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David Attenborough's new series, Life in Cold Blood, starts soon on BBC. It's the last of the Life on Earth series and is about reptiles and amphibians, the only major animal groups not yet covered. Nature has a feature on the new series and its host:

Attenborough is very much as you would expect from his on-screen appearances—knowledgeable, eloquent, a consummate storyteller and extremely excited about wildlife. He is as happy enthusing about a turtle mating frenzy as he is about the grisly habits of the caecilian, a burrowing worm-like amphibian whose young feed by tearing strips of fatty skin from their mothers. And what about the most interesting thing he’s eaten himself? “Big moth caterpillars in New Guinea. You put them on a fire and they come out like Twiglets.”

His latest subjects, including snakes, lizards and frogs, might be less of a draw for some people than ‘meerkats and monkeys’, but he seems to relish the challenge. “In a way, it’s a great advantage because it means that a lot of their stories haven’t been told. It’s a measure of what, in my view, public service broadcasting should do. It shouldn’t just be about making programmes about popular animals.”

I read the last sentence of the article with particular joy.

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Two major developments last week:

I got lasik surgery on Tuesday, allowing me to see reasonably well for the first time in 13 years or so. By "reasonably well" I mean well enough to fly a plane. As I understand it, visual acuity is the only relevant qualification for flying a plane, so see you in the skies soon.

On Friday I reached the end of my apartment search and signed a contract for a one year lease in a cool place about 200m from my office. The walk from my bed to my desk is under 1000 paces, and that's if I take the stairs. I moved in on Saturday.

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