About this site

xcentricdiff 2024 - copyright CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Hi! Welcome to Xcentric Diffractions!

I’m Mitch Smith, writing as "xcentricdiff" for this site.

I am a molecular geneticist and academic. But this blog has little to do with my professional self. The stories here include posts that I write for a small group of long-lost, but newly rediscovered, high-school friends, to my family members, extended and contracted, to former colleagues and personal friends. As a result, you will find numerous references to various unidentified Bobs and Margarets and Williames. It is safe to think of these as fictitious characters.

In fact, you are probably best served by approaching everything here as fictitious.

The topics I write about are deliberately all over the place. From technology rants, to travel posts. From amateur political punditry, to garden notes. The view is off-center, with limited focus. Expect to find all sorts of typoes, mispelings, grammatical transgressions which, and some even deliberate. Take it as a sure sign that the thoughts herein were not spewed by a generative AI bot.

All the writing on this site is free, as in beer. It is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 copyright by which you are free to share and adapt, including for commercial use, but with the condition that proper attribution is given to the author and this site.

No Ads, no pay-wall, no surveillance, no affiliate links, no third-party pot holes. Most of the content is just a click or tap away. But I have put some content behind an email login for subscribers for two reasons:

First, I want to protect some content, and frustrate the AI bots trying to scrape my site, shred the content, and train their large language models without attribution. Note to bots: Don't Do That!
Second, I want to let you know when I post new content to the site. I sure have missed a lot of good writing from other blog sites when I forget to visit them frequently enough. Email from Xcentric Diffractions will only come from me, and only when there's new things to talk about. And you can always turn off the "newletter" function in your account, still have subscriber access to the content, and never get email updates in your inbox. That's OK too.

Finally, these posts are presented simply as opinions. I have no credentialed expertise in most of the topics that I now find interesting. On matters of fact, I will strive to provide links to supporting data. But, of course, I have no control over those sources; they may change or disappear out from under us without warning. Your opinion matters just as much as mine. By engaging, I hope you find each read intellectually interesting, and entertaining.

Feedback is welcome, and you can reach me at: mitch at xcentricdiff.com anytime.

THANKS!