Warwick Stubbs > Recent Status Updates

"The fire flared up and swallowed the dry paper, and I found my thoughts shifting to Nazi book burnings. Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of wrong ideas."

Always interesting, but there's a limit to how much I want to know in one sitting, and despite thinking that the subject of soil is quite a fascinating topic when there's so much to discover, Evans' writing doesn't quite grip me the way it did with his book On Eating Meat. Perhaps the latter book is more (directly) topical... or maybe it's just his writing style.

Tombs of Atuan not as interesting as The Wizard of Earthsea - too much ritual-explaining, and not much doing. Sparrowhawk has turned up though, so I am interested to see how the relationship and Arha's beliefs develop.

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We know that if you are exposed to a more diverse array of bacteria, from soil and from animals, starting in the first weeks of life, then you are less likely to have faulty immune responses.

- P. 53 'Soil' by Matthew Evans

"Jim was glad that the Mustangs were so close. His eyes feasted on every rivet in in their fuselages, on the gun ports in their wings, on the huge ventral radiators that Jim was sure had been put there for reasons of style alone. Jim admired the Hayates and Zeros of the Japanese, but the Mustang fighters were the Cadillacs of air combat."

"Voices fretted along the murmuring wire, carried like stressed notes on the strings of a harp."

More enjoyable to read than J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun

"His knees ached from the constants swaying, and at times he had to hold on to the leather belt of the Japanese soldier beside him. But it last he was moving towards the open countryside, and the welcoming world of the prison camps."

"The communist head and intriguing ability to unsettle everyone, a talent Jim greatly respected."

"The real war was ... the old battlegrounds at Hungjao and Lunghua where the bones of the unburied dead rose to the surface of the paddy Fields each spring. Real war was the thousands of Chinese refugees dying of cholera in the sealed stockades at Pootung, and the bloody heads of communists soldiers mounted on pikes along the bund. In a real war no one knew which side he was on..."

"The New Pangea in which distant species are meeting up and generating hybrids is so unusual in the history of life on Earth that the current generation of new plant species, in particular, could be higher than it has been any time in the 700 million years since there have been land plants."

We have been changing the planet for too long to go back. The escalating impacts of homo have been taking place for some 2 million years... Australian aboriginals eradicated 2 tonne Diprotodon marsupials as well as half tonne birds and seven-metre reptiles. ...By ten thousand years ago we had killed off most of the world's largest land animals long before we built our first city or started to write.

Around two-thirds of the species that researchers have studied in recent decades have shifted their distributions in response to climate change, becoming commoner in those places where the climate has improved for them. Animals are moving towards the poles at around 17 km a decade.

"We have triggered a mini mass extinction and could potentially be on course for a sixth big one if humans continue to dominate the earth for millenia to come. This loss is devastating but, luckily, it isn't the whole story. After every fall during the history of life there has been a subsequent rise in diversity."

I'm impressed I've got this far with this book. Tried several times in the past but the opening sprawl usually put me to sleep or encouraged me to start thinking of something completely different. Hope this update doesn't jinx it.

Mary Somerville's 'On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences' was noticeable because it was written by a woman, but not particularly addressed to women readers - let alone children. This pointed up the paradox that women were not yet accepted as equals by the male scientific community, although in the crucial field of interpretation and explanation to a general public, they were already the pioneers.

Part 7 looks at the discussions on vitalism and suggests precedents that may have influenced or inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Part 8 continues on with Davy inventing the Gauze Safety Lamp to stop coal miners from getting blown up. Meanwhile his marriage is disintegrating and this 554 page book feels more like a biography of two major figures: William Herschel and Humphry Davy.

Part 7 looks at the discussions on vitalism and suggests precedents that may have influenced or inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Part 8 continues on with Davy inventing the Gauze Safety Lamp to stop coal miners from getting blown up. Meanwhile his marriage is disintegrating and this 554 page book feels like a biography of two major figures: William Herschel and Humphry Davy.

Cairns goes to great length to refute the sexism claims in the texts of Mozart's librettists by exploring how deeply engaged the pathos of the music is with the characters themselves. There is no evidence that Mozart had an ounce of sexism or misogyny in him, yet how can one reconcile this aspect of his character with the sung text? By looking at how his music develops these characters into whole human beings.