One-hour lecture.

Direct link to the lecture: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=LVFvHcBynLE

Onesimus was an African man who was instrumental in the mitigation of smallpox in Boston by teaching the variolation method of inoculation, which prevented smallpox and laid the foundation for the development of vaccines.

After a smallpox outbreak began in Boston in 1721, Mather proliferated Onesimus's knowledge to advocate for inoculation in the population. This practice eventually spread to other colonies.

Historian Ted Widmer of CUNY's Macaulay Honors College noted that "Onesimus reversed many of [the colonists'] traditional racial assumptions... [h]e had a lot more knowledge medically than most of the Europeans in Boston at that time."

More broadly, I was taught in Murder Machines (schools) that Edward Jenner developed vaccines, but I'm recently learning that it was common knowledge in the Ottoman Empire and Africa before Jenner.

Variolation was also practiced throughout the latter half of the 17th century by physicians in Turkey, Persia, and Africa. In 1714 and 1716, two reports of the Ottoman Empire Turkish method of inoculation were made to the Royal Society in England, by Emmanuel Timoni, a doctor affiliated with the British Embassy in Constantinople, and Giacomo Pylarini. Source material tells us on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; "When Lady Mary was in the Ottoman Empire, she discovered the local practice of inoculation against smallpox called variolation."

I'm a country boy all my life. I can't cycle or take the metro anywhere. Walkable cities are great but they're a hundred miles away.

Everyone goes on about how they hate cars, but what else are you supposed to do?

https://electrek.co/2023/12/04/livaq-equad-unveiled-as-most-capable-electric-atv-ever/ – this article talks about something with a 108km/h and a range of 273 km. It's mad expensive unfortunately, but that is normally to do with adoption rates and scale.

(It says "claims a range of 170 miles (273 km) from its 15.4 kWh battery pack", which implies consumption of about 55 watt-hours per km travelled, though that'd be variable depending on speed and conditions)

If I had one of these, I could get to town, get to a train station, without a car. I could carry one child, which is worse than a car, but the energy consumption is a 3-4× lower than a car. If train stations had swappable batteries, that would be ideal, but I don't see that coming any time soon.