Yesterday I suddenly wondered: what do spiders think about? They’re in their web, dead still, all day long. Do they think? Or do they not experience consciousness like humans and are just responding to stimuli?#
Either way, I felt oddly sorry for them. For their boring life. But who knows, maybe they’re happy enough.#
Like books, you can never have too many notebooks. Though maybe I have too many. But they give me great pleasure, so I don’t mind.#
Just like with books, the anticipation is wonderful – thinking of the day I get to crack it open.1 Which is why, in my opinion a notebook should never have too many pages. Because you eventually get bored of it and become desperate to start a new, fresh one.#
Health authorities in Siberia’s Irkutsk region have placed nearly 200 people under medical observation after a laboratory worker died from plague.
At least 197 people who may have had contact with her were reportedly placed under medical isolation, including more than 100 in hospital wards.#
According to someone on Xwitter (totally unverified) she worked in a lab. There’s some random interesting stuff in the thread:#
… what worries me the most because Russia has designed to kill. In short, they took the bacteria and made changes to it to make it worse. For example, it's known that they designed one where taking antibiotics (the cure) triggers a toxin to kill you from something else.#
I really hope this story doesn’t become a bigger story, it fizzles out, and we don’t hear about it again. It does sound like Russia is actually taking steps to contain it. But I never really thought about Russia having bio-weapons (but it makes sense).#
Goodness. A lot of my Xwitter feed is about this outbreak in Russia. It seems that it might not be bubonic plague. But either way, it’s a serious virus. It’s become aerious enough in my mind1 Not that I know anything. that I’ve created the "2026 Russian Outbreak" tag on the blog.#
Again, I hope this turns into nothing.#
But pretty much every outbreak in the history of the world has spread far and wide and humbled humans ability to contain and control it.#
I don’t know much about the science of outbreaks and plagues. All I know is that outbreaks are very common – as we learnt with COVID-19. Throughout history there’s plagues roughly every fifty years I think. And now that humans have the toxic combo (literally) of being able to design these viruses ourselves and the hubris to think we can control it, it wouldn’t surprise me if outbreaks happen more often than every fifty years.#
I’m always baffled that there’s labs playing with this stuff. I hope it’s for ethical reasons – such as helping cure diseases. But you feel that we’ve got to put together some sort of treaty, like we have with nuclear bombs, around these viruses.2 Though don’t expect Russia to play ball.#