Substrate

"You are what you eat" was the phrase when I was growing up. And it's true, isn't it?

But the same goes for everything we do:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.

– Annie Dillard

…

You got to, as they say, have a system. And one of mine is to, by default, wear shorts between April and September. That means today is the last day of default shorts-wearing in 2026, as we enter six months of much darker days here in the North East of England.

After a great Day 1 I had high hopes for the second day of SCiO's annual conference. Although the opening panel session on Systems Thinking in Government inexplicably didn't get beyond introductions and positioning statements in the time allotted, the rest of the day was fantastic.

About 10 days ago, I discovered that SCiO's annual conference was happening this week down in Cranfield. After checking that I had air cover from my better half, I booked my place and so I find myself down here after a ~4 hour drive from Northumberland.

Source: Are.na

Source: Are.na

Every week I get a Google Scholar alert with academic articles that have cited my work. The screenshot above is from a recent one about which I was alerted. No, I'm not going to link to it.

These days, it's pretty obvious that the authors of papers citing my work haven't read my actual words, but only other people's summaries. And, of course, some "scholars" either intentionally or accidentally misinterpret my work for their own ends.

Today, my wife Hannah and I celebrate our 23rd wedding anniversary – meaning we've been married for more than half our lives ❤️

Although she hasn't retained the accent, Hannah is originally from Liverpool, so it feels appropriate to quote the ending theme song from Surprise Surprise featuring famous Scouser, the one and only Cilla Black:

Obligatory note that, no, I'm not about to top myself. I'm just philosophically interested in life, death, and everything in between.

I’ve just realised that yesterday’s post about consequentialism is closely related to something I studied as part of my postgraduate Systems Thinking qualification: Critical Systems Heuristics, or CSH. The 2x2 grid I shared in that post was a way of resisting the lazy claim that a system is justified merely because it “works”. CSH provides a more disciplined way to ask what is hidden behind that claim.