revere | March 16, 2008Jokes that go, "What do you get when cross a such and such with a such and such" are legion. Jehovah's Witnesses seem to come in for more than their share of these jokes ("What do you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah's Witness? Someone who knocks on your door for no particular reason."), although it's hard to say what any particular religion's fair share should be. Anyway, here's another one. What do you get when you cross a goombah with a Jehovah's Witness? (No outraged comments, please; I'm married to a southern Italian).
This:
revere | March 15, 2008You may not know Joe Weizenbaum's name, but many people are familiar with the computer program he wrote more than 40 years ago, Eliza. Eliza mimics a Rogerian psychotherapist, picking up key words you type in and spitting them back in the form of questions:
You: "I feel anxious today." Eliza: "That's interesting. What are you anxious about?" Etc.
In some ways it was very simple minded and Joe himself considered it a parody of psychotherapy. But in other ways it struck a deep chord. It was one of the first computer programs to simulate a human conversation and to give the impression of a…
revere | March 14, 2008A lot of kids have personal "culture heroes" when they are growing up. I suppose athletes and celebrities predominate, maybe a political personage here and there. But I suspect lots of kids also have scientists or artists as personal heroes. My own culture hero when I was a youngster (Elementary School) was Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 - April 18, 1955). I once sent him a birthday card and I had a scrapbook of clippings about him.
He still is one of my heroes. And today is his birthday. I'll celebrate it with this nice little animation that explains the key concept in the Special Theory…
revere | March 14, 2008There are a lot of rats in this world and they have meat on them. I always wondered why they weren't more commonly used as a human food source. Bird flu has taken care of that. Enjoy:
revere | March 13, 2008Influenza is spread person to person but there are viruses that depend upon another intermediate host to travel from host to host. Many of these viral diseases are found in tropical climes, although they used to be common in temperate regions. The US had quite a lot of malaria and yellow fever in the 18th and 19th centuries. These are both mosquito-borne diseases. They were eliminated by eliminating the mosquito species that carried them. Lately the US has had a resurgence of encephalitis viruses, especially West Nile and Eastern Equine Encephalitis. Recently a new mosquito-borne viral…
revere | March 13, 2008Few of us had heard of palm civets before SARS. Then these small nocturnal animals came under suspicion as the source of the human SARS virus. Civet cats were a wild animal delicacy in the area where SARS broke out and it was discovered that they were infected with the same virus as humans. Did humans give it to the civet or the other way around? Or is their some third source? Bats have been discussed for SARS.
Now Vietnam is reporting, for the second time, the deaths of civets from H5N1:
Four Owston's palm civets, a catlike carnivorous species that the International Union for the…
revere | March 12, 2008Most of the surface of the earth is covered with water. Some of it is pretty deep (at least by human standards). Above us is the atmosphere. It goes up. Way, way up. So if we were to make a sphere with just the earth's water and another one with the atmosphere at standard temperature and pressure (STP), how big would be spheres be? The answer seems to have surprised some people (see the comments at this link). But it shouldn't have. Volume goes up with the cube of the radius of a sphere while the surface increases by the square of the radius. This means that for larger spheres, the surface to…
revere | March 11, 2008I'm an advocate of using computer models to help us think about what might or could happen during various pandemic flu scenarios, but it is a technique with drawbacks. For one, it can suggest that some things might be possible that are either very difficult to do or aren't feasible. This happened in 2005 when some models were published in Science and Nature that suggested a pandemic could be nipped in the bud before it started. Most people thought that what was required was unrealistic but it put WHO in a bind. They had to marshal their resources to show they were willing to try or go down…
revere | March 11, 2008As part of our jobs many of us read literature that few others see. For example, every two months I get a journal called Industrial Health, published (in English) by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health of Japan. It's been around for a long time (it is now in Volume 46) and it's pretty good. It frequently has papers that are interesting and the December 2007 issue (which just arrived in my mailbox) is an example. One article is entitled, "Biomechanical and physiological analyses of a luggage-pulling task," by Jung, Haight and Hallbeck. It's about those two-wheeled…
revere | March 11, 2008Here's what a flu pandemic might look like:
"In four weeks, we went from a ho-hum flu season to ridiculous overcrowding," said Dr. Maurice Ramirez, an emergency physician who works in several institutions in north Florida. "We have had so many people that we have them, not in beds in the hallway, but in chairs with a number taped to the wall over their heads."
"We've seen a tremendous amount of flu--from an anecdotal standpoint, a much busier season than in recent years," agreed Dr. Peter A. Lipson, a private practice internist in southern Michigan who also sees patients at a walk-in clinic.…
revere | March 10, 2008Suppose you had a high priced lawyer who sent a notice to someone on your behalf certifying, upon pain and penalty of perjury, that the information in her notice was accurate but that it turned out it was nothing of the kind? And that the falsity of the statement would have been immediately evident to a large number of non lawyer lay people, much less a lawyer acting on behalf of the US government? It seems there are only two choices here: deliberate perjury (a serious crime); or the engagement on your behalf of seriously incompetent people (business as usual in this Administration). I'll let…
revere | March 10, 2008I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you occupy a country you also assume responsibility for its public health. That's both international law and it's the right thing to do. In Iraq we haven't done that. So while I am about to say it once more, after I've said it I have something else to say, too, something that underscores my point in triplicate.
But first the main point:.
It is the kind of news that everybody had been dreading. An outbreak of cholera in Iraq, which started in two Northern provinces, has already reached Baghdad and has become Iraq's biggest cholera outbreak in…
revere | March 9, 2008
(Source unknown)
It's a lousy disease, but Radio New Zealand's headline has to be one of the more amusing headlines I've seen in ages: "Listeria sandwiches on sale at hospital cafe":
Listeria has been found in packaged sandwiches sold by a cafe at Middlemore Hospital, Auckland.
Food contractors to Counties Manukau District Health Board, Spotless Services, informed the DHB of the situation on Friday.
The contamination was found in Naturezone Thai chicken sandwiches, sold by the Aviary Cafe on Monday, 3 March. (Radio New Zealand)
So what's this Listeria stuff about, anyway? This material is…
revere | March 9, 2008It was a big quake, 8.3 on the Richter scale. Epicenter: in the Pacific Northwest, Andreanof Island, Aleutian chain. The date was March 9, 1957. Until now, it's actual cause was unknown. Today we reveal the shocking details.
A rock on the bottom of the ocean near Andreanof Island randomly rearranged its molecules to become an octopus:
This was no ordinary cephalopod. This one had a name: PZ Myers.
The world into which PZ so suddenly evolved was not friendly. He was surrounded by "ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed victims of obsolete mythologies". He fought back:
But the…
revere | March 8, 2008The first computer I used was a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-9. It had 48K (that's 48KB, not 48MB or 48GB) of wound ferrite core memory that took up half a very large room. The we booted it with paper tape -- a strip of tape with holes punched in it that got read by a paper tape reader. First we had to set some register switches by hand. No time share. We signed up for use two hours at a time. There was someone in the lab 24/7 using the beast. My first desktop, an Apple II+, had the same amount of memory but it fit on a table top. That was 13 years later. Without a monitor it cost $2200…
revere | March 7, 2008The Medicare Drug Prescription debacle ("Part D") was supposed to keep drug costs down by introducing competition. Write this bigger and you have John McCain's health care plan. But back to Part D. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the lobbying group for geezers like me that I resigned from because they backed this same Plan D some years ago, has now found that under the intense competition, prices for oldsters like me have risen double the rate of inflation since the program went into effect:
The increase in average prices paid by wholesalers and direct buyers was the…
revere | March 7, 2008There are a lot of open questions about the influenza antiviral drug oseltamivir ("Tamiflu"), among them whether it works at all for bird flu (highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1), and if it does, whether resistance will develop making it ineffective. But all the questions have a common assumption: that the patient is actually taking Tamiflu. How would you know if you were or not? Because the bottle says so? Not necessarily. In December 2005 U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Officers seized 51 shipments they said were counterfeit Tamiflu pills at their air mail facility in San Francisco…
revere | March 6, 2008We don't especially like being anonymous on this blog but we feel it is prudent given the retributive nature of this administration. We don't care that much ourselves as we are pretty well established. But we worry that our students, our colleagues and our institution will become collateral damage in retribution for things we say here. It's not just that we read about this stuff in the news. We know the people involved personally. Last week we posted about Deb Rice, a scientist in the State of Maine health department who is also one of the world authorities on the health effects of the…
revere | March 6, 2008If you look at the bar chart below you will see that this year's bird flu season is shaping up to look pretty much like last year. In the first two months of the year there are a few more cases but essentially the picture looks much the same. If that is indeed true, then also expect a spike of cases this month (March) since you can also see that is the past pattern. Already cases are being reported in Egypt, and of course, Indonesia. The countries involved this season have been Vietnam, China, Egypt and Indonesia, just like last year. Whether you consider that reassuring or worrying probably…
revere | March 5, 2008Things are changing. And here's some evidence. This is a great story (hat tip Boingboing). It's about a new test for African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), a disease carried by the tse-tse fly that afflicts an estimated 66 million people in 36 countries. Not a nice disease:
At first, the main clinical signs of human trypanosomiasis are high fever, weakness and headache, joint pains and pruritus (itching). Gradually, the immune defence mechanisms and the patient's resistance are exhausted. As the parasite develops in the lymph and blood of the patient, the initial symptoms become more…