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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. So I decided to read it and see if it would also be useful for teenagers to read. And I must say I can recommend it to anyone trying to understand our world, not just teenagers. Especially in today’s environment where facts don’t seem to…
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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 time on his hands I figured it was a good time to introduce him to some basic coding concepts in a playful way. It hasn’t been a terrific success I must say. Sitting down and concentrating isn’t his favourite pastime. And although this first playground…
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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 it stirred quite a controversy because of the violence. Compared to what has come since then the violence is quite mild but at the time I remember people found it quite shocking. And even now, watching the movie again the violence is disturbing in the…
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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 on the covid-19 situation and what to do. To many he is the personification of the lockdown and generally not liked much. Not surprising considering he has been constantly and relentlessly reminding us of the inconvenient truth that our own behaviour determines if the virus…
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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 the covid-19 pandemic while on vacation in the south of France. Reading this in the middle of a pandemic obviously made it all more tangible. Compared to Ebola which acts fast and has a high mortality rate AIDS is a slow killer, infecting people without…
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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. Obviously those outbreaks were not covered in Spillover. The book discussed here is actually the extract of chapters in Spillover covering Ebola and updated with additional material covering those later outbreaks. The additions mainly cover new insights about the identity of the host animal for…
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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 are not yet mandatory but recommended. So while googling detectors and batteries I also had a look at the Nest Protect and read a couple of online reviews. They are expensive but finally I decided to buy one anyway. It sounds stupid but from a…
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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 to replace is between 500 and 700km so I thought I had a bit of time before really needing to switch. I just went already to get it out of the way. As I had experienced a bit of a lack of cushioning in the…
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Spillover, David Quammen (ISBN 978-0393066807, W.W. Norton & Company)
This book came out in October 2012 and I read it myself in June 2015. The subject of the book is zoonoses, diseases that are transmissible from animals to humans. The book explores recent new diseases that appeared and outbreaks of these diseases. Among the diseases covered in the book are AIDS, ebola and sars. It came out right in the middle of a series of outbreaks of Ebola which gave it quite some free ‘publicity’ so to speak. The book investigate the mechanisms of zoonoses and tries to explain why we have seen many new diseases of this type…
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1000km running history on Strava
Yesterday I finally managed to go for a run again this week (too many online meetings) and I finally passed the 1k of registered running kilometers on Strava. For a person like me this is a veritable milestone as I am not a real runner. I have to force myself to go for a run and not do something else with my time. I did a bit of running as a teenager and ran up to 15km in those early days. More I never managed as I was always going as fast as possible and I actually liked sprinting more.…
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