Hey everyone!
Hope you had a relaxing and adequate Christmas and New Year.
I was extremely lucky to get over the New South Wales border just before it closed with South Australia. Max and I spent Christmas in Adelaide and had 10 days of friends, family, and eating. We had 3 COVID tests in 2 weeks, all negative.
I was quite surprised and impressed by the measures still in place in Adelaide for contact tracing. People were still scanning QR codes at every shop, cafe and restaurant, even though the state hasn’t had a locally transmitted case since the small cluster in November.
Sydney now has stricter mask-wearing laws, which pretty much everyone is following in stores and on public transport. It’s absolutely jarring to nervously wait for each day’s announcement of new locally-transmitted cases in New South Wales (ranging, usually, between 0-10) compared with the state of the virus in the UK and US. And yet our media still quibbles at the oversights and mistakes made by the states’ governments. It’s wild.
Today will just be a series of links to Things of Interest I’ve collected over the past week. I have some new ideas of where to take this newsletter/blog and you can expect to see more on that soon.
Here we go:
Will humans ever reverse climate change? — a science newsletter reviewing the latest science fiction release from Kim Stanley Robinson and then discussing the science and ethics behind how we reduce our carbon emissions.
A podcast all about our accents! — award-winning linguistics podcast, very interesting stuff!
The fantastic BBC podcast on A History of the World in 100 Objects came back after 10 years to talk about the past decade’s most important object. You’ll have to listen to it to find out what it is.
The K-pop inspired band that challenged gender norms in Kazakhstan
I was having this conversation with some people over the break about how people used to sleep in “two shifts” and found an article to back it up (they were incredulous)
What is the ‘Blue Revolution?’ — farming in the oceans
Why Your ‘Carbon Footprint’ is a Lie
And one of my favourite YouTube channels, Wendover Productions, went out of his way to list news of the world you may have missed in 2020 (that has nothing to do with the pandemic) from every country in the world. Truly, a man after my own heart.
Part One:
Part Two:
Oh, and in personal news, I received an overall High Distinction in my first subject (Global Social Policy) in the Masters of Social Work that I’m officially starting this year. I’m super happy that I could apply 10 years of teaching students how to write academic essays to my own endeavours. I’m super looking forward to tackling the next subjects.
Until next time!
Stay safe and eat something delicious.