PeeCleemens
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Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling (ISBN 978-1408855898, Bloomsbury)
The first Harry Potter book, published in 1997. In 1999 the first 2 books were translated in Dutch. At that time more than 500000 had already been sold in the English speaking world of the first 2 books and film rights had been bought by Warner Bros. It was quite the hype in the UK…
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Star Trek. The Motion Picture
I recently decided to watch the Star Trek movies again. I watched them very long ago and thought it would be a bit of ‘brainless’ fun to watch them all in a short period of time. What better time to do so than a typical dreary Belgian summer. The first movie of the series came…
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Factfulness, Hans Rosling (ISBN 978-1473637498, Hodder & Stoughton)
This book was given to me by an uncle somewhere middle of 2019. As I have no shortage of books in the ‘want to read’ category I put in on the stack and left it there for some time. Then came some science oriented discussions about facts with our kids related to their homework assignments.…
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Swift Playgrounds
A year ago, at the beginning of the first lockdown we started with Swift playgrounds at home on the iPad to teach our 10 year old son Merijn a bit of coding. I had looked at it earlier but then it wasn’t available yet in Dutch. Last year it was and with a lot of…
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First Blood
The Rambo character recently became a news item in Belgium because of the renegade soldier Jurgen Conings. I wrote a short post about this as his supporters compare him to the hero Rambo. But in First blood Rambo is not yet the revenging hero from the later movies. When the movie came out in 1982…
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Rambo Jurgen
In Belgium the news has been dominated the last couple of days by the search for a fugitive soldier named Jurgen Conings. He threatened to use violence against one of our most prominent and outspoken virologists, Marc Van Ranst. Marc was for a very long time a daily item in the news where he commented…
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The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest, David Quammen (ISBN 978-0393350845, W. W. Norton)
Another book by David Quammen that is excerpted and adapted from his book Spillover. If you already read Spillover then this book might not bring much new. I read Spillover in 2015 in unsuspecting times and then this basically long chapter from that book on AIDS in the summer of 2020 in the middle of…
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Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus, David Quammen (ISBN 978-0393351552, W. W. Norton)
Elsewhere on this blog I wrote about Spillover by David Quammen. That book covers a number of so called zoonoses, diseases that can be transmitted from non-human animals to humans. Ebola is one example discussed in Spillover. When the book came out late 2012 it was in the middle of a series of Ebola outbreaks.…
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Nest Protect 2
A couple years back we renovated our house and as part of it we needed to install smoke detectors. We went for the standard smoke detectors, nothing special. Two weeks ago the battery in one of them died and I didn’t have a spare battery lying around. Also, we hadn’t placed CO detectors yet. They…
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The impact of Covid-19 on Running Shoes
Last week I had some time on Tuesday to go to Runner’s lab in Zaventem for a new pair of running shoes. The shoes I had were the previous model GT-4000 on which I had run a little over 550km by now. Strava had given me an alert about the mileage but the recommended fork…
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