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Tim, this is for you, or for anyone who needs help getting rid of an hour or two browsing the interwebz.

Some of the topics I've been researching for my writing. I can look at the list and feel like at least all this work wasn't completely wasted.

Virology, genetics and the combination of the two. Horizontal gene transfer, huh - it's like nature is cheating. Diabetes, hemophilia and the digestive system. Ebola, rabies. Bats and rodents, virus vectors. Kept news feed on atom-level research in virus and drug manufacture. Back to some basic school chemistry and biochemistry long forgotten. Structure of the UN, organization of the CDC. Some geography and politics of various areas of the US. Hundreds of conspiracy theories, hundreds of delusions and extremists, militia and patriots. History of vampire literature and vampire myths. Some "unsolved" mysteries - like the Voynich MS and Oak island (Nova Scotia). A side track on pirate history. I didn't really need looking up algorithmic trading but did a little reading anyway. Spent a week getting to know Skykomish and to a lesser extent Seattle. There's a bakery in Seattle I want to visit someday. The human senses. UFOs - no really, there's some interesting things there. Maybe 100 historic Europeans, like Tycho Brahe, Hernan Cortez, the Sforza family. About two weeks' research on Torsten Stålhandske. ADHD, autism and Asperger's. Free running. Reading and re-reading roughly a dozen novels and series of novels, pinpointing what their draw-in is and what their weakness is, for me. In the process I've become a constant reader of liberal Kentucky blogs and a bunch of other things. Spent some time reading up on the biology of Borneo and Sumatra. Did case study on the topics I would have needed to look into for background of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Baroque cycle, like thief takers and the myths and stories of that world (Neal is so awesome he probably already knew all of that but I would have needed to read a lot). The history of feminist, sexually explicit or pornographic literature; this was one of the harder topics to research without having time and materials provided by an institution or university, and probably also one of the topics where my results remain most shallow. I didn't really need to research Wikipedia but I've kept writing down notes and collecting loose ends about it. Cryptids. Cross-over research from my UAV hobby. Numbers stations. The lesser key of Salomon, demonology. Insular dwarfism.

When I put the topics together like that I feel less like I wasted over a year on non-productive procrastination. No the procrastination was probably the topics I didn't even know where to start researching - attraction and gender, fashion and feeling of self-worth, online truth, self image and expectation, technology as magic of the future

Clarke's third law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Gehm's corollary to Clarke's third law:

Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.