---

title: "Things I learned this week #1"
author: Thomas Wilson
date: 2020-08-14
slug: 2020-08-14-things-i-learned-1
draft: false
tags:
  - things-i-learned
---

- **This tidbit about a literary villa**: Over three days in June of 1816 at a villa in Geneva, Mary Shelley started writing _Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus_ and John William Polidori started _The Vampyre_ (which preceded the modern romantic image of vampires). The latter inspired Lord Byron (who was also at the villa, by the way) to write _A Fragment_. Imagine being 2am whiskey drunk at that, wow.
- **This way to think about css/styling**: The decisions we make about the naming, structure, and languages/frameworks for modern styling tools just _move complexity_, they don’t solve it. If you use CSS, it doesn’t matter too much how do you name it (BEM or utility classes?) or how do you build it (vanilla CSS, post-CSS, SASS?). Likewise, CSS-in-JS vs inline styles won’t affect things. _Be consistent_ and _know where the complexity in your codebase is_ ([source](https://shoptalkshow.com/425/))
- **This thing about viruses during a pandemic**: It makes evolutionary sense for a virus to be less virulent (to cause less disease). Those viruses which can infect more people will, by definition, be more evolutionary successful. This is one reason (alongside massive economic, medical, and societal changes) that the global death toll from HIV is lower now than it was in the pandemic of the late 1980s. ([source](https://www.nhs.uk/news/medical-practice/hiv-evolving-into-less-deadly-form/))
- **This puur-fectly fitting French word**: The\** French word for the verb ‘to purr’ is *ronronner\* - which sounds simply excellent with a French guttural accent.
