Bats in Portuguese Libraries (2018)

Coimbra in general is worth a visit. :-) And so is the surrounding countryside and towns.

My oldest kid pointed out that the university literally has an ivory tower on a hill :-)

Perhaps as a library worker, you are more prone to notice articles on HN that have anything to do with libraries.

I suspect it has to do with the vast amount of worlds which exist inside the 1000s and 1000s of books. Take that fascination and mix it with our (many who read hn) fascination on how to store, quickly receive, and organize knowledge in better ways–everything from speed to aesthetics.

The people who do work a lot with massive amounts of data may mask what we do in a dry and sterile language, but I’ve noticed that most people who do this have a deeper secret love of knowledge and libraries and wisdom.

HNers very much like knowledge, and books contain large amounts of it.

they were organazing lots and lots of "data" long before computers even existed

For me librarians have been the keepers of our heritage and knowledge since ... they started doing it. We have no idea about anything before librarians (or the equivalent predecessor concept) started doing what they do.

My greatest aspiration is to contribute to our survival, culture and all.

So in the same way as anyone who makes a gritty youtube video can claim to be 'anonymous' I can claim to be a 'librarian', the least secret secret order.

Public libraries are amazing. The state gathers, keeps and maintains all the written knowledge it is able to and then distributes it (mostly) free of charge to the population.

>What do you think that's about?

I think as a group of mostly full time technologists, we tend to take solace in the quaint comforts of the old analog world, and appreciate it a bit more than most. After spending 12 hours staring at a screen and lost in a completely abstracted world, I (and I suspect other developers) enjoy things like reading paper books, baking, fishing, anything that exists solely in tangible reality.

It makes a pleasing change from our usual HN party animal's fascination with cocaine, MMA and casual sex, is why.

In tech, so much of what we do is ephemeral. We spend all day using frameworks that will be forgotten in a decade to write code that will be deleted in a year used by users who will have moved on to other things before then.

We crave permanence and libraries embody that.

From my understanding the bats only enter the library at night, hunt and leave.

Rabies is very rare in Europe nowadays.

You wouldn’t have to worry about rabies too much in a stable population like that. If they’re living their lives inside the library, the only risk would be if a human with rabies entered the library and was bitten by a bat; a very low probability event.

Rabies is officially erradicated in Portugal since the 1960's. I've searched for official data at: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data?s=rabies

Most cases (we're talking 0-3 in a given year) in Europe seem to be imported from tourists or immigrants returning after being bit by a wild animal. This was the case in 2011 in Portugal after a dog bite in Guinea-Bissau (article in portuguese): https://www.publico.pt/2012/03/31/jornal/portugal-registou-c...

So looking at the data, it seems the little bats have been harmless for at least 60 years.