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Many egg forms as well as bacteria can exist intact in a cysted state for a very long time under surprisingly harsh conditions. From a USDA anthrax fact sheet: "When cells of B. anthracis escape from the animal's body through bloody discharges from the natural openings of the body after death, and are exposed to oxygen, they form spores. These spores are highly resistant to heat, cold, chemical disinfectants, and long dry periods. B. anthracis spores are reported to survive for years in the environment."

More here http://www.usda.gov/homelandsecurity/anthraxfs.htm

... not to nit pick, but this is a false statement:

The fast food industry are the main reason that things like Ecoli is now so common in store bought foods.

The rate of food borne pathogens has gone down dramatically in the last 100 years, and the trend continues through the advent of fast food in the last 50 years. In particular, E. coli contamination in particular has been reduced by over 15% since 1999, when substantial advances were made in the quantity and sensitivity of testing.

http://peaches.nal.usda.gov/foodborne/fbindex/FBI_ Stats.asp

(google is also helpful)

The ones about bullshit?

Wow, your definition of "rural" and mine are way different.

I never thought much about it, but apparently agreeing on a definition for "rural" is actually quite difficult. See here. But generally speaking, it isn't just the number of people in your town that matters, but also the population density and its proximity to a larger city.

That is misleading for two reasons. First, the signal does not travel through the planet, it travels around the surface. Second, your calculation is for sending a signal (and receiving an echo) from opposite sides of the planet. Should I not be able to expect a shorter ping time if I am pinging my next door neighbour? Google says: (10 meters * 2) / the speed of light = 66.712819 nanoseconds.

This might be a good starting point. Baghdad, Iraq to Washington DC, United States is about 9968 km, yeilding a 66.5 ms minimum ping time.

It's a truly sick world that we live in. You have my heartfelt apologies for my failure to stop this insanity. A little collaboration on everybody's part might help.

It's a truly sick world that we live in. You have my heartfelt apologies for my failure to stop this insanity. A little collaboration on everybody's part might help.

That's not interesting or insightful. It's just a blanket statement.

"All local bread is better than global bread."

Is it? Is there any conclusive proof to this anywhere? As far as I can tell, both the local bakeries, regional grocery stores, and national chains all offer different kinds of bread - from nutritionally useless white bread to donuts to whole grain bread.

Food is cheap right now. It's one of the few things (along with tech) that gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper each year. And that's all food. From partially hydrogenated soybean oil (mmmmMMM!) to spinach and legumes. Milk does seem to be getting more expensive, in real terms, and I'm not sure if it's simply other costs going up and the Milk Price Support Program or something similar, increasing the overall costs, or what. It seems, however, that pricing differences between the producer and the consumer do not seem to correlate, even abroad.

But, in summary, not all mass produced food = cheap, not all mass produced food = poor quality, nor cheap = quality. I think the only difference is that for local food producers to compete, they have to have exceptional quality if they want to stay in business.

You should check the farm subsidies that US farmers get to not grow food. They'll make your head spin.
Take a look here.

In 2000, 79% of the US population lived in urban areas, the 2001 Canadian census lists 79.7% there is hardly any difference there and yet claims about "Oh, but Canada lives closer to the border" still persist. Urban vs Rural is NOT the big issue. The big issue is GREED by companies and COMPLACENCY of the population to bend over on issues such as this.

1. The National Biodiesel Board explicitly says that its production capacity is only 150 million gallons per year, with another 200 million potential. At the limit this is less than 1% of road-diesel consumption and about 0.6% of total distillate fuel consumption.

2. US production of soybeans in 2004 was 3.15 billion bushels. At a yield of 11.5 pounds per bushel and a guesstimated 7 pounds/gallon, the entire US soybean crop would produce 5.18 billion gallons of soybean oil. You would need roughly 7 times as much production to replace all over-the-road diesel and 12 times as much to replace all distillate fuel oil consumption; I'm not going to waste the time to calculate what it would take to replace motor gasoline (that's your homework, and you're flunking).

   Total US acreage of soybeans harvested in 2004 was roughly 74 million acres, or 116,000 square miles. 12 times this is about 1.4 million square miles. Total area of the USA is 3.5 million square miles, so you are talking about planting another 40% of the land area of the USA in soybeans (over and above the area already used for other crops) just to replace distillate fuel oil use.

Complexity is not the same as bureaucracy. Even in F1000 companies, bureaucracy is a bug, not a feature. (It's just harder to eliminate in larger companies.)

Large government contractors and suppliers fall somewhere between private enterprise and government in this scale; they have to be efficient enough to actually build a bomb that goes "boom", or a plane that flies, but they also have to be bureaucratic enough to fill out the reams of paperwork that come as part of the Faustian bargain: If you want a chunk of the taxpayer's money, you've gotta dedicate at least 20-30% of your manpower to jumping through the government's hoops.

In government per se, bureaucracy is not merely a feature -- it's practically the raison d'etre for the whole enterprise. What good is open source if we can't have studies on it, build fiefdoms around approving and sharing it, and make other people from other fiefdoms fill out paperwork to get their hands on it? What good are space shuttles unless we build space stations for them to go to, and space stations without space shuttles to ferry the parts up there $500M at a time?

Remember, there's Fedland from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash

NEW TP POOL REGULATIONS I've been asked to distribute the new regulations regarding office pool displays. The enclosed memo is a new subchapter of the EBGOC Procedure Manual, replacing the old subchapter entitled PHYSICAL PLANT/CALIFORNIA/LOS ANGELES/BUILDINGS/OFFICE AREAS/PHYSICAL LAYOUT REGULATIONS/EMPLOYEE INPUT/GROUP ACTIVITIES. The old subchapter was a flat prohibition on the use of office space or time forr "pool" activities of any kindm whteher permanent (e.g., coffee pool) or one-time (e.g., birthday parties). This prohibition still applies, but a single, one-time exception has now been made for any office that wishes to pursue a joint bathroom-tissue strategy. [ ... ]

And there's the Real McCoy: (Excerpted from Meat, Poultry, Egg Produce Labeling Review Process)

FSIS streamlined the system in a final rule issued on December 29, 1995, (60 FR 67444) that became effective July 1, 1996, by expanding the categories of products for which labeling can be approved generically by industry. For example, the rule allows Federal establishments to design and use labeling that conforms to the regulatory requirements for meat, poultry, and egg products that have standards of identity and composition defined in the regulations (9 CFR 319 and 381) or in the Food Standards and Labeling Policy Book.

Everyone who's worked in both a Fortune 1000 company and government, and who has obtained approval for the funding of a working group to ascertain the value of conducting a study on the relative levels of bureaucratization, please contact your union steward for permission to obtain form G3122 ("Application for Exception to Standard Rule 7431, section 8, supbaragraph 6") before even thinking about raising your hand.

You can find some naked chicks right here.

You said: "So what happens when the temperature (down to -90C) goes below the sublimation temperature of CO2 (-76C, if I recall correctly)? Does it just freeze out of the air?"

Most likely. The phase diagram for CO2 shows that for our standard atmospheric pressure, CO2 freezes at -78.5 C. If the temperature is only slightly lower than -78.5 C it may take some time for a significant amount of CO2 to precipitate due to the latent heat of solidification for CO2 of -43 cal/g (smaller than the absolute value of water which is about -80 cal/g) . Additionally some CO2 may remain in the air which varies by temperature (which would be relative humidity for water). As the temperature drops the amount of CO2 that can be dissolved in air decreases. Unfortunately I couldn't find a reference for CO2 saturation vs temperature. If it is reasonably low (which it should be) at -90 C, CO2 frost will develop.

On Mars with an atmospheric pressure that varies from about 5 - 10 mbar (1 atm = 1013.25 millibars), CO2 frost can develop as seen by Viking 2 and by satellite pictures of the poles. Snowflakes won't form, since the shape of a snowflake is determined by van der Waals forces (don't occur in CO2). CO2 frost should look similar to this.

So either it is another island they are talking about (possibly in the vicinity of Flores) or their 31sq km figure should read 31 thousand sq km (not likely given the importance of the small size of the island that explains their evolution to a small skeleton).

You can see a detailed map or the archipelago here:

Flores is approximately at 9S 122E

Eristalis gatesi

The Bill Gates flowerfly.

See: http://www.sel.barc.usda.gov/diptera/syrphid/gates .htm

"Can this technology used for making weapons?"

For some strange reason, there's something | There
called a "lameness filter" that repeatedly | are
rejected all attempts to post this message | lots
the way I wanted it to appear and saying I | of
had too few characters per line and that I | technologies
needed to reduce the count of "junk" chars | that
per line in my post. Perhaps it's just me, | can
but I think that making me do something so | be
TOTALLY HOKEY as THIS, JUST so the post'll | used
appear the way I intended for it to appear | to
somehow seems MUCH more hokey, in the long | make
run... But maybe I'm just being too ornery | weapons...

You just have to learn to think like this guy
and turn yourself into a human one of these.

No politician? Granted, $7.2 million isn't a huge amount of money, but it was enough for Bush to bring it up during the debates. I think the fact that it would increase agriculture jobs is just as important as helping the environment.

Second, home energy costs make up 3.83% of the CPI budget, auto fuel makes up 3.25%, dairy makes up 0.84% of the budget, and all food makes up 15.38% of the budget. Assuming a $2,000/month budget, this translates to $76.60 a month for home energy, $65 for auto fuel, $16.80 for dairy, and $307.60 for all food. None of those figures look too terribly out of line to me. Specifically, which one do you object to?

Third, the BLS table shows dairy up 10.4% since August 2003, and auto fuel up 16.5% over the same period. I calculate the price rise from the USDA numbersto be about 23%, and the Department of Energy has fuel prices up 15.9%. Granted, the milk number looks skewed, but the DOE numbers are actually higer for fuel costs.

I will concede that the CPI numbers aren't perfect; no measure of "inflation" can be. But, to insinuate they are cooked or are made up is really tenuous.

DDT was banned when? 1972. It takes how long to break down? 15 years. If DDT were the source of egg-shell thinning we would have seen an increase in egg shell thickness around 1987.

We didn't.

2003 USDA study, DDT/DDE concentrations are not linked to shell breakage in condors

1998 - Science News - Shell thinning in birds predates DDT.

In just about every study on DDT/DDE you will note that DDT wasn't the only artifical compound found. It was usually accompanied by high concentrations of PCBs, mercury, and/or lead.

[Making ethanol from corn] actually costs considerably more energy than you get from burning the ethanol, and oil is burned in the process of making it, so it doesn't help with US energy independence.

Brazil is not the only place performing these analyses... check out what they are doing in Hawaii

...this one from the USDA which seems to say that ethanol is energy positive.

Not that I'm a consipracy theorist or anything, but of course it does. That is the US Department of Agriculture after all. And we're talking about what? Corn ethanol? Hmm, corn is an agricultural crop.

Now, take a look at the first two bullet items from their mission statement:

• Expand markets for agricultural products and support international economic development;
• Further develop alternative markets for agricultural products and activities;

Do you honestly think they'd ruin a perfectly good opportunity for one of the largest food crops in the US by speaking badly of corn derived ethanol? Please...

As for ethanol, I will raise you Cornell study with this one from the USDA which seems to say that ethanol is energy positive.

I don't think so. Canada is only one tenth the population of the US, and has a far lower per capita GDP than the US has (Canadian per capita GDP is the sama as Korea actually), yet Canada (and Korea) both still have far wider broadband deployments than the US.

Yeah, but "[r]oughly 80 percent of Canada's 31 million population resides within 100 miles of the U.S. border"

and "40 percent of Canada's land is largely undeveloped."

Almost every part of the United States is populated, though thinly. A significant percent of the US population is really rural. 82 million rural residents is almost 3 times the population of Canada, and near to a third of the US! Broadband to the cities is already available, it's the outlying towns that are hard to reach.

See Rural Maps for more information

Grandparent is the correct, it has not been completely solved in the U.S.

Eighty-nine percent is a lot, but 11 percent of everyone in the U.S. is also a lot.

Be sure to scroll down for the line graph showing that it's been about the same since they started measuring it. And the bar graphs suggesting why.

Here's a recent example taken from the USDA recall site. Did you know that Wolverine Packing Company is recalling 101,600 pounds of fresh ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli? These were shipped on June 15. I didn't hear anything about it. These were shipped nation wide to "foodservice distributors".

Since nobody is likely to die from a downloadable virus, I doubt we'll see more accountability from the IT world.

Until corporations are held accountable, don't use IE and don't eat ground beef.

Here's a recent example taken from the USDA recall site. Did you know that Wolverine Packing Company is recalling 101,600 pounds of fresh ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli? These were shipped on June 15. I didn't hear anything about it. These were shipped nation wide to "foodservice distributors".

Since nobody is likely to die from a downloadable virus, I doubt we'll see more accountability from the IT world.

Until corporations are held accountable, don't use IE and don't eat ground beef.

:)

You're going to have to google it yourself, though.

...or click here.

Under Glickman's leadership, USDA has restructured and modernized its enormous, decentralized field office structure, helping cut administrative and overhead costs by about $4 billion. He also has taken a strong, personal interest in civil rights. The Department has recently reviewed its civil rights practices for the first time and has dramatically improved its commitment to fairness and equality, in both treatment of its employees and execution of its programs. At Glickman's direction, the Department settled one of the largest civil rights class action suits filed against the U.S. Government.

Unfortunately, I didn't get interested in local politics until nearly the end of his term in office, so I can't say too much about his political leanings...

There's a very informative biography on him here.

Here's an interesting map I found, showing the population densities in the world. Turns out the only places in the US that are anywhere near Europe's density are the northeast and a small part of the west coast. Which for the most part already have mass transit. Most of America isn't dense enough for mass transit to be viable.

Have you ever been to London?

Yes. And an aunt of mine lived their during the war. While the actual destruction was not at all as devastating as what Germany had to endure, it was certainly not for lack of trying. My aunt gave a very gripping account of the terror that the V2 evoked. It was a death that you did not see coming since it was the 1st supersonic weapon ever. She told us "if you heard it you knew you were al right this time. But it made you feel vulnerable all the time because you weren't save anywhere in London, and there was nothing anybody could do against it." It was perfect state terrorism.

Perhaps, but given how much advanced gas was produced, like sarin, you would think a reasonable person, upon hearing of the attrocities committed by the Russian army as they advanced through East Prussia would make you give up that resolve.

Ever cared to read an objective biography on Hitler?

Hundreds of thousands left, even according to Jewish sources.

And millions have been killed in the holochost.

By far more than survived

A grand-aunt of mine was married to a Jewish German. His name was Wilhelm - as German a name as you can get at the time. They were both chemist and managed to get away to the US before it was to late, but all of Wilhelm's family perished in the Holocaust. His sister and her husband made it to France just to be arrested the night before trying to make their final get-away by boat. I always admired him for being able to come to Germany without hate.

So, what were all those Jews doing from the time Hitler was elected in 1933 until the holocaust supposedly happened in 1943?

If you would care to educate yourself on the issue you would know that the discrimination against Jewish Germans started very gradually. First the synagogues burned, than they had to wear stars, then they were held in ghettos and then gradually they vanished out of sight. The Nazis were very careful in not advertising what happened to the people in concentration camp. They were "just" supposed to be forced to work, and many in fact were exploited that way. It has been reported that even many inmates of the concentration camps thought it was inconceivable that Germany even as badly tainted by Nazism as it was would simply kill its own citizen. A lot of effort was spend on entertaining this illusion. Making the gas chambers in the camps look as inconspicuous as possible (sometimes a shower head was just a device to release water but sometimes it would release something far more lethal).

You can go to Auschwitz and take a look for yourself at the streamlined manufactory of death. Efficient as a state of the art slaughterhouse. If you compare for instance with how many cattle is slaughtered per year in the US the number of victims becomes absolutly plausible.

So the US doesn't have a problem then? :-)

Your best (free) bet is probably TIGER data in either its original form or in shapefile form, updated and corrected locally.

TIGER is made from USGS DLG or DRG files, combined with some updating done by the US Census Bureau. Since the census is only done periodically, the TIGER data gets out of date.

Some organizations take TIGER data and update it and resell it in various forms. One of these is NAVTEQ, who has people out on the road constantly driving around and updating their maps. As a result, this information tends to be rather expensive, but pretty high quality. Other companies in the same business are DeLorme and UnderTow (formerly Chicago Mapping, I believe). I think UnderTow's Precision Mapping product has pretty decent licensing terms, last I looked at it (several years ago). Much better than DeLorme.

If you want to get your own imagery and work from that, there are several good free sources:

University of Maryland's GLCF site serves up 30m color imagery and 15m monochrome imagery for most of the world. To make the color imagery useful, you'll want to take a look at Scott Cherba's Tutorial using Photoshop or Terrainmap's tutorial using PaintShop Pro. One of the software companies I've founded makes an inexpensive utility called PixelSense (Windows, $49) to do this process automatically.

The United States Department of Agriculture Lighthouse Server serves up a variety of data including free 1m monochrome mosaics of virtually every county in the US. These are large files, and come in MrSID format, for which you'll need to download a Viewer (time-limited trial version) that can save out the portions you want. The nice thing about this is that they are mosaiced and brightness-balanced, whereas if you just go buy/download a bunch of DOQQs elsewhere, they may not match well at the edges of each file.

Finally, in urban areas, you may be able to take advantage of the USGS Urban Areas High-Resolution Orthoimagery available for some cities from the USGS Seamless Server. This data is fantastic, 1ft resolution color airphotos. You can see cars and individual people. It's very recent, having been aquired after 2001 for national disaster planning and response purposes.

Good luck. I'd be happy to answer questions you might have privately, as a lot of my customers do cartography.

Actually, if you have a look at a world population density map, the US and Norway have somewhat similar population densities over most of their landmass - the eastern US is denser, but much of the west is less dense.

Near 100% in populated areas is totally different from near 100%. US coverage is near 100% in populated areas; maybe not by carrier, but overall, yes.

Is this far enough east for you?

<a href="http://www.usda.gov/oce/oepnu/aer-814.pdf">U SDA Report in 2002</a>
<a href="http://www.ethanol-gec.org/corn_eth.htm">'95 report</a>

This statistic that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than is gained by burning it is bandied about all over the place but it is *only* valid if you are talking about corn, I'm not even sure that it is still valid for corn.

It's not valid. (PDF)

Accroding to this usda research, producing ethanol is energy positive. What proof do you have that it is not?

Cellulose ethanol is a terrific idea, and saves food crops for food purposes...

Actually, it's a myth that the ethanol process uses corn that goes for food. Most corn doesn't get processed into food. It is used as animal feed and the by-product of corn ethanol production is a distiller's mash that is actually better for animal feed since it is high in protein and rich in water-soluble vitamins and minerals. Because the fermentation process removes only starch, all the remaining digestible nutrients are left in the distiller's grain.

I do think ethanol from waste straw is a good idea but getting it from corn is also a good idea that could be even better.

Cellulose ethanol is a terrific idea, and saves food crops for food purposes...

Actually, it's a myth that the ethanol process uses corn that goes for food. Most corn doesn't get processed into food. It is used as animal feed and the by-product of corn ethanol production is a distiller's mash that is actually better for animal feed since it is high in protein and rich in water-soluble vitamins and minerals. Because the fermentation process removes only starch, all the remaining digestible nutrients are left in the distiller's grain.

I do think ethanol from waste straw is a good idea but getting it from corn is also a good idea that could be even better.

I bet cattle would fart less if we didn't force-feed quite so much them before we killed 'em. And the methane they spew is only a tiny part of the pollution they cause. Ammonia gas, phosphorous, and lotsa microbes and pathogens stream out of every feedlot in enormous quantities.
"For every 10 pounds of nutrients consumed, 8 to 9 pounds are excreted in the feces and urine."
Straight from the USDA.
Does this strike you as wasteful? Did you know the US could feed 800,000,000 people on the grain that's fed to livestock? Let the cows eat grass and save the grain for the starving! Or sell it and take $80 billion off the trade deficit!
Fucking decadent carnivores, messing up the place...

facing global competition much like agricultural

You want to know a little known secret about ag competition? The destruction of the family farmer has to do with Federal social policy, not agriculture competitiveness.

We farm east of Corning Iowa, which was the one-time home of an emerging national farmers union (before the government got it stopped). (see the USDA website for a timeline of some farmers movements). The problem the government's always had with farmers is that they're darn near impossible to control. Look at the John Birch society's prevelance, as well as election returns from "Red" (which should be Blue, FYI) states vs. "Blue" more liberal areas.

Why are farmers so difficult to control?

o They're independent workers and are raised to be independent. Their whole ethic system, though processes, motivation, etc. is intrinsically defined (meaning THEY are the law that gets their butts out of bed at 5AM, not some external authority).

o They deal with reality first-hand, every day, and subsequently grow up being the most aware of the truth of Reason. Sluff off and plant the crop two months late? You have no crop. Skip maintenance on the tractor? It breaks. Get sloppy on fence mending, your cattle disappears. Do this a few too many times? You die. (You haven't seen work ethic until you've met a modern farmer) Live in a city for a big company, you get further and further separated from first-hand consequence of reason. Sluff off on that report due? Oh well, do it tomorrow. Boss won't yell till next week. Implement a less safe or innovative product? Market won't notice for maybe a year. Give crappy service at the DMV counter? What are they gonna do? Fire you? Action and consequence are distanced. Belief in Reason leads to very strong and dangerous thinking - dangerous if you're a government parasite.

o Bottom of the model independence. How do you control someone who doesn't need you every day, and you can't starve them? You screw with the government in the city and they'll have you screaming uncle soon enough (whether it's from a cell or not is your choice). But there's little you can do to that family farmer, and did you notice, if you have to go get him, you're on HIS turf, not yours? Might get shot.

o The worst thing, is if you piss off the farmer, YOU starve. He'll just let his crop rot. He's got enough for his family to eat. This isn't a good thing for government bureaucrats.

So the government, starting with FDR and significantly extended under Johnson, Nixon and Carter, introduced massive controls of production, regulation, consolidation/centralization of purchasing, application of all sorts of environmental regulatoins, etc. By adding substantial costs (ala barriers to entry) to the process, it forced farmers to grow to several thousand acre farms to be able to bear these costs (while the market price was capped through centralization of purchasing). Not only was this effective, but the government was right in line to "help you buy those few more thousand acres", created programs that get you hooked, and once you're in, you'll never get out.

Now they've got a foot on the farmer's neck. So no, per the previous poster, this isn't a function of global competition decimating the farm as it is the intentional restructuring of an American class by bureaucrats who felt they were getting too big for their britches.

But then again, how is the outsourcing issue any different? Didn't you all get too big for your britches, buying all those stupid dot-com stocks, fleeing to the burbs (leaving the government to clean up the mess), putting your kids in private schools, and buying all those damn SUVs?

Don't worry. Both the marxists and the country club elite will set things straight, just like they both did for the farmers.

Think Microsoft as an oil company, and that's what we have. That's why we haven't managed to convert t]o ethanol

No. The reason that we haven't converted to ethanol is that until a few years ago, it took more energy to produce a given amount of ethanol than you could get out of the ethanol by burning it. It was more cost effective to just mine your energy. No conspiracy here.

Sean

Yes, similar things are being done in the states. Two sites to start you off:

Strictly broadband internet related: http://www.ruralbroadbandcoalition.net/

More general rural development: http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/

Do a google search for "state name rural broadband" and I'm sure you will come up with something else interesting.

To sum up this article, Plum Island is mysterious, and it scares the daylights out of the author, especially since the strike.

To shore up this sense of dread, the author asserts that two events convince him that Plum Island is more dangerous than people commonly know:

Assertion 1: The first appearance of what we now call Lyme disease [was] a mere 13 miles Northeast of Plum Island.

Fact 1: The first record of a condition associated with Lyme disease dates back to 1883 in Breslau, Germany, where a physician named Alfred Buchwald described a degenerative skin disorder now known as acrodermatitis chronica atrophicans (ACA). (Lyme Disease Foundation).

Assertion 2: West Nile Virus made its first appearance near or around Plum Island.

Fact 2: In 1999 the radius of infection centered around New York City. West Nile Virus is very common virus (according to the CDC, it has been found in West Nile virus has been described in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, west and central Asia, Oceania (subtype Kunjin), and most recently, North America), that could easily been carried by any visitor to one of the world's most populated cities.

Assertion 3: Placing quotes around the word "coincidental" makes it sound conspiratorial.

Fact 3: It does make it sound conspiratorial, but it doesn't make it true.

Honestly, the fact the author was so frightened by the predictable rumors of frightened workers sealing rooms with duct tape (any biology student will tell you that would be useless against airborne pathogens) the he felt he had no choice but to "pack up the car, score some weed, [and] picked up my girlfriend and head to the Jersey Shore ... wait for the imminent human die-off" shows me that the author is deeply paranoid and alarmist (too much weed, Alan?).

Maybe Plum Island leaked some kind of strange stupidity virus?

See this link in the story.

--
Evan