Every so often, in the course of my life, I think about something. Often, when I've thought about it, I write something down about it in a text file on a computer, to maximise the chance of me not losing the results of my thinking, and being able to look those results up when the thing in question next occurs to me.

As a result of successfully not losing a load of these files, I have a gradually growing collection of random unpublished musings; many mathematical (ranging from pointlessly pure mathematics through to applications to everyday life), some more practical (my recipe collection), and one or two in other fields such as literature. A representative set of examples might be:

• a collection of fractions with particularly cute decimal expansions (such as 100/9899, whose expansion displays the Fibonacci sequence)
• an analysis of the optimal strategy for a driver approaching traffic lights
• a failed attempt to derive a generally usable meaning for the phrase ‘twice as likely’
• a recipe for satay sauce
• a set of notes on the various ways in which I've so far failed to cook coeliac-friendly lemon chicken
• notes on my recent re-reading of the Narnia series (I hadn't read them since before I knew anything much about Christianity, and was curious to see just how extensive its reputed Christian allegory actually was)
• a small collection of ideas for SF or fantasy novels which I will (let's face it) never make even a token attempt to write
• instructions for teaching oneself the juggling trick known as ‘Rubenstein's Revenge’, which I posted to Usenet more than once back in my serious-juggling days and saved in case I ever needed to post it again

… and so on. All a bit eclectic, not all with a happy ending, and in many cases not very well written, because none of it was particularly intended for other people to read.

But the more stuff like this I randomly jot down, the more I idly wonder if any of it might be useful or interesting to anyone else. As a general supporter of the idea that all other things being equal information ought to be free, I occasionally feel faintly guilty that I write this stuff and don't even consider publishing it. It probably wouldn't take me too much effort to polish up quite a lot of these writings and shove them up on a junk-pile page on my website, and at times I'm inclined to feel that even if only two or three people have their lives the least bit enriched by that then it might be worth me putting the (minimal) effort in.

On the other hand, some of it's controversial; the Narnia example above is a good one. While I'd be happy to make my notes on Narnia available to anyone who's particularly interested in knowing what I thought, and also happy to receive genuinely interesting comments pointing out things I might have missed, I don't particularly fancy the idea of receiving hate mail from people who think I'm attacking their religion, or well-meaning attempts to persuade me to see it all differently. (And I also wouldn't want to get into a discussion deep enough to require reference to the books, since I've now given them back to the person I borrowed them from.) I worry that if I publish this sort of thing on my website it might be interpreted as a general invitation to send comment and criticism, and I'm not sure I want to do that.

I'd be interested to know what my readers think. People who read this diary, after all, are precisely people who are interested in random things that happen to cross my mind (or who are at least too polite to say they're not :-), so if anyone is going to want to read any of this stuff then I'd expect someone round here to be among them. Any thoughts?