Feh, WSU

What with AC being a UW grad, and us being in the Seattle area, of course we went to be UW supporters, rather than WSU.

That said, Linnea did apply there. They have an Everett Campus (linked to Everett Community College) and we thought it would be a good balance: WSU standards, which are excellent, and local to us, which WSU is very much not.

So she applied.

And Thursday got an email saying that, no the Everett Campus was "just for degree completion" it's not a real "branch campus" or whatever. Um. That is mentioned absolutely effing NO WHERE on the WSU Everett website, and the links there just take to Freshmen application links etc. Their Wikipedia page doesn't mention it. The Common App let her apply to the Everett Campus.

And now, having paid the $70 application fee, we find out that she needs at least 60 college credits to apply there. But they're kindly letting her transfer her application to another campus. All of which are far from home.

I'm irked. We can afford for the $70 loss, it's not the money. It's that some kids can't, and with the currently situation of schools in the Seattle area (UW Seattle is very hard to get into, UW Bothell not much easier, and every other school is private), the idea of a branch campus to a good state university was appealing to us, and I'm sure we're not the only ones.

Book review: Breath from Salt

Breath from Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine Forever by Bijal P. Trivedi.

I'm not going to do much of a review on this book, but I want to say this: READ THIS BOOK.

I'm betting it will end up in my top three books of 2021. Trivedi weaves the "politics", the patients, and the science into a story that details the administrivia, the human side, and the scientific side of the story of a 100%-fatal-at-a-young-age to 95%-treatable disease, and showing, too, how many of these people are fall into more than one of these categories, the scientist who is sick, the fundraiser who lost a child, the patient whose advocacy pushed policy. In many ways it reminds me of _The Emperor of All Maladies_ by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and that's a very good thing.

Seriously. Worth a read.

I was reading an excellent fantasy book when I decided to start this one just to see if it was going to be any good. I'll now pick up the fantasy. I didn't look at it while I was reading this one.