April was OK. We are much more fortunate than most, enjoying one another’s company, having a terrace, good ingredients nearby, jobs. We’ve got it all. Utterly selfishly, when the lockdown eases on Monday and the park opens, I'd prefer it to be open only to those of us who really want to know how nature took back ownership of the place, even if only temporarily. I know that’s not going to happen. Nor are the roads going to stay car-poor for long. But I can dream.

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About this time last year, I started taking a melatonin pill every night before bed. I had long used it for jet lag, but I think it was reading Gwern’s lengthy analysis that prompted me to try it on the regular. I began doing that a year or so ago, and at some point roughly 200 days ago I switched from a 3 mg dose to a 1 mg dose. How do I know? Because my second bottle of 200 tablets was just delivered.

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There has been a flurry of activity on the Zettelkasten Forum around higher level notes, which I’ve been doing my best to understand. In the course of that, though, some older discussions about the different approaches to unique identifiers have also bubbled up. Those have made me rethink my approach.

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A couple of weeks ago The Main Squeeze said she had seen some little birds poking around the entrance to a somewhat strange hollow terracotta sculpture we have on the terrace. Sure enough, I confirmed the presence of blue tits. There’s no sign yet of any activity within the sculpture, but the birds...

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The important image is in the middle on the bottom row; a plant infected with one strain of a virus is hotter than an uninfected plant, to its left. It is also hotter than a plant infected by a different strain of the same virus, the box to the left.

About a month ago now, the headline of a press release grabbed my attention, in a good way. ¹ Disease-causing virus manipulates crop plants to favor its vector. I had to read it, and the original paper. No longer being in the business of science journalism, I did nothing with my amazement, until now.

The story, in a nutshell:

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