Factlets

On the occasion of the visit to St. Mary the Virgin at Brading, noticed at reference 1, it occurred to me that it was odd that we talked so much of St. Mary the Virgin, as my memory from RI (as religious instruction was then known) at school was that Jesus had some half brothers, that is to say brothers fathered on Mary in the ordinary way by Joseph, rather than by the Divinity. So while Mary may well have been a virgin at the time of the birth our Lord, she did not stay that way.

I then went on to think about the Western classical piano tradition; spawned in Europe, with its beginnings in Germany and Austria, and then fanning out to the rest of Europe and onto to rest of northern Asia, and now going from strength to strength in China. With Europeans moving to the Americas taking that tradition there too. But leaving out southern Asia and Africa - although we do have the popular piano tradition of this last, via the enforced emigrations from Africa to the Americas. What would Reich and his work on the genome have to say about all this? See references 2 and 3.

Then this morning, BH read in the anthology noticed at reference 4 about a death from yellow fever in Atlanta, Georgia. Which prompted an excursion which started in Larousse and progressed through yellow fever, quartan fever (a fever with a four day cycle), fever in general, malaria (from the Latin for bad air), paludisme (from the Latin for marsh) and plasmodium. So yellow fever is a mainly tropical complaint caused by a virus, while malaria is a mainly tropical complaint caused by a small animal, a plasmodium, and known to the French as paludisme. I suspect that at one time there was much confusion between the two, given the considerable overlap of both location and symptom.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/piano-17.html.

Reference 2: Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past - David Reich – 2018.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/03/counting-ancestors.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/trolley-hunt-in-ryde.html.