elainegrey

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BLEEP surveillance capitalism.

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This is a fascinating paper:

Merrill, Ray M., Spencer S. Davis, Gordon B. Lindsay, and Elena Khomitch. “Explanations for 20th Century Tuberculosis Decline: How the Public Gets It Wrong.” /Journal of Tuberculosis Research/ 4, no. 3 (August 9, 2016): 111–21. https://doi.org/10.4236/jtr.2016.43014.

I found it looking for a graph of the rate to TB in the US in the 20th century. This graph shows deaths. You have to take the authors' word for it that "The decline of tuberculosis in the United States is similar to that in England and Wales." They note, " Even with the use of the BCG vaccine in England and Wales, and the use of streptomycin in the United States, there was not a significant change in the rate of decline of tuberculosis deaths"

They put much of the decrease in TB deaths on improved living conditions, hygiene, and nutrition which reduced the transmission and strengthened people's immune system. Apparently there was lots of spitting in public.

I'm pretty sure this last round of public health training failed to get me washing my hands for twenty seconds, but i did get the elbow message.

Let me recommend the Diaries of Note feed, which you can subscribe to at https://www.dreamwidth.org/circle/diariesofnote_feed/edit

It is possible the project has come to an end, but if it has not entries like
https://diariesofnote.com/2023/03/11/like-a-black-dragon-above-the-clouds/
might still be in store.

If your public library doesn't have good ebooks, http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-emergency-library-to-provide-digitized-books-to-students-and-the-public/?iax=ntlemrlib%7cctalnk

BUT DO CHECK YOUR PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Your public library likely has a fine portfolio of e-resources beyond the easy offerings of Overdrive or Hoopla. NC Live -- a collection of e-resources many NC public libraries access -- has a number of ebook resources beyond Overdrive.

I have used the butterfly net three times in the past week and a half since returning from travel. Two evenings i scooped up flying bugs in the living room and evacuated them. Just now i scooped up a vole that presumably Edward had brought in and evacuated it (to the front of the property, away from my fruit trees).

I don't mind Edward eating voles -- outside. But this one looked (relatively) uninjured as Edward tracked it going back and forth along the base of the wall.

We have moths and other flying bugs in because they are attracted to the lights through the window of the deck door and, as Carrie comes and goes, the flying critters come and go as well.

It's been so easy to capture the critters and get them outside with the net. I'd gotten it because we leave the door open on the screened in porch for the cats to come and go, but i've used it inside more than in the porch so far. I think i could even scoop up a snake with it. Maybe. The rat snake that was in the house was quite large.

This blog post is a book review of Etrog: How A Chinese Fruit Became a Jewish Symbol. It made me think of amaebi's Hebrew studies and that she may appreciate the chapter wrestling over the the meaning of the Hebrew phrase peri ‘eṣ hadar (cut & pasted from the review - maybe the unicode worked).

I enjoyed the blog post, and would read the book if my reading list were a little shorter....

Friday: took the day off, tromping around in the yard a good bit. Small rocks lining the entrance to the new roof water drain*, some raking, some scouting the fence line. In the late afternoon i joined my sister's family to see The Last Jedi which we all thought was well done. (And likely to spawn another ninety films.)

Saturday: Christine and i tried to translate our Yuletide tradition of visiting the San Francisco Flower Mart to North Carolina. The restaurant was a satisfactory replacement, the nursery less so. It's possible we missed more yuletide bounty from earlier in the month. Just because it was less Christmassy didn't mean it was a disappointment: we hauled home three cat sculptures that now reside in the little courtyard area, two flats of pansies, miscellaneous phlox, and two spiderworts. I planted half the pansies, discovering that the soil (clay) was pretty solidly packed and mixed with gravel. Fie. As i dug to loosen it, i was worried i would cut the phone line again.

Sunday: As Meeting ended i felt a pressure to return home asap. I assumed it was my shyness kicking in. I just felt awkward. At home though, i found Christine in distress with the elephants. I'm glad i got home quickly. I don't think i was able to offer much solace; she did something new to cope.

While she coped, i worked in the yard, most successfully inscribing a 20' diameter circle within the driveway island and turning soil for the pansies and phlox in the area between the circle and the house. (The island is a blunted tear drop shape, with the fat end extending towards the house a few feet further than the inscribed circle.) Loosening the soil means finding more rocks: small chunks of quartz (walnut sized) and larger slate bits. One good sized rock turned up: maybe the volume of two coffee mugs? I do wonder if i am inefficient in messing around with such small rocks, but fitting them together to line the area around the drain intake gives me pleasure.

I've read another good speculative fiction work: A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. It's book two in a series. Book one has holds that will keep it out of my hand for a small forever. I'm glad i went ahead and read book two. I didn't feel like i was missing out: the character whose back story might have been outlined in the first book couldn't recall that back story. The story of survival that makes up the back story thread of another character in this novel resonated when the speaker at Meeting on Sunday shared his interactions with a street boy of Nairobi. The second story was one of identity and embodiment. I was quite pleased to find a second very engaging book in a row.

I also read Daytripper by by Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon. Too quickly: i need to go back and look at the art and give it the time it deserves. I am appreciating the graphical novel selection my library system has made in Overdrive.

Am i still happy, despite the elephant visit? It certainly created an ache but i think i also continue to carry the openness and lightness i've become aware of. The ache for Christine is not that different from the irritations and discomforts and physical aches that punctuate my physical being.

I suppose i do have an awareness that one particular discomfort is one i hope will fade before i need any assistance dressing it. Maybe better medications will come about. I can hope.

Back to work!


* About 30% of the roof water drains into a small area outside the kitchen window in the tiny "courtyard" at the front door. There's not much room for water barrels even if it was a place i'd want them visible. We've managed to adjust drainage so it's not pooling near the foundation, but in a heavy rain i've watched it wash down the driveway. Part of the driveway re-work was to address this drainage issue, so there's a pipe to drain the roof runoff into the east yard. I'll probably design a rain garden near the outlet.

A beautiful description of one persons' answer about why they blog: https://cbreaux.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-editor-working-on-my-book-asked.html

And, by the way, this is an amazing person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Reid_Soskin

I've rung in the new year by planning out the gardening through the summer and ordering seeds. The vendor i'm using, Southern Exchange, was out of some of the seeds i'd picked out. In one case, i didn't mind because it gave me an excuse to choose the Seminole pumpkin as my winter squash: so much of what i will grow in the big plot is from the Americas. Apparently peanuts originated in the area now known as Argentina, before being adopted in some areas of Africa, and then ending up in the southeast.

They were also out of Roselle, the hibiscus that leads to the bright red infusion. This gave me an excuse to place a tree seed order with Sheffields, which includes both Roselle and a local native mallow, the native Yaupon holly (i've mentioned it's the one North American caffeinated plant?), native crabapple and pawpaw fruit trees, and the bitter orange.

We'll see if gantt chart level planning for gardening is less of a waste of time than it is for software engineering. Since it's all the same steps, i think it wasn't a waste: being able to link the schedule to N days before or after various climate dates seemed pretty efficient. I just wish i could extract it all from my iPad app with a bit more clarity. I think the best i can do is a screen grab of the calendar view.

--== ∞ ==--

Late yesterday afternoon we saw Arrival, which i recommend whole heartedly. I wonder if linguists cringe watching it. It is stunningly beautiful, and i'm glad to have seen it in the theater where the visuals could overwhelm me. I think of one science fiction novel where a language didn't have subject and object, but the verbs were bidirectional. I can't untangle how that language would express "I watched the movie" and "I read the book" given just how invested i am in being the actor on some consumed material. Well, no, the media infuse my mind.... anyhow. No spoilers for the movie, except to say the meditation of the movie is on yet another topic.

--== ∞ ==--

I am anxious about being back to work today. I feel all sorts of "behind" and ineffective, but there isn't a strongly concrete example. It's guilt and, i suspect, the deep ruts of procrastinatory habits developed during grad school.

I've not communicated with others over the end of the year. My parents are back from being with my grandmother, and each parent offers up behavior to cause worry. My mother has developed a pressure to get things out of their house that she can't pace. And so she drove over on New Years Eve to drop off two baskets and a variety of stuff when we planned to visit the next day. Written out it seems reasonable, but it's missing the context of her terrible lingering cough and the weariness from the travel to see my grandmother. Mom's drive, her need to get things done due to some internal expectation, was a lesson i learned that lead to some of my own imbalances. It's not a sustainable or healthy drive, as her lingering coughs and frantic arguments with my dad underscore, and in my learning it got tangled up terribly with depression. I think i am learning how to relax and rest: i hope she can do the same.

Dad forgot to take his heart medicine on Sunday morning, and so he was in his hyper goofy mood at lunch. My Dad worries Christine more than I, as i know his erratic behavior is "mostly harmless" but for Christine it is one great minefield of potential triggers. For me it is mostly wearisome as there's no way to connect. I do wonder how much of his clowning is some dysfunctional effort to deal with Mom: an image of a rodeo clown in the bull ring comes to mind. He had confided his concerns about Mom's level of being frantic and confused on the phone the day before. But then there is the odd reality of how these beta blockers affect his behavior. He's much calmer and grounded when he's taken the med.

--== ∞ ==--

I managed not to ring in the new year with a terrible case of poison ivy. My last work in the yard in 2016 was to hack into a vine running up one of the older pines. I might just get my arms around these pines, but i'm sure there are some with a girth i could not reach around. B came out with his drone this fall and measured the height of the trees for us -- they're 90' tall, which is an average height for a mature yellow pine. The poison ivy grows up the pines as one massive main vine until past the understory, and then the poison ivy radiates it's branches out at about 60' above the ground. It seems to be no harm to the tree, and i'm sure the fruit and branches of the poison ivy make for lovely bird habitat. I have mixed feelings about eradicating it, since the only negative is the seedling poison ivy and the occasional fall of leaves during a thunderstorm. Even then, any poison ivy i had this past summer was quite mild.

And what am i going to do with the dead vines? There's a tangle around one pine where the vine detached from the tree and fell, dead i suppose. But the oil that is the irritant persists.

http://mikesbackyardnursery.com/2012/10/how-to-get-rid-of-poison-ivy/ shows the type vine i'm talking about.

Anyhow, i've been urged to plan to eradicate the poison ivy and, since i had my machete and had been killing honeysuckle, i thought i might give the poison ivy on this one pine a go. The vine was as thick as my wrist, at least, and with the first hack a cloud of dust shook free from all the rootlets. I was up wind, and i figured that most of the dust was just plain dust. I've not developed any good technique with the machete - not much is needed for honeysuckle - so i took a while to cut through. Wood chips went everywhere, and i had no face protection. I soon was thinking how stupid it was to be doing this on a whim, but i figured i should finish what i started and then just wash everything. I seem to have come through unscathed.

I have opinions about water district folks, and one of those opinions is that if a writer from Wired calls for comments, they are unlikely to reply. I suspect there's a good bit of, "Who the *&^ is this?" and, "I'm not going to talk to every curious grumble grumble grumble."

So when i read a Wired story about a fight over water releases for salmon late this week i filed the content under "ignore" and went looking for real news. Sac Bee articles were brief and not helpful (turning quickly to metering urban users and ripping out lawns). The Wall Street Journal railed against greens and Democrats. An article in the Western Farm Press answered my questions with clear and complete writing. I promptly left comment thanking the author, and then decided to write directly instead. And now Western Farm Press is added to my news feed.

--==∞==--

Feeling a bit drifty.