[COMPLETE] The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks by Joseph Banks - annise

[gailtv]

Hi David --

I am very sorry to hear that you have lost members of your close community to the virus. Articles in Science on Covid-19 are publicly available -- there is some very sobering reading. Shelter in place/Lockdown is costly for jobs and businesses, but the best of social distancing methods if sustainable for long enough. The NZ very strict lockdown has cut new case numbers but the tail to zero will be long. My Chicago granddaughter's school is closed for the rest of this school year -- as I guess are all city of Chicago schools, or Illinois?

Fresh peas -- yum -- sugar snaps? Alas our home-grown vegetable season is coming to a close but we had a very productive veggie patch this summer. We have had to stay at home for the best of the autumn weather for getting into the mountains... ah well. Getting my hill climbing with full pack back will be painful. I am guessing that you had some interesting trips planned that are now on hold or reconsidered?

Section 17 is ready.

https://librivox.org/uploads/annise/endeavourjournal_17_banks_128kb.mp3
22 min .6 sec.; 88.7 dB

Thanks for listening and keep safe.

Cheers

Gail

[craigdav1]

17 PL OK.

jaws..vermin….

Our garden plot (in a community garden) is about a half mile from our home, so each day I haul 12 pounds of water to the garden. The city usually doesn't turn on the water for gardens until sometime in May. Our pea plants are flowering so the effort seems to have paid off. The lettuce and beets are also doing well. We just canceled a hiking trip in Scotland. Hopefully we will be able to do it next spring. Face masks, social distancing and another month of "stay at home" are the norm here. We do brisk 4-5 mile walks each day but Chicago is rather flat so it's not very challenging (even carrying the water part of the way).

[gailtv]

Hi Again --

Section 18 is ready.

https://librivox.org/uploads/annise/endeavourjournal_18_banks_128kb.mp3
31 min 33.3 sec, 90.7 dB.

It's nice that Chicago has community gardens -- I didn't realise that they did. Too bad about the walking trip to Scotland. Hopefully the world will have a new normal by a year from now -- maybe one that pays attention to epidemiologists. But that would be listening to scientists -- perhaps too much to ask. If your peas are flowering now you will have a feed before June, depending of course on how many warm days you get.

Take care

Gail

[craigdav1]

18 PL OK.

Finally some warm weather. The plants are happy.

[gailtv]

Hi -

I have just uploaded Section 19, which is the first of three Sections that are needed to cover his account of the customs and manners of the Tahitians.

https://librivox.org/uploads/annise/endeavourjournal_19_banks_128kb.mp3
26 min 57.4 sec, 89.5 dB

Please let me know if I have anything to fix. Thanks for listening.

Cheers

Gail

Have you had peas yet?

[craigdav1]

19 PL OK.

Have you had peas yet?

Just added to salads. If will be another week before the first crop is harvested. Though it has been a wet spring (actually, record breaking) the daily temperatures have been 10 degrees below average.

[gailtv]

Hi David and Anne --

I fancy some diversion from Banks, who I have to admit I am finding heavy going because of the lack of/non-standard spelling, punctuation and grammar in his Journal.

I have just been listening to a biography of the Empress Dowager Cixi of China (late 19th, early 20th century) written by Jung Chang (she also wrote Wild Swans) -- which is very good -- and in so doing have discovered that there is a public domain book written about the court of the Empress Dowager Cixi by Katharine Carl, the painter who was admitted to paint portraits of the Empress Dowager. Cixi was literally the power behind the throne for almost half a century, and is infamous for her role in allowing the Boxer Revolution in response to foreign invasion, which got well and truly out of hand.

I am going to put a project up in the Launch Pad for it -- are both of you happy to help me out in your usual roles as DPL and MC?

Anne and David, I hope that you and yours are all well. NZ has just one known active covid case left after our severe but effective lockdown and I understand that Oz is doing well too. I am sorry, David, that the US is in so much turmoil. Tragedy upon tragedies, Chaos upon chaos.

Cheers

Gail

[annise]

Sounds good to me. Yes we are all fine and coping . The USA seems to have been slow to realise - at the time when we were talking about China as the source our state's first cases were people who had come back from the USA.
Next stop LV wise China

Anne

[craigdav1]

The new project sounds like a nice learning experience. Something certainly I know little about. Sign me up. And yes, the US was slow to respond to the pandemic though as it turns out the virus came from China mostly via Europe which is why the east coast was so badly hit. Travel restrictions from Europe would have not been the first thing anybody would have done. We were all worried about entry of the virus via the west coast. It had already circled the globe though.

[gailtv]

Hi Anne and David --

Thanks both of you for agreeing to help.

The Project on Katharine Carl's time in the court of the Empress Dowager of China is now put into the system. When the project opens up I will indicate that we have a DPL and David can leave his trail of .... freshly picked peas?

By the time that the virus came to NZ it came from all over the world, I think -- but probably the UK and Europe more than the US. I think that Australia also got hit pretty hard by a cruise ship or two. In theory viral molecular taxonomists should be able to model the spread by following the patterns of the sequence variants in the viral genome -- but I still haven't seen any authoritative papers that do that even though there is a good international collection of strain sequences -- it must be tricky. Maybe I haven't searched in the right places or used the right key words.

Cheers

Gail

[annise]

The New Scientist has had many articles about the virus which I find very interesting - and I trust them. None of them pretend to know everything.
On a lighter note - my 6 year old grandaughter discover my university text books - I kept a few for reference in a bottom shelf, and has been lugging around Principles of Immunology and "doing research" with it. It seems to be mainly numbers she writes down and I think its the size of the book that attracts not the subject matter.

Anne

[gailtv]

Hi -

Section 20 has been completed.

https://librivox.org/uploads/annise/endeavourjournal_20_banks_128kb.mp3
24:53.1, 88.1 dB

Anne - I love it that you have a wee granddaughter who is "researching" immunology -- but it sounds like she may be a mathematician or modeller if she is copying numbers. I found the publication date of that book -- maybe you and I were studying biology at about the same time but in different universes or at least hemispheres.

Thanks for putting the Forum for the Empress Dowager together for us.

Nature is my go to for Covid19 science -- here is an interesting recent link. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01573-5 I think that they are putting all their Coronavirus stuff into the public domain.

Cheers

Gail

[craigdav1]

20 PL OK!

Thanks for the link. It seems we have three biologists here. I find the Nature and Science podcasts very helpful.

[gailtv]

Hi David --

Section 21 is uploaded now, ready for DPL action.

https://librivox.org/uploads/annise/endeavourjournal_21_banks_128kb.mp3
26:47.0, 89.1 dB

Many thanks.

Gail

[craigdav1]

21 PL OK!