And Now to Write

  As I mentioned in my first blog post of the year, I don't really do the resolution thing.  To be honest, I haven't really done the whole goal thing.  My rationale was that goals are usually overly ambitious resulting in them not being met, and if I want something enough, I'll do it without needing to really articulate it.  But, every spring I find myself writing a big goal list for the upcoming summer.  It usually features things like "read x books," "finish project y that I started a year ago," and "exercise z times per week," for example.  And, every year, I'd meet maybe half of these goals, further providing evidence to myself that goal-setting doesn't work for me.   But recently, I had a light bulb moment.  It isn't that goal-setting doesn't work for me - I just haven't been doing it right.  It took 3 rounds of me being exposed to the right approach for it to click.  So, what needed fixing?  Recognizing goals and obj...

A couple months back, a friend lent me a sizable book titled The Coming Plague  that chronicles the journeys of epidemiologists who confronted diseases that were new as of the 20th century. So far, I've read about the discoveries of Lassa, Machupo, and Ebola. Now, I'm exploring various strains of influenza (P.S. Swine flu was/is actually pretty terrifying and now I understand why people were freaking out about it). While reading about this specific virus, a thought struck me: heresy  actually parallels influenza viruses pretty dang well. Before I get into it, I'm going to quote a couple of paragraphs I read that brought about this realization. When the [influenza] virus reproduced itself, the chromosomes had to unwind and make duplicate sets of their proteins and RNA. In the process, parts of one chromosome might overlap with another, extraneous bits of RNA from the cell in which the virus resided might get copied as well, and the whole mess would be reassorted and reass...