* Bacteriophages, viruses that parasitize bacteria, are among the most abundant and successful phenomena on our planet. As Nicola Twilley put it, “The battle between viruses and bacteria is brutal: Scientists estimate that phages cause a trillion trillion infections per second, destroying half the world’s bacteria every forty-eight hours.”

* Tuberculosis was the second deadliest infectious disease among humans in 2020, behind only Covid-19. More than 1.3 million people died of TB in 2020. The difference between TB and Covid is that more than a million people also died of TB in 2019, and in 2018, and in 2017, and so on, stretching back every year for hundreds of years. Like cholera, tuberculosis is almost always curable in communities with strong healthcare systems.

* Everyone’s keen on freedom until you are floating in the absolute freedom of outer space with forty-five minutes of air inside your space suit.

* Ruskin’s obsession with strength and weakness in poetry (and the assumption that strength is inherently better than weakness, which in my opinion is a fundamental misunderstanding of the human situation) serves as a stark reminder that the forces of colonialist thinking in English literature stretched so deep into everything that there’s no separating—there or anywhere—art from ideology.

* The word graupel is taken from the German word for sleet. English-language meteorologists used to call this kind of precipitation “soft hail,” but eventually abandoned the term on account of how graupel is neither soft nor hail.

* It is one of the only Olympic sports that the U.S. does not regularly participate in (we have not fielded a team since 1996), so it is rarely on American TV.

* Julie has been my editor for almost twenty years now, and has edited all of my books, including this one. She is also one of my closest friends. The reason she had occasion to visit Iceland frequently was because of the children’s TV show LazyTown, which was filmed in Iceland, and which costarred Julie’s husband, the puppeteer David Feldman.

* One of my favorite sentences in the English language comes from a review of Strawberry Hill at the fan website boonesfarm.net: “Strawberry Hill has a rich, vibrant strawberry flavor with just a hint of hill.”

* It occurs to me that technology often brags about solving problems it created.

* Lack of standardization often hampers productivity. Railroad gauge size is a famous example of the phenomenon, but the one that enters my life most often is charger cables for portable electronic devices. Some of my devices use USB-C charging cables; others use USB-A or mini-USB or micro-USB. And then there’s whatever charging standard Apple is using at the moment. Apple has abandoned so many standards over the past decade that it’s a blessed miracle they still make computers with QWERTY keyboard layouts.

* Aristotle didn’t actually write this, but the ideas are distilled from Ethics.

* It’s telling that in the U.S., world’s largest balls did not really become a thing until after the highway system was built beginning in the 1950s.