Hopefully Interesting

It's been a while since the last two posts on the topic so it seemed like a good idea to write down what I'd learned or changed my mind about recently on the topic. Immunity changes symptom timing One thing that's become important in the Omicron wave is that it seems that if you train your immune system to recognize a disease then you'll develop symptoms of that disease more quickly than if your body doesn't recognize it.  Most of the symptoms we tend to get when sick like inflammation or a fever aren't directly caused by the disease but by our body's innate immune system fighting it.  I'm actually not sure exactly why adaptive immunity leads to triggering innate immune responses faster but it's apparently a thing.  Michael Mina has a nice infographic here on the topic which is also arguing that this means waiting 5 days after symptom onset to return to work might now not be good enough when previously it would have been. Previously the one genuine...

Another year has left us.  While we can never return to it we can learn from it.  And one way of learning is to read books!  This was a good year for reading for me in terms of book count at least but part of that was going through many excellent Penric and Desdemona novellas which don't take as much time.  I also don't think I read as many doorstoppers as normal though there were certainly some in there.  So 70 books total compared to my baseline of 50.  I'm going to list these by category with bolded ones being particularly good. History Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation by Anton Howes Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein The Modern Defenses of the Coast of Maine, 1891 - 1945 by Joel W. Eastman The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America by Nick Bunker The Enlighten...