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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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The Breakfast Club
Last weekend we watched The Breakfast Club with the family. This movie from 1985 caused quite a stir when it came out. I remember watching it at the time while being in high school myself and loving it. I watched it multiple times but it cannot have been on regular tv. Probably it was on a paid movie channel that came out where we live around that time. The movie made a big impression on me as a teenager, probably because it deals with the emotions and insecurities teenagers struggle with. It was easy to identify with and for me…
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Personal Web Page Developments
Near the end of the previous millennium my internet provider brought ADSL connections to the market and I subscribed to the service. No more dial in connections with a modem over the phone line. With the service came an email address with a couple of aliases and the possibility to host your own personal homepage. In the beginning I didn’t use the homepage option. As time went by I started to think about the possibility of using a homepage as a ‘diary’ to keep family living abroad informed of what was going on on my end. That kind of got…
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The new MacBook Air M1
When the lockdown started last year in March it meant many changes. For one thing we ended up working from home and learning from home for the kids. The oldest one had to follow on line classes and do homework. This meant that my MacBook Pro changed ‘owner’. Where I was using it before for myself when the desktop was in use by other family members it now was kind of constantly in use by my daughter. As this was really bought as an entry model laptop it had the base 128Gb configuration in terms of harddisk space. I soon…
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Zwaartekracht en aardkorstgetijden
De meeste mensen weten wel dat de zwaartekracht van de maan eb en vloed veroorzaken. Maar ook de aarde zelf vervormt een klein beetje door dezefde zwaartekracht. Het hoogteverschil van het water tussen eb en vloed kan gaan van enkele meters tot meer dan tien meter. De aardkorst is stijver en dus is de vervorming kleiner maar de aarde stulpt aan de kant van de maan toch nog enkele decimeters uit. Gelezen in de wetenschapskalender van 2021.
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Bedrade hoofdtelefoons
Het is waarschijnlijk technologische archeologie in de nabije toekomst : de bedrade hoofdtelefoon. Maar als je er een hebt dan zul je vast al gezien hebben dat er zwarte cirkels staan op de metalen plug aan het einde van de draad. Die cirkels isoleren de verschillende metalen delen van de plug. Elk deel fuctioneert als een contactpunt voor een ander signaal. Als je maar 1 cirkel hebt dan is de plug tweepolig, een pool voor het signaal en een voor de aarding en afvoer van elektriciteit. Een plug met 2 cirkels is driepolig en kan stereogeluid produceren. Zijn er drie…
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