To steal from William Gibson, Italian efficiency is excellent, it’s just not evenly distributed. That was running through my mind for the very brief time it took me to get my first shot of the Astra-Zeneca Covid vaccine yesterday evening. I was predisposed, I confess, because actually booking the appoinment (for which thanks to The Main Squeeze) had also been a miracle of efficiency and good fortune.

A Blight on Soviet Science is a recently published long read about Nikolai Vavilov. It’s a good read too, a well-told account of the life of the extraordinary botanist and seed collector, his fight with Trofim Lysenko and eventual downfall and death in prison of starvation. Just one thing about it worried me.

The picture at the top of the article.

Looking back, I cannot remember which particular recommendation engine thought I might like to read this. I asked a couple, telling them how much I had enjoyed All the Light We Cannot See and A Gentleman in Moscow. After I had ploughed through a couple of things for work and John Le Carré’s Sing...

Still healthy, which is nice. The winter has been unseasonably mild and spring — surely a false spring — is upon us, with teeny leaves and flower buds and a promise of good things to come.

A week or two back, I started doing an online course for Python. May as well have a tenuous grasp of another language, right? To start, they had me install a thing — I suppose it is an IDE — called Anaconda, which actually seems very nice and easy. However, it has definitely done something to my established environment, because when I went to run my weekly stats script, I got a bunch of errors saying it couldn’t find things that it had been perfectly well able to find before I installed Anaconda.