What I'm Listening To
Latest TTC course was Understanding Genetics: DNA, Genes, and Their Real-World Applications by David Sadava. 24 lectures.

I think I should have liked this more. It's pretty informative, Sadava is a good lecturer with a breezy avuncular manner. Found it quite hard to remember the complicated stuff: kept forgetting what a promoter was. I think one problem is that half of the stuff is very familiar so I sort of stop paying attention, and then suddenly realise I don't understand what he's saying and have to rewind.

Still, seems to cover things pretty thoroughly, both the theoretical side and the applications.

Notable point: the Cohens are hereditary priests in Judaism, believed to all descend from the same man. However, they look very different in different parts of the world. So, they did some Y-chromosome analysis and found that they do appear to have a common male ancestor after all.

Next
Not sure on the audiobook front. Tried a few lectures from the second half of the massive 84-lecture History of the US course, but it even half of it might be too long-winded. Was hoping for some historical tie-in with those Western novels, but only covers cowboys very briefly. Namechecks Louis L'Amour but only to say that the portrayal in books like that is unrealistic.

On the plus side, this part is by a lecturer with a Brummie accent.

What I'm Reading
On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler. This isn't the famous "On Death and Dying" book that introduced the notorious Five Stages: this is a later book on dealing with grief.

Gets a bit cloying in places, and has some sections that would only work if you're religious or believe in the supernatural: has a few anecdotes about subtle messages from the departed. Not as psychobabbly as I expected though, apart from always talking about "sharing". How come everybody Shares and nobody just Tells you anything.

Covers quite a variety of situations: suicide, sudden death, multiple death, talking to children, Alzheimers etc; mostly in sections a few pages long. The advice is pretty similar in of them: don't try to rush things, don't try to live in denial, trust your instincts. The most useful aspect is probably the many anecdotes of how people have struggled to come to terms with grief.

The advice seems pretty realistic. The authors point out that the five stages (denial, bargaining, anger, despair, acceptance) are widely misunderstood. You don't progress in a line from one stage to the next, you can swing backwards and forwards through them, you can be in more than one simultaneously. They also point out that "acceptance" doesn't mean that you feel OK about the death. It just means that you learn how to incorporate the sense of loss and keep going.

[Gwen's son Johnny drowned in a pool at his fifth birthday party.]

For the next three years, Gwen talked with everyone who had been at the party, all of whom reassured her that she had been a good mother, that it had happened in a second. By the fifth year, she was still talking about it, and her friends felt it was time for her to find "closure".

Gwen, however, was baffled by the notion. "How do I find closure for such a tragedy? Every morning I wake up and think, 'Today my child would be ten and in the fourth grade'. How do I find an action that will put this to rest? How long am I allowed for a child that I loved for five years? Can I get an extension because this was an accident?"

In the loss of a young loved one such as Johnny, people pay oversimplify the stages. We expect six months of denial, then a few months of anger and depression, followed by some bargaining. Finally we expect to find acceptance, which we imagine will lead to some type of "closure". It's never as easy as the terms on the checklist. Real life and real grief are never as neat and tidy as that. Many believe that after the death of a child there is no closure.

Gwen will never find a defining act that will place Johnny in her past. He will never be behind her as if he moved out of the house. He will always be a part of her past and will live in her heart, which makes the concept of closure unrealistic. Gwen survived, and she and her husband had other children, but she never closed the door on Johnny. Instead, she learned to live with a permanent hollowness in her heart. She realized that the only acceptance she could find was that the death had happened and that she would develop ways to live with it. But for Gwen, "closure" will never come.

Overall, quite interesting but a bit US-centric. Not a bad read but might be irritating if you gave it to an atheist or someone very allergic to sentimentality.

Web
Bowbuilding

Will Eisner cartoon M16 manual.

Possibly-more-accurate bust of Julius Caesar found.

Upside-down matchbox art.

Big cow.

Confessions of a sweatshop inspector

And many prefer to be bamboozled, because it's cheaper. While companies like to boast of having an ethical sourcing program, such programs make it harder to hire the lowest bidder. Because many companies still want to hire the lowest bidder, "ethical sourcing" often becomes a game. The simplest way to play it is by placing an order with a cheap supplier and ending the relationship once the goods have been delivered. In the meantime, inspectors get sent to evaluate the factory—perhaps several times, since they keep finding problems—until the client, seeing no improvement in the labor conditions, severs the bond and moves on to the next low-priced, equally suspect supplier.

For the half-assed company there are also half-assed monitoring firms. These specialize in performing as many brief, understaffed inspections as they can fit in a day in order to maximize their own profits. That gives their clients plausible deniability: problems undiscovered are problems avoided, and any later trouble can be blamed on the compliance monitors. It is a cozy understanding between client, monitoring company, and supplier that manages to benefit everyone but the workers.