, like Piero, had a goitre (that's the lump beneath his chin).
Then I might go on to how iodine was discovered, and the meaning of "cretin", and what that has to do with goitre. Some reviewers, the ones with short attention spans, don't like this style, but they are probably the sort of people who think I should wear a suit.
If you want to know what I am up to, check my Journal.
The home page of this set is here.