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.

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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...

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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.

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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.

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A couple of weeks ago someone shared a list of things that people can’t help themselves but recommend to others, things that are so useful or worthwhile that you can’t imagine how you lived without them.¹ Of course I skimmed through it. There were things I’m already doing (plain text) and things I’m never going to do (children)². There were also things that elicited a masssive “Huh?”

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