☛ Miss Marple makes a comeback

The Guardian reports:

The collection, titled Marple, marks the first time anyone other than [Agatha] Christie has written “official” (as recognised by the Christie estate) Miss Marple stories. The 12 women who contributed to the collection include award-winning crime writers Val McDermid and Dreda Say Mitchell, historical novelist Kate Mosse, classicist and writer Natalie Haynes and New York Times bestselling author Lucy Foley.

(If the Guardian link above doesn’t work for any reason, here is an alternative link from Smithsonian Magazine quoting The Guardian.)

This is great! Always room for more Marple mysteries for avid Christie readers such as me!

There have already been several new “official” Poirot novels, written by Sophie Hannah, also sanctioned by the Christie estate, that have been published in the last few years. I have read a couple of them, and they are pretty good reads! The author’s voice seems just that bit different — of course, that is to be expected, and indeed hoped for — and that’s a little jarring after years of reading Christie, but the plots and the characters are quite well-thought-written-fleshed-out. They won’t feel out of place amongst Christie’s Poirot mysteries.

If these new Marple stories are anywhere as good, then they will be worth looking out for.


News Juxtaposition: Climate Change

Here are some news snippets from the last few weeks.

As China’s most important river, the Yangtze provides water to more than 400 million Chinese people. This summer, with rainfall in the Yangtze basin around 45% lower than normal, it reached record-low water levels with entire sections and dozens of tributaries drying up. The loss of water flow to China’s extensive hydropower system has created problems in Sichuan, which receives more than 80% of its energy from hydropower.

Nearly a half million people crowded into camps after losing their homes in widespread flooding and the climate minister warned Monday that Pakistan is on the “front line” of the world’s climate crisis after unprecedented monsoon rains wracked the country since mid-June, killing more than 1,130 people.

The drama is just the latest problem as the state experiences its biggest insurance crisis since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. […] In the last two years, more than 400,000 Floridians have had their policies dropped or nonrenewed. Fourteen companies have stopped writing new policies in Florida. Five have gone belly-up in 2022 alone. The record, set after Hurricane Andrew’s devastation, is eight in one year.

The latest casualty was Coral Gables-based Weston Property & Casualty, which leaves 22,000 policyholders — about 9,400 in South Florida — scrambling to find new insurance companies.

Costs also have skyrocketed. In 2019, when DeSantis was sworn in, Floridians paid an average premium of $1,988. This year, it’s now $4,231, triple the national average, according to an Insurance Information Institute analysis.

[T]he study published in the journal Nature Climate Change used satellite measurements of ice losses from Greenland and the shape of the ice cap from 2000-19. This data enabled the scientists to calculate how far global heating to date has pushed the ice sheet from an equilibrium where snowfall matches the ice lost. This allowed the calculation of how much more ice must be lost in order to regain stability.

The research shows the global heating to date will cause an absolute minimum sea-level rise of 27cm (10.6in) from Greenland alone as 110tn tonnes of ice melt. With continued carbon emissions, the melting of other ice caps and thermal expansion of the ocean, a multi-metre sea-level rise appears likely.

“It is a very conservative rock-bottom minimum,” said Prof Jason Box from the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (Geus), who led the research. “Realistically, we will see this figure more than double within this century.”

Climate change is happening, our civilization as it currently stands will be upended because of it, and we as a global society have done (next to) nothing to mitigate it. The best time to take measures to decelerate climate change was decades ago; the next best time is right now. Either we grit our teeth and hold our breath through a couple of decades of accelerated, painful, transition to sustainable energy use, or… we will be forced to hold our breath under water as our coastal life submerges.

By the way, 40% of the world’s population lives within 100km (60mi) the coast.


Music: lyrics for Nao, by Ritam Sen, Prasen, and Hoodkhola Kobitara

This is such a beautiful song; if you haven’t heard it, here’s a version on Youtube! (There are a couple other versions, such as this one, also great.)

Hat tip to Poorna for making me listen to this on one of our uncountable night drives; it has since been on repeat play for me.

Song: Nao
Lyrics: Ritam Sen
Music: Prasen
Group: Hoodkhola Kobitara

ekhon nistobdho mohonaye
eshe dariyeche dosh-jon shundor
bati ghorer naw-sho janalaye
koto pakhi khujche mrityur uttor!

ekhon nistobdho mohonaye
eshe dariyeche dosh-jon shundor
bati ghorer naw-sho janalaye
koto pakhi khujche mrityur uttor!

jeno churi jawa ek phali bhor aaj
mridu chhuye achhe himel gallery
jeno churi jawa ek phali bhor aaj
mridu chhuye achhe himel gallery

ei, ei ei ei
ei bhor nao, bondor nao
nao ey-nistobdho mohonao
nao ey-nistobdho mohonao

mm-hm ei, ei ei ei
ei bhor nao, bondor nao
nao ey-nistobdho mohonao
nao ey-nistobdho mohonao

shudhu tumi, ar tumi, ar tumi
koto mrito potrikaye kartuj-e
golaper sugondhi guhaye
aw-prem er ondor e chokh buje

shudhu tumi, ar tumi, ar tumi
koto mrito potrikaye kartuj-e
golaper sugondhi guhaye
aw-prem er ondor e chokh buje

aaj chand-er ghor makhto bichana
tomar podo-dhhoni lukoye bali te
aaj chand-er ghor makhto bichana
tomar podo-dhhoni lukoye bali te

ei, ei ei ei
ei duur nao, roddur nao
nao ey-nistobdho mohonao
nao ey-nistobdho mohonao

mm-hm ei, ei ei ei
ei bhor nao, bondor nao
nao ey-nistobdho mohonao
nao ey-nistobdho mohonao

nao ey-nistobdho mohonao
nao ey-nistobdho mohonao


☛ Ancient DNA traces origin of Black Death

A Silk Road stopover might have been the epicentre of one of humanity’s most destructive pandemics.

People who died in a fourteenth-century outbreak in what is now Kyrgyzstan were killed by strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis that gave rise to the pathogens responsible several years later for the Black Death, shows a study of ancient genomes.

“It is like finding the place where all the strains come together, like with coronavirus where we have Alpha, Delta, Omicron all coming from this strain in Wuhan,” says Johannes Krause, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who co-led the study, published on 15 June in Nature.

Fascinating read on new research on the origins of Black Death. As you can imagine, it’s not an easy task to find genomic data from the plague bacteria, several centuries after the pandemic. Then, like now, how the pandemic spread mattered quite a lot of how and where a lot of humans came together and then dispersed, carrying the deadly disease with them.


☛ Of Cricket, and How Fast Bowling is About More Than Speed

It has been too long on this website with not a mention of cricket. To remedy that, here is essential reading by Cameron Ponsonby at ESPNCricinfo on how fast bowling speeds are only a portion of the feel of a fast bowler’s pace:

It is very easy to think of facing fast bowling as primarily a reactive skill. In fact, read any article on quick bowling and it will invariably say you only have 0.4 seconds to react to a 90mph delivery.

But what does that mean? No one can compute information in 0.4 seconds. It’s beyond our realm of thinking in the same way that looking out of an aeroplane window doesn’t give you vertigo because you’re simply too high up for your brain to process it.

However, the reason it’s possible is because, whilst you may only have 0.4 seconds to react, you have a lot longer than that to plan. And the best in the world plan exceptionally well.

When the ball arrives to you, as the batter, literally faster than you can react to the ball, how fast a ball feels has way more to do with diversity between bowlers than the raw pace on the ball.

Excellent and insightful read.

Another interesting piece by Ponsonby talks about data analytics in cricket. As Ponsonby mentions in his fast bowling article, cricket only dabbles in data analytics when compared to, say, baseball, where the analytics have been taken to another level altogether.

I think I’m okay with the balance that cricket has with its data analytics: I would rather have the analytics being fascinating reads for the fan, and an influence on the coaches/players, without their becoming all that anyone cares or talks about. I sometimes feel like the innate skill and art of sport gets lost in baseball. Makes for great reading though!