Saturday, 7th. March 2026

For reasons I cannot guess at the moment it is quiet out there. Why can I not hear the continuous dull drone of vehicles on the highway? We have a uniform pale grey sky and almost no breeze. It is hazy with visibility up to about 400 metres. Could some unusual atmospheric effect be dampening sound? I do not know. For now, I am simply enjoying the near absence of vehicle noise.

During a wide-ranging conversation with friends over five hours yesterday afternoon I found myself extolling the virtues of ignorance, whilst at the same time bathing in the warm lather of collective knowledge. Ignorance is the basis of science. We don’t know something so we seek to understand it. Ignorance is the starting point, but we might also have an idea, perhaps based on experience or observation, of how something might work. We state a null hypothesis.