I think it’s unfortunate that we ended up with a calendar that is not perfectly in sync with seasons.

Some calendars like this he Persian/Kurdish ones start with first day of spring. Beginning of autumn is "mid-year", which intuitively makes a lot of sense.

If you do have a deep interest in this it would probably help to learn immunology on a more detailed level. My suspicion is that articles like the one you linked feel unsatisfactory because they say things like this

> But if our immunity is “restructured” in some way every few months, we would again expect all viral infections to peak at the same time

It is clear the author doesn't have a good understanding of basic immunology.

Much of the mystique falls away when you understand concepts such as adaptive immunity (how it develops and is retained), antigenic drift, environmental conditions (on the host) that improve transmission, etc.

While I haven't dived deep into this topic according to this article viral seasonality tracks with the migration of wild birds: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27324078/

Nothing is surprising after it has been discovered.

This is one of the reasons loss of biodiversity and mass extinction are so horrifically depressing, to me. All that marvelous complexity, all the blueprint information for it, all lost forever. Take the axolotl - it does not, seemingly, ever reach senescense, meaning they don't die of old age. Somewhere locked up in that blueprint information could be the key to new therapies or techniques to incorporate this into ourselves. But they are in danger of extinction, existing in a small patch of Mexico City's canals as they do. We lose them, we lose the chance to learn from them. How many undiscovered medicines, therapies, techniques lost forever? We don't even begin to imagine accounting for this particular externality

I once read a quote that I can't find anymore (and neither do I know who said/wrote it), that went something like: "Imagine advanced space-faring aliens land in your backyard and invite you to take a tour in their spaceship. You quickly realize that their technology is millions of years more advanced than our own. That is what studying biology feels like."

I'm no biologist but I liked that quote :)

> Earth and its biosphere is a marvel of technology.

Our world is exceedingly rare and beautiful.

We lucked into an incredible solar system configuration, and evolution has done some seriously heavy lifting.

The molecular biology of DNA alone -- its biochemistry and enzymatic machinery -- is enough to be its own field.

> Shame we don't seem to appreciate it enough.

The domain experts do. This complexity is very difficult to teach to laypeople and those not interested in science communication. It's so easy to take it all for granted. You have to develop an understanding first in order to appreciate the marvel of biology.

Communication is getting easier, though. I'm sure we'll get there.

The bacteria in dirt don't do what I want, though. that's the great value of man-made machines, they (typically) do what I want (except cars)

Videos of lacrymaria single cell organisms (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lacrymaria+olor&t=ffab&iar=images&...) show how absurdly sophisticated they are, with complex deformation of their membrane, which itself is remarkable.

Most of the HN crowd probably thinks biophilia is backwardsness, unless harnessed in service of technology. Utterly neurotic.

It's not technology. Technology is art, craft, human creation. Natural phenomena can be hard for us humans to understand.

We’re getting there

The transistor based direction may be folly, but it will get close. All within 100 years passed vacuum tubes.

Technology? Living cells don't look like the transistor-based technology we have, and we don't understand how cells work to make such broad assumptions. It seems to me that if transistor-based lifeforms exist, they look nothing like the organic lifeforms on our planet.

> And to make it so cheaply and quickly? Pure science fiction.

Don't scientists out there very explicitly avoid building self-replicating systems at any significant scale to avoid the associated risks?

I think they already can create artificial/synthetic lifeforms in a lab - it's just that there are not a lot of use cases that make building a factory worth it, at least so far.

[Upd: I stand corrected - I thought they can, but turns out they can't. Thank y'all.]