Review: Mort by Terry Pratchett

Mort is a short and hilarious romp through Terry Pratchett's Discworld featuring:

•  Mort, a teenager whom no one except Death wants to hire as an apprentice and whose name people find it impossible to remember
• Death, the reaper tasked with transporting important people to the afterlife and who's very confused by the mortal concept of fun
• Death's daughter 
• an unkempt magician
• an obstinate Princess. 

After a dispiriting day of waiting in vain to be hired at the town hiring fair, Mortimer is just getting ready to trudge home from the town square when Death appears looking for an apprentice. Mort's father is a bit confused, but after making sure that it's a job with good employment prospects that'll make a good contributing member of society of Mort, off Mort goes to Death's home outside Time. 

The plot essentially consists of Mort taking a few people to the afterlife and then making a big mistake when he tries to save a princess he has a crush on and manages to create a hole in the fabric of reality itself. Hijinks ensue.

The plot, while perfectly serviceable, definitely isn't the main draw of this book -- the writing is just hilarious. Whether it's:

• everyone calling Mort "boy" and him constantly muttering "Mort" after their lines
• Pratchett's frequent observations like "So long as he caught nothing Terpsic Mims was one of the Disc’s happiest anglers, because the Hakrull river was five miles from his home and therefore five miles from Mrs Gwladys Mims, with whom he had enjoyed six happy months of married life.  That had been some twenty years previously."
• little details like the staff of Sto Lat castle and lesser nobles of Sto Lat being called the Yeoman of the Pantry, the Lord of the Privy Closet and the Lady of the Small Hexagonal Room in the North Turret
• Death's horse being called Binky
• Death's speech (which isn't heard but rather beamed into the mind) always being represented LIKE THIS is great, and his foray into the mortal world to take his first holiday since possibly the beginning of time and try to figure out what fun is. 

Pratchett just has incredible voice, and so his very-involved-narrator role works really well. 

"“Well,----me,” he said. “A----ing wizard. I hate----ing wizards!” “You shouldn’t----them, then,” muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes.” 

The worldbuilding of Mort doesn't really stand up to rigorous scrutiny, which is fine. This is lampooned by Pratchett a few times, when he says that he has no ambition of creating a consistent Discworld and is perfectly happy for the rules of magic/physics to be different in different places, and when a plothole is explained away by Death telling Mort not to rely so much on mathematics. He also explains people not being shocked by the appearance of Death/Death's apprentice or not seeing them as 'people see what they expect to see'. 

Some quotes (not even necessarily the best ones honestly, just the ones I could find, which are still great...)

[Quotes are from here or Goodreads Quotes]

• "But you’re Death,’ said Mort. ‘You go around killing people!’ 
• I? KILL? said Death, obviously offended. CERTAINLY NOT. PEOPLE GET KILLED, BUT THAT’S THEIR BUSINESS. I JUST TAKE OVER FROM THEN ON. AFTER ALL, IT’D BE A BLOODY STUPID WORLD IF PEOPLE GOT KILLED WITHOUT DYING, WOULDN’T IT?
• "Mort’s innate honesty will never make him a poet; if Mort ever compared a girl to a summer’s day it would have been followed by a thoughtful explanation of what day he had in mind and whether it was raining at the time." -- This is SO ME. #headcanon: Mort is autistic.
• "He’d never plucked up the courage to try Albert’s porridge, which led a private life of its own in the depths of its saucepan and ate spoons."
• "She drew herself up to her full height, which wasn’t really worth the effort."
• "Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote.  The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote."
• THERE’S NO JUSTICE.  THERE’S JUST ME. 
• "Pardon me for living, I’m sure."
  "NO-ONE GETS PARDONED FOR LIVING. "

Renting in Dublin: The Digs Experience

Renting in Dublin is notoriously extortionate and difficult to sort out, and as a student it can be harder because everyone thinks you'll trash the place. Digs are one solution: here's my experience living in digs for my first year in college. 

I moved out in September 2016, a month after my 18th birthday. For a year, I'd been banking on a free apartment in Grand Canal Dock, and that was pulled out from under me just a week before college started. I suddenly had to find a way to live and rent in Dublin on 330 euro a month (my SUSI grant), and oh boy things were stressful. 

The first place I tried (the first to answer the frantic emails I sent out through daft.ie the next day) was a place on Dorset St being advertised by a Mr. Razor "Ray" Razor (I kid you not). I arrived on time and was kept waiting for an hour with a crowd of about ten mature international students before being brought to the house (which was nice enough) and told they didn't like first years, the deposit was three months' rent, and they'd only consider giving me the place if I recruited a friend to share the room with me. Nooope. 

I actually saw that place on Daft this year again, a white cottage on Dorset Street. I know rent is €200 per month, but don't do it. Dodgy as hell. 

Then I had emails with some other people, all room-shares because when you're looking to rent for under €250 per month that's the most you can hope for, including more very creepy ones, but about four days later I got a phone call at 9 pm telling me I'd won the Naughton Scholarship (thanks Naughton) and would get €5000 each year for four years. Since I've been entirely financially independent since I moved out aged 18 and that's what I've been living on, that was pretty helpful. 

I could upgrade to non-shared rooms! 

Anyway, I eventually (this was within a couple of busy busy days in fairness) got viewings at two digs, one in Skerries and one in Saggart. The one in Skerries had a beautiful bedroom, I will say, but I went with the one in Saggart and lived there for a year. Here's the experience I had. 

People

The identity of your landlord isn't as important in other rented accommodation, but it's very important with digs as you'll be living with them. Luckily, my landlady (or digs mom, as I ended up calling her) Viv is lovely and we had great chats when I came back at night. She was really helpful -- one example: I missed the last bus and had to get a taxi from Tallaght but didn't have cash to pay the driver, and she stayed up into the early hours and met me at the door with cash to give him -- and thoughtful. She also gave me the comfiest dressing gown ever, honey-and-lemon tea when I was sick, some lifts to the Luas, the odd cupcake ... Viv is awesome. Thanks Viv. The rest of the family were also nice, so it worked out well. 

Price 

Digs is generally significantly cheaper than other rentals, and it was a good match for me. Mine was also far out (see next point) so it was only €280/month, which is hella cheap. It varies but digs generally is that bit cheaper, and food is often provided too which helps.

Bills are also typically included in the price from what I've seen, which wouldn't be the case with an apartment rental or houseshare.  

Location

The location of my digs was incredibly inconvenient, a 90-minute plus commute each way between it and college, which meant I was late a lot because on going to college I lost the ability to get up at 7 for a 9 am. But digs are dotted around everywhere, this is just the case with particularly cheap ones. 

Duration

Digs are typically for the academic year only and may not apply over Christmas and Easter breaks. This one was a Sunday to Thursday night arrangement (I stayed with friends or sometimes family the other two nights of the week). 

Independence/Adulting

Digs aren't ideal for independence, in the sense that I wasn't allowed have any guests over  (at least not to sleep over) or use the cooker and I didn't do any chores, so I didn't get the full adulting experience. That said, I could still come and go as I pleased and conduct myself as I wished and had privacy in my room so it was a nice transition since I moved out early. I'm enjoying the increased adulting in my new apartment (even really enjoying the chores honestly), but that was nice for the year to let me focus on dealing with college. College is already really intense, so I got to figure out how that worked while moving out and living independently, but still having a safety net -- as long as I could pay my rent, I knew I wouldn't starve. 

Amenities

Cons: I wasn't allowed use the washing machine.

Pros: Breakfast and home-cooked dinner were provided every night. I was rarely up early enough to eat breakfast and I was often too tired to eat much of the dinner (god I was so tired on coming back from college at 10 or 11 every night), which I felt bad about, but I appreciated having it there. 

Overall

I loved my digs despite the annoying location and not being allowed have people over, mostly because my landlady was awesome. You don't always get lucky like that, but if you do I recommend digs for first year in college. If you're still searching, I found mine approx last week a year ago so there's still hope. Good luck!

Review: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale was yet another hyped-up disappointment for me, because it reads not like a novel but a literary exercise. It's certainly an example to be discussed in a college English class, but it's not a story. 

It centres Offred, named for the man she belongs to, in the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian Christian theocracy. Offred is a Handmaid, the main role for fertile women in Gilead; she lives with a man and his infertile Wife where her only purpose is as a vessel for babies that the Wife will then raise. Gilead has a population crisis and so having babies is the most important thing anyone can do; Offred's only worth lies in her "viable ovaries". Women in this society are property and are not allowed to read or write. They're allowed out once a day to shop for groceries with their Handmaid pair and see the bodies hanging from the Wall. 

Btw, the population crisis comes from mass infertility caused by radioactivity ... and chemicals ... and anthrax ... and Iran? Lots of things alluded to, none explained. 


via GIPHY


Writing

The Handmaid's Tale is lyrically written, quite often to a fault, but still impressive. Atwood clearly has a mastery of arranging the English language and making aesthetically-pleasing phrases. Unfortunately, she gets a bit carried away and writes incredibly run-on sentences with ten commas. She also refuses to use quotation marks for some reason -- to make it more dream-like or stream-of-consciousness, I guess? She's also good at analogies and metaphors. 

“We are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.”

Framing

This book is framed as the handmaid's literal diary, recorded into audiotapes and discovered by historians hundreds of years later to be regarded curiously as a potential source document for the historical Republic of Gilead, though this is only made clear in the Epilogue. It's very much a literary exercise in framing, playing with narrator-as-historical-source-material and a somewhat unreliable narrator who sometimes just says random things. Maybe if this had been told to me at the start it would've been okay, but I just felt betrayed by it at the end. 

It just seemed designed to be clever, rather than to be a good story. Yes, it's an interesting format, but the playing with my suspension of disbelief just annoyed me. 

Exposition

The opposite of Brave New World, which was entirely exposition; this is just hints, with next to no payoff or explanation of what's going on. We're not even told how this totalitarian regime came about so suddenly until halfway through the book, and even then it's vague: [Mild Spoilers] a Christian army of some kind shoot dead every member of Congress and the President, suspend the constitution and take away women's rights. Women become property, which Offred (with her old name) discovers when she tries to buy something and the Compubank doesn't recognise her card because all her money has been transferred to her husband since property can't own property. This is dramatic and quite interesting, but it's never really explained properly how this could possibly happen in the space of a few weeks, and why nobody fought back. [/End Spoilers]

Also, right before the takeover there were apparently intense feminist marches all the time and you were supposed to hate men? I dunno. 


via GIPHY

Characters

The characters themselves seemed fairly unrealistic. Moira and Offred's mother seemed reasonably realistic, but we mostly only hear stuff about them from before the theocratic coup. The Wife seems one-dimensional, and the Guardians pretty boring. The Commander at least has his illicit Scrabble games. Luke, her husband before the takeover, was a pretty interesting character, but we only get her wonderings about his fate. 

Offred herself was a pain. A typical quibble with the younger YA characters is their whining, but she was 33 and did it all the time while being the most passive person going. I don't even begrudge her being Luke's Other Woman before the takeover because the rest of her is just so annoying. Like wow. Get a grip. Yes, her life was pretty terrible, but why write a book about someone who just accepts it? I think it was another lesson we were meant to learn, about the forgotten people in revolutions, but again, I don't care to be preached at in novels.

Agency

Always a big issue for me; characters who lack agency. Offred just does what people tell her, always. Even when it's stuff she could get in trouble for, it's not compelling because it's still not her own idea. Sure, people get shot for disobeying, but we don't read books for this. 

Again, this is where YA is better (Offred is 33). Whether it's because teenage optimism or invincibility or something else, a YA heroine would've done something. It might've gone badly and had a sad ending, but there would have been a plot of some kind, and that was just missing here. Honestly, all the adult novels I've read lately have been disappointing; do adults just stop daring to do things? How depressing. As a very proactive person, I identify much more with YA characters. If anyone has recommendations of adult speculative fiction featuring characters with agency, please tell me in the comments or Tweet me @frizzyroselle.

Character Relationships

I did like the shift in Offred's original husband's behaviour when she became his property. She was freaking out about it (understandably) but he was much calmer, saying something like 'you know I always take care of you', which would normally be comforting but is now terrifying because he legally owns her. When they go to sleep, she's thinking 'We are no longer each other's; I am his." That was one part that did get to me. 

Offred and Moira, her rebellious friend who escaped the training School they were brought to to be re-educated into Handmaids, have a pretty interesting relationship, with Moira mad at Offred for passively accepting her fate.  I quite liked Moira -- she was the only one I really saw try to do anything, but her story ends with Offred saying she has no idea what happened to her because she never heard from her again. 

There's also the relationship between the Handmaids and the infertile Wives, who must hold the Handmaids' hands as their husbands have sex with the Handmaid in hopes of creating a child and combating the population crisis. For obvious reasons, they dislike the Handmaids, and that's quite clear.


World-Building

There were lots of cool concepts here: colour-coded costumes depending on your role in society, a re-education school to transform women into Handmaid's. But so many things were mentioned and then never explained or revisited. For example, due to chemicals or radiation or something, some babies are born Unbabies and must be taken away somewhere because they're awful. What does that mean? Do they come out as goat-human hybrids, or something? Confusing. And then the Unwomen, who are apparently shipped off to the Colonies to die cleaning up toxic waste or pick cotton. We know some of them are old women and some are incorrigibles like Moira who get caught and not executed, but what's it like there? If this was a YA book, someone would've gone there and found out what the deal is, but here nobody bothers. 

There's apparently an underground resistance but we never see it do anything, and there's a war on TV but it might be made up, Offred doesn't really know. 

There's no plot really, so the whole book is spend showing bits of the world and still nothing is satisfactorily covered. 

There are lots of interesting concepts here, but they're just not fleshed out enough. 

Monotony

Oh my god how many times can someone possibly describe the curtains?!?! I swear she did it at least seven times, could be way more. I get that that's a theme of the book, supposed to illustrate the emptiness of her life and womb or ...something. But I hate that sort of thing in a book -- if you can't include symbolism without boring the socks off the reader, don't include it. 



via GIPHY


Ending

[Spoilers obviously]

The book ends when Offred's diary stops and we never find out what happens to her. All we get is an epilogue where historians at a symposium on Gileadean history discuss the trustworthiness of her diary as a source. I HATE open endings, HATE them. I was wondering how it was going to wrap up when it was so close to the end and still no plot had started, and the answer is that it didn't. Grrr. [/End Spoilers]


Overall, I think this was a book meant to teach a lesson, and on the way it lost touch with its actual story. If I was looking for a lesson without a story, I would've read a non-fiction book. 2 stars. 

Review: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was a travel book; I bought it in London's Gatwick Airport for the plane home, and read it again ten days later on the plane to Prague and through Prague's underground. 

It's, I suppose, a history book, but on a very unusual scale, what I'd probably call macrohistory. This history rarely mentions individual people or individual towns, but instead traces the story of homo sapiens from the beginning of the universe, spending a brief period on the evolution of humans and then transitioning from biology to history. It covers revolutions including the Cognitive Revolution, where homo sapiens became sapient and set itself apart from the other human species inhabiting the planet, and began to live in hunter-gatherer communities; the Agricultural Revolution, when humans settled down into farming communities, the revolutions of money, language, religion, imperialism and science, and the future of humanity with increased technological advancement. 

Thoroughness

Sapiens covered quite a lot, and I wasn't left feeling like very much was lacking, even though by its nature it had to stay zoomed-out the majority of the time. It seemed to cover the themes of human history rather than the people, so for example it took a brief look at gender inequality in ancient history, using the ancient Babylonian Hammurabi code as an example, which held that rape of a woman was a property crime against her husband or father (a pattern that continued -- the sort of thing where, according to this, the builder's son could be killed if the house he built collapsed and killed the owner of the house's son). Sapiens asks why women were discriminated against to start with and tackles some of the usual explanations, like "men are naturally stronger so they were better at the most important jobs in ancient society", which it counters by saying that physical strength wasn't required for many prestigious positions like the priesthood, but women were still excluded from those. So, like The Meaning of Science and Superintelligence, I got the vibe that the author had put a lot of thought into it. 

Fresh Voice 

The author wrote with what was, at least to me, a novel perspective. One thing he brought up was whether the Agricultural Revolution was actually a good thing, as we tend to think it is because we think the arrow of time always arcs towards progress. He described how living conditions actually in many ways got worse, and about the Malthusian principle in which an increase in food just led to an increase in population so everyone was still living horrible lives in poverty, highly susceptible to diseases and blights. 

He also said some things that were unpleasant surprises, like when he moved on from talking about religion to talk about the different types of humanism, and said liberal humanism implicitly relies on a god to give humans a special spirit that sets us apart from animals, so one of the humanisms left is evolutionary humanism, which I liked the sound of (yay biology) until he said "btw that's what the Nazis used". 

Well-researched

Sapiens had loads of interesting stories, like that of the Numantians being under siege from the Romans for 13 months and, when food ran out, deciding to burn down their city and die free rather than becoming slaves. I learned about the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, later renamed New York, and why countries like the Netherlands depended on their strong banking systems and less tyrannical monarchies for their success at exploration. I learned that the first name written down in history is the signature (we think) of some random accountant recording a transaction/writing a financial statement, not a general or hero.

Favourite Parts

I liked that it had a whole chapter or two on science, though it did seem to mix science up with technology somewhat. It had a chapter on the Marriage of Science and Empire, which was an interesting perspective. It talked about how much European science gained from the colonies e.g. new lands to explore, new flowers to catalog -- but it also talked about how science helped empire, saying that the reason the British conquered the world instead of the very powerful Chinese is that they used science and acknowledged ignorance, leaving blank spaces on maps to be filled in and taking an interest in what was around them. I'm sure it's an over-simplistic explanation but it was pretty interesting. 

It was a good book overall, and I'm impressed that a history book kept my interest because I'm not a history fan. Four stars. 

HBX CORe: My Experience Doing Harvard Business School's Online pre-MBA

This summer, I did an online pre-MBA with Harvard Business School called HBX CORe, mostly sponsored by the Naughton Foundation, who continue to be awesome. 

The course covered Business Analytics (Stats), Financial Accounting and Economics for Managers (Microeconomics with some emphasis on using your knowledge to make decisions). The certificate you get at the end apparently holds the same weight as an executive course certificate from Harvard Business School. 

Business Analytics (Stats)

I really enjoyed this part of the course because I love statistics, and I knew about half of it already, having done the Leaving Cert, three research projects, and a year in a science degree where we covered statistics twice. 

The course covered measures of central tendency and spread like mean, standard deviation, variance and the coefficient of variation, plotting histograms and scatter plots, interpreting things like correlation coefficients, confidence intervals and hypothesis testing. All that was very easy because I already knew most it, but I did learn some new stuff with Module 4: Linear Regression and Module 5: Multivariable regression, about how to do and interpret regression analysis, accounting for net vs gross effects for variables included/excluded from the model, using and understanding the R-squared value to assess the strength of a model and the adjusted R-squared to compare models with different numbers of variables, and dealing with issues like collinearity in your model. 

There was a big emphasis on applying your learning to real-world scenarios throughout, with almost everything done by example, which was quite nice. 

The other two courses I had zero prior experience of so they were more challenging. 

Financial Accounting 

I definitely found accounting tough at first -- it took me a while to wrap my head around the basic assets = liabilities + owner's equity equation so I kept getting that wrong for a bit, and it was definitely hard to remember which accounts get debited or credited (it seemed a bit arbitrary to be honest). We covered journal entries, T-accounts, the trial balance and balance sheet, the income statement, the statement of cash flows, forecasting and valuation, interpreting ratios (e.g. leverage, assets/equity, or the length of the cash flow cycle), accounting principles (like materiality, historical cost, consistency, money measurement, the entity concept), adjusting journal entries (accruals and deferrals), the accrual method of accounting vs the cash method (Harvard uses accrual as do most big places apparently), deferred taxes, production systems, long-lived assets (depreciation and amortization expenses and accumulated) and free cash flows, among other things.

My favourite parts were determining company lifecycles and industries from cash flow statements (e.g. a startup company typically has negative operating cashflows as it's not profitable yet, negative investing activities because it's spending a lot buying equipment and high positive financing activities because it's raising lots of capital, whereas a mature company typically has positive operating cash flows, small positive or negative investing activities because because it's only buying some replacement equipment and can offset the cost by selling off old equipment, and negative financing cash flows because it's paying dividends by this point), accounting principles (materiality, historical cost, entity concept, consistency, money measurement, conservatism) and FIFO vs LIFO (first in first out vs last in first out, basically how you track the cost of goods sold, which I liked because FIFO and LIFO are computer science terms, or at least "queue" and "stack" are). 

Economics for Managers

Economics was also completely new to me, and it's definitely counterintuitive. It was also funny because it's "for Managers" and a lot of people in the program apparently were in managerial positions at their companies but I was just a first year college student, but y'know good to learn it early I guess.

Economics covered willingness to pay and the demand curve, elasticity, measuring demand via surveys, focus groups and conjoint analysis, strategies for increasing demand including advertising, complements vs substitutes, and network effects, willingness to sell, measuring cost, fixed vs variable cost, price wars and relative cost analysis, supply curves, scale economies, markets and market equilibrium, short term and long term, demand and supply shocks, price ceilings and price floors, consumer vs producer surplus, the impact of taxes on certain goods, exchange rates and the China growth miracle, creating markets, types of auctions, and competition and differentiation including monopoly pricing, marginal revenue, various strategies for price discrimination including self-selection, discounts for certain groups (e.g. students and seniors) and two-part tariffs, bundling and strategies for competitive differentiation. 

I learned a lot of economics from this course but I think my main takeaway is wow economics is cut-throat. It shocked me how it was all about making the most profit rather than about what was the right thing to do. For example, I learned how and whether to set discounts for students and seniors to make the most profit overall, when previously I thought it was just because they knew these people couldn't pay as much and wanted them to have the experience (e.g. cinema ticket) too. Maybe I was naive but I guess I just thought more people were naturally kind. So yeah, pretty crazy. 

The Course Platform

The course platform was very slick, and I loved that there were so very many quizzes throughout because learning it just by lectures would've sucked, whereas this kept me engaged and made me understand the material. There were a lot of really cool explanatory graphics, and it was clear that a lot of effort had been put into the platform. As is the Harvard Business School way (from what I've heard), there were a lot of case studies, featuring interviews with the CEOs of the companies, and I particularly liked the ones with the American Red Cross and a pharmaceutical company, though there were lots of others e.g. Amazon. Some of the videos seemed a bit gratuitous so it was annoying that they were unskippable but mostly they were good. According to this Business Insider review of HBX CORe, the platform is designed never to have the user idly watching a video or reading content for more than five minutes, so it's full of interactive activities. 

There was a big emphasis put on interacting with your cohort, but I only did a little bit apart from the occasional required peer marking (so for example I didn't use Peer Help) because, well, I didn't want to do much, so it'd better not impact my grade.

The Final Exam

I sat the final exam on 1st September and am waiting for my results. I haven't a clue how I did on the exam to be honest (in the continuous assessment, I got A1s in Stats and Accounting and an A2 in Economics), so we'll just have to wait and see, but I did learn a lot so I'm glad I did the course. 

Update: I ended up getting 100% in the Statistics exam! Will update with the other two if I can find my scores two years later...

Review: Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA by Maryn McKenna

Superbug in three words: Scary. Thorough. Illuminating. 

Antibiotic resistance has been my thing, my #1 project, for almost two years now, and I've talked to hundreds of students about the importance of saving antibiotics, but I never had much of an insight into the human cost of antibiotic resistance until I read this book. The book is essentially a collection of MRSA victims' stories, and in some parts is very very sad, talking about a twelve-year-old who went on a camping trip, got sick and ended up dying in hospital after several days frantically trying to save his life, MRSA having caused systemic organ failure after destroying his lungs. I read "23,000 people in the US die every year from MRSA" ages ago but Superbug brought home the emotional pain of each one of those deaths. 

Apart from the deaths, there were lots of stories of MRSA destroying lives and losing people their jobs or homes because recurring infections forced so many hospital stays or moving house.

My favourite parts were the most sciencey parts, like the discussion of PVL, a toxin discovered by French scientists that's responsible for destroying lung tissue in MRSA pneumonia, and the many, many references at the end which have given me a lovely reading list of journal articles. I also enjoyed all the detective hunts, where McKenna documented how scientists tracked down the causes of MRSA epidemics, and the creative solutions scientists came up with. For example, MRSA was spreading in a hospital nursery for newborns and scientists dislodged the meticillin-resistant staph aureus with a different, non-virulent, kind of staph. There were some problems with it later on but it worked to stop the MRSA outbreak there.   

McKenna also tracked the spread of MRSA through agriculture in one chapter, showing how it could pass from livestock fed antibiotics to humans and back again, causing outbreaks. 

An interesting chapter was about the process of developing antibiotics and why so many pharmaceutical companies now don't consider it worthwhile because resistance appears so fast. 

A big theme of the book was the convergence of two epidemics, traditional hospital-acquired MRSA (hospitals are a perfect breeding place for resistant organisms because there are so many antibiotics around that it creates a strong selection pressure on bacteria to become resistant) and community-associated MRSA, where people caught the infection outside the hospital. In the convergence, community-associated strains of MRSA started appearing in the hospital and vice versa, so the terms are losing their usefulness. The fear is that community strains of MRSA could pick up the multidrug resistance of hospital MRSA (most community MRSA is resistant to beta-lactam antibiotics and some others, whereas the hospital ones are resistant to a much wider range of antibiotics), and the hospital strains could pick up community MRSA's virulence, its ability to cause devastating diseases. 

The book was very thorough; McKenna is a good writer and did hundreds of interviews with victims, their medical teams and other sources to corroborate stories, read a thousand journal articles and more, so she managed to say a lot about one species of bacteria. She did a good job of making the science accessible, in my opinion, though at points I would have preferred a higher science:story ratio (this is one of the reasons Leon tells me I should just read textbooks). The stories could get a bit repetitive sometimes, but I did like that she seemed to have all angles covered and showed the many ways MRSA could attack. 

It's not a hopeful book, so don't read it if you want to be cheered up. I'm not sure how she didn't get depressed writing it, honestly. But if you're interested in antibiotic resistance, have a look at it. 

Review: August 2017

In August, I worked out a Lablinn-Stemettes collaboration and developed a new Lablinn workshop in London, had a work reception, did a ton of Lablinn stuff including working on our journalism and our upcoming public health competition, studied and stressed about biology, turned 19, had my six-month-iversary with Leon, spent 12 days in Prague, Brno and Vienna, finished my Harvard Business summer course, read three books, wrote nine blog posts, had a photoshoot and went to a Harry Potter convention. 

LABLINNxSTEMETTES IN LONDON: On the 2nd of August, the STEMettes flew me over to them in London to work out a collaboration between Lablinn and the Stemettes to bring Lablinn's topics (antibiotic resistance, vaccination and citizen science) to schoolgirls across the UK through lesson plans for school clubs, and then to attend the Summer Leadership Academy. It was cool, and I'm excited to spread Lablinn's message further, and happy with the new, more hands-on workshop I developed for Lablinn. Read about the trip here.

WORK RECEPTION: I finished my summer job on the 28th of July, but had a reception for it on the 4th of August, right after I got back from London. 

NEW LABLINN INTERIM LOGO: 

Eoin, one of our Graphic Design team members, made an interim logo for Lablinn. 

LABLINN JOURNALISM: 

In August, we had several team members publish blog posts.

• a blog post by Anastasija Zajec about falling in love with science 
• a blog post from Joana Baptista about the value of science education  
• an interview I did with Dr. Helen Hynes about antibiotic resistance
• an interview I did with FameLab medallist Ross Murphy about vaccines, science communication and trust in science. 

At the start of September, we had Ella Willsmore's article on why it's so difficult to develop a vaccine against malaria. 

I'm really proud of all the progress we've made and the hard work of the team. It's super cool. 

LABLINN PUBLIC HEALTH COMPETITION:

We're organising a public health competition for students aged 10-18 in the UK and Ireland for this school year, focusing on antibiotics, vaccination and the environment. This month, we were working on organising prize sponsorship and thus making a pitch. Shoutout to our other Graphic Designer Nicky who made a mockup flyer for the competition that I can't show you right now but will when I can! Lablinn also has some really cool stuff unfolding soon that I'll tell you about later. 

SIX MONTHS WITH LEON: I spent about twelve days this month with Leon, which is a surprisingly low number. We also hit six months of relationshipping, which was weird because it felt like so much longer because we spend most days together. Not complaining, he's amazing.

19TH BIRTHDAY: I aged. It's sad because (a) 18 is a nice number (b) I have to spend like quadruple as much on transport now because I can't use my child leap card anymore and have to switch over to the student leap card aka daylight robbery. Leon did set up a cute treasure hunt with my presents though. Also, our six month-iversary coincided with my birthday. Also, I did not have a happy time because of the biology nightmare (see below).

PRAGUE: I spent five days in Prague with my friend Lukas from the Youth Platform. Read the blog post about that trip here. 

BRNO: I took a short trip to Brno, in the southern Czech province of Moravia, with Lukas, and saw the castle, city centre and this historical tank painted pink. I've written a blog post about that here. 

VIENNA: I then spent a week in Vienna with Lukas and Lili, another Youth Platform friend. Read about that here. 

HARVARD: The HBX online course I did in Statistics, Accounting and Economics this summer finished up on August 17th so I spent some of the early part of the month finishing up the coursework, and had the exam in a test centre in Dublin on 1st September. I ended up with an A1 average in Statistics and Accounting and an A2 in Economics for the coursework. It remains to be seen how I did on the exam. 

PHOTOSHOOT: I had a photoshoot in Drogheda to go into the paper for the launch of TEDxDrogheda 2018. I like that I had a photoshoot on the 28th August this year and on 1st September last year -- it lines up quite nicely. 

READING: I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, which I bought for the plane back from London and finished in Prague, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which Leon got me for my birthday, and SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA by Maryn McKenna, which I finished in September.  

BLOG: I published 9 blog posts in August: 

• July review
• Assessment of progress made on August 2016-July 2017 goals
• Roundup of the 15 popular science books I read in a year
• Review of The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
• LablinnxStemettes in London (linked above)
• Prague, Czech Republic trip (linked above)
• Brno, Czech Republic trip (linked above)
• Vienna, Austria trip (linked above)
• Review of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

LEAKYCON: I went to LeakyCon, the Harry Potter convention, with my friend Cathy because she had a spare ticket. The opening ceremony was on August 31st. It was pretty fun. 

BIOLOGY: I've put this down the bottom because it's long.

I was having a great time studying Biology from the recommended 1st and 2nd year undergrad textbook in preparation for entering second year biology, having checked that even though I didn't do first year biology I still had the prerequisites for second year biology and a biology degree, when I got an email saying that I wasn't allowed to do biology because I hadn't done it for Leaving Cert and entered a multi-week nightmare worrying that I'd have to drop out and start college again but couldn't afford it and trying all sorts of avenues to be allowed study the subject I've discovered I adore. Some progress has been made (eventually got an email saying the final decision is mine) but I've to wait until shortly before term starts for confirmation of my modules. I've gone back to studying for Biology (most recently did Speciation and Mitosis) and I just love it so so much so hopefully peace of mind comes soon. 

The immense stress about it occupied at least 50% of my mind in every waking hour from the morning of 10th August to at least the 24th, and then the some progress brought it down to about 30% of my mind where it is now, so the worry ruined my birthday, six month-iversary, and trips to Prague, Brno and Vienna because I just could not stop thinking about it the entire time, but hopefully if it works out not my entire life.


But it is nice to be capable of studying it again -- just hopefully can get confirmation I'm allowed to do it and go back to fully enjoying it. Haven't been able to stop gushing about what I'm learning from the textbook to people I meet -- it's just so cool.
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Honestly, I had no idea so much happened this month until I wrote this blog post. Wow. That's quite a lot.