A Bug's Life

1. Persistent attenuation of lymphocyte subsets after mass SARS-CoV-2 infection

(tags:immune_system pandemic )

2. Huge fire shuts Scotland's busiest train station indefinitely

(tags:Glasgow Scotland fire trains )

I was chatting to a couple of friends last week, and realised that I really fancied having one of those "bar chart race" videos for my links, showing what had been the most popular links over the last 21 years that I've been saving links (to Delicious, and then Pinboard).

So I downloaded the JSON blob of my whole link history, used some PowerShell to slice and dice it into a CSV, and uploaded it to a site that converts a bunch of data with dates into a bar chart race. And voila:

Unsurprising to see "Europe" break the top 20 in 2017. Followed a year later by "OhForFucksSake".

Both files available here, for the very curious.

I started to recognise an intrinsic feeling of accentuation when it came to Essex, between sparseness and density, bucolic abandonment and oncoming modernity, realism and poetry, country and city, rich and poor – buzzing dichotomies that meant that, as hard as I tried to pin Essex’s story down, it always somehow slipped away. [loc. 1151]

Burrows was born in Essex^*, and moved back there from London when he and his wife started a family. He has real affection for the county, but a solid grasp of its socioeconomics, and of the TOWIE-fuelled perception of Essex as 'a land of crass consumerism, populated by perma-tanned chancers and loose women with more front than Clacton-on-Sea'.