Just a quick post for today. The photo shows an electronic snake toy I bought for our cats. (From ads I saw on Facebook.) It goes back and forth, reacts to objects in front them, pauses every once in a while waiting for a cat to paw at it, then starts up again.
Here’s something I don’t usually do. But perhaps it’s worth doing, especially for this past year.
What were the significant events of this past year, in my personal life and in the history I’m living through?
I had a heart transplant! I’m still alive! I have a supportive family, and a step-grandson who just turned 1-year-old in October. And I am making visible progress toward a couple three long-term goals, even though I’m not optimistic about ever finishing any of them.
Here am I, the grandson, my partner, and the grandson’s parents (partner’s son and his wife):
Sunny but chilly today; we’ve had rain for much of the past two weeks, and now we’re in for a week or so of sun. We did a 34-minute walk, though Robinson Drive and around on Skyline and back to Crestmont.
We’re being extremely careful about exposure to Covid, of course, given my immune-compromised condition, especially with the apparent easy spread of the new omicron variant. Also, my partner’s relationship’s relationship’s relationship was exposed to someone at work who had tested positive, and so now even my partner is avoiding close contact with his immediate relationship until they can be tested.
I’m happy enough just to stay at home.
I’ve been fascinated to see people struggling to pronounce “omicron”; it’s a Greek letter, long familiar to astronomers, both professional and amateur, and to science fiction fans, since fictional planets tend to be named after their stars, e.g. “Omicron Ceti III” (to cite a planet in an early Trek TOS episode, “This Side of Paradise”). But I learned something in all this: apparently “omicron” really does mean, in the Greek language, small-o, just as “omega” means big-o. Makes sense, but I’d had never noticed that.
Links today are about Don’t Look Up, the economy, fantasy worlds, and Arabic numerals.
E.O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, Liveright, 2016, 259p
This is one of Wilson’s last four or five books, the first one following The Meaning of Human Existence in 2014. These books seem slighter that most earlier Wilson books, but this one has an especially striking theme: that to prevent mass extinctions, to preserve the Earth’s biodiversity that humanity’s survival depends on, we must save half the planet’s land-surface from human development. Keep it wild.
I thought to post a summary of one of those E.O. Wilson books tonight, but it’s past 4:30 and I don’t think I have the time. (I try to wrap up here by 5:30.) So some miscellaneous items today.
First, I finally got my Covid booster today. My cardiologists had actually recommended my *not* getting it when it first became available, since my anti-rejection meds had lowered my white blood cell count. I gathered the idea was there was little point in getting the booster with such a low WBC to work with. But the most recent blood tests showed that level had risen sufficiently to warrant getting the booster. (OTOH, I am not to get a flu shot, or any other routine vaccine, until a year after the transplant — which was 7 months ago now.)
The great evolutionary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died on Sunday. He was 92. He had been publishing new books right up to the end, with Tales from the Ant World in 2020. Several of his earlier books, from On Human Nature in 1978 to The Meaning of Human Existence in 2014, have over the decades profoundly influenced my thinking.
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Follow-up to previous post: about the film Don’t Look Up.
So, I give the film a thumbs-up, even though it’s uneven. It follows through on its premise. It effectively parodies the denialist nature of the anti-vaxx crowd, with a crucial difference.
(Spoilers.)
No links political or scientific today. Instead I’ll indulge on what’s happening now, and what happened in my childhood, on Christmas Eve.
Henry Gee is a long-time editor of Nature, one of the two (along with Science) general interest scientific journals. Gee came to notice of the science fiction community in the 2000s (iirc) when he commissioned short science fiction stories from many of the top authors in the field. He’s published several books, most recently A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters.
Here he is in Scientific American, 30 Nov 2021: Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct, subtitled, “Habitat degradation, low genetic variation and declining fertility are setting Homo sapiens up for collapse”
