Well, I’ve finally done it to myself. My posting rate has flagged because I have overshot the limits of how much one person can reasonably do between work, family, school, and life. You can overshoot the limits for awhile, even quite a while, but eventually you pay that debt in the form of burnout at a minimum, and mental and physical and social difficulties if you wait too long to address it. Not to worry, in the medium term this problem is solvable and I will solve it. Because reading, thinking, writing, and then more thinking (mostly in that order) or very important to me. Anyway, here are some picks from the posts I did manage to make in February.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The Covid-19 “lab leak hypothesis” is still out there. Is this even news? I’m not sure. But what is frightening to me is that deadly natural and engineered pathogens are being worked with in labs, and they almost inevitably will escape or be released intentionally to threaten us all at some point. It’s like nuclear proliferation, accidents, and terrorism – we have had a lot of near misses and a lot of luck over the last 70 years or so. Can we afford the same with biological threats (not to mention nuclear threats) – I think no. Are we doing enough as a civilization to mitigate this civilization-ending threat? I think almost certainly, obviously not. What are we doing? What are we thinking?

Most hopeful story: Just stop your motor vehicle and let elephants cross the road when and where they want to. Seriously, don’t mess with elephants.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Chickie Nobs have arrived!