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An email response from Mr C Stross has inspired me. I am trying to write something every day - no topic, just a blog-like thing i guess.

Blog-like. Not a great word for an aspiring writer, hey?

Hmmm - um, I find it difficult to determine when I should complain about treatment I am receiving.

I don't know when I am facing are perfectly justified events that I just don't like, or if they are unfair acts that I should be protesting about...

For example, parking tickets. Got one again the other day, to add to the thirty or so on my shelf. I get regular letters from the council about them, but being broke and gutless, I ignore until things get so bad I must deal with them...

okay, change of subject, less guff more stuff.

Anyway, I found out recently that the "hobbit-like human", found on Florencia, one of over 17000 Indonesian islands. I had thought this discovery was discredited years ago, but apparently not. The problem seemed to be that the only ancestors we have found of this "human" arefrom roughly 2 million years ago. But they have reliably dated the Indonesian bones at only 15000 years old.

In other words, a species thought to have lived 2,000,000 years ago turned up practically on our chronological doorstep. Perhaps when the first Egyptians were chatting about pyramids over their barbeque, this creature was still existing as it always had, half a world away.

I know I cannot conceive of 2,000,000 years of existence. How does a species come to terms with that amount of time? We barely have a few thousand years history and I feel so remote from someone 30 generations ago that I would consider them, mentally, as I would another species. Their DNA would be so similar to mine I doubt a geneticist could separate us, but I wonder if cerebral development would be different - or would all the difference be in socialisation?

How well would an individual from 5000 years ago fit in with me. Stripped of all societys' trappings and gimmicks, I would imagine that great++granddad would probably be more "grounded", as they say, but his linguistic skills would not shape up to mine.

I guess this is how sci-fi stories are born? Did I just witness a very private creation act? Can you witness something of your own?

It'd be good to either a) have done a science degree, or b) have a good friend with one, so as to be able to bounce my silly ideas off them and see what sticks.

Can you mix IT and genobiology and get something interesting?

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