Friday: finished _Spillover_
Jul. 2nd, 2021 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI dropped off at the framers the Mondrian print that leapt to its doom last Saturday. The glass was broken, the corners of the frame were coming apart and the metal frame itself was bulging in places as well as having lost some of its color. I was hoping some of the damage to the print could be corrected, but that is not the case, so I am having it re-framed with a distressed wood with white and grey paint. We are all getting old, after all. Oh, and I went with plexiglass this time, which will make it lighter, and hopefully less likely to leave dangerous shards around, if it engages in further self-destruction.
I finished reading Quammen’s _Spillover_. There is a lot to think about in this book from about a decade ago. It got popular again this past year, because it is about zoonoses; there is a big chunk about SARS (the prequel), which is eerie to read, when you think about the dates of that event, and the beginning of our current pandemic. There is also, obviously, a lot about HIV / SIV as well, which is interesting, as I was not fully up to date in our understanding of the history of that virus. Other things mentioned: Hendra, Nipah, Marburg, Ebola.
There’s a chunk at the end about caterpillars and their killers. Obviously, I don’t love watching caterpillars munch their way through trees, altho I cannot say I’ve given a lot of thought to understanding why they stop. Turns out at least part of the time, there’s a virus involved. The discussion of that is interesting (especially that the caterpillars aren’t able to mount any kind of response to the virus, and so the virus multiplies completely uninhibited until the caterpillar, er, melts. NOT explodes. Skin splits, viral goo.), and the closest Real World analogue to nanotech SF descriptions of “goo”. But what I thought was most interesting about the discussion in the book is where Quammen went with it. Quammen doesn’t like the caterpillars either, but rather than see the caterpillars (“forest lepidoptera”) as a dire threat to forest ecosystems and, honestly, everything alive on land on the planet, that is barely held in check by their own viruses, Quammen sees the die off in forest lepidoptera as a bit of an eerie warning of what could happen to us. Mind you, he _does_ see us as a threat to the planet / ecosphere as well! But still. I can’t really take the caterpillars / forest lepidoptera side in any way here. They are too terrifying in their own right. I’m glad there’s some code around that takes them down when they get out of hand.
It’s worth reading, if in need, at this point, of an update.
I finished reading Quammen’s _Spillover_. There is a lot to think about in this book from about a decade ago. It got popular again this past year, because it is about zoonoses; there is a big chunk about SARS (the prequel), which is eerie to read, when you think about the dates of that event, and the beginning of our current pandemic. There is also, obviously, a lot about HIV / SIV as well, which is interesting, as I was not fully up to date in our understanding of the history of that virus. Other things mentioned: Hendra, Nipah, Marburg, Ebola.
There’s a chunk at the end about caterpillars and their killers. Obviously, I don’t love watching caterpillars munch their way through trees, altho I cannot say I’ve given a lot of thought to understanding why they stop. Turns out at least part of the time, there’s a virus involved. The discussion of that is interesting (especially that the caterpillars aren’t able to mount any kind of response to the virus, and so the virus multiplies completely uninhibited until the caterpillar, er, melts. NOT explodes. Skin splits, viral goo.), and the closest Real World analogue to nanotech SF descriptions of “goo”. But what I thought was most interesting about the discussion in the book is where Quammen went with it. Quammen doesn’t like the caterpillars either, but rather than see the caterpillars (“forest lepidoptera”) as a dire threat to forest ecosystems and, honestly, everything alive on land on the planet, that is barely held in check by their own viruses, Quammen sees the die off in forest lepidoptera as a bit of an eerie warning of what could happen to us. Mind you, he _does_ see us as a threat to the planet / ecosphere as well! But still. I can’t really take the caterpillars / forest lepidoptera side in any way here. They are too terrifying in their own right. I’m glad there’s some code around that takes them down when they get out of hand.
It’s worth reading, if in need, at this point, of an update.