The vaccination is trivial to make, assuming you have a cow with active cowpox. Requires a needle to scratch your skin, and a Q-tip to swab from the sore on the cow to infect the scratch. Done, no prep required. Precautions: be sure the cow is from a brucellosis and TB-free herd. If you then do human-to-human propagation, it helps to have a team of known-good (no HIV or hepatitis, etc) humans to spread from. Risk factors for bad cowpox infection are eczema and/or immunosuppression.
It's unclear how widespread it is in the US cattle population, however. The cow we hand-milked when I was a kid did have what looked like an episode of it (and it's clear how milkmaids would get it, because if you're going to milk the cow, that's where the sores are, so you've got about 10 minutes skin-to-skin contact).
I don't know why you would think smallpox would make a good strategic weapon. It's taboo -- deploying it would legitimize a nuclear response.
I think you are confusing variolation with vaccination. Cowpox is not trouble-free, but I have never read that it was a dangerous as 1 in 1000. I was vaccinated as a kid, and so was everybody else. We had a hand-milked cow when I was in my teens, and I was re-exposed (but did not get it again).
And yeah, versus smallpox in the wild, I would not hesitate to re-infect myself with cowpox. Same for my kids. In a population where everyone under 40 had never received any vaccination at all, smallpox would be grim.
This assumes that you SECRETLY immunize your population ahead of time. Otherwise, that action gives the game away.
My assumption has always been that IF there was an outbreak, I would contact every dairy farmer I could till I found a cow with cowpox, and do an old-school vaccination. Nobody in the family is immune-compromised, and the odds of safety are pretty good (crossed a street lately?)
The way the article reads, this is intended for use at/in the entrance to an underground bunker, to blow down internal doors, so that it could be followed by a fuel-air explosion that would kill everyone in the place. However, this seems to assume that the blast door would be right there at the entrance for the bomb to blow down, and that there would not be another one, behind it, and that the blast would not be attenuated through the design of the tunnels and the doors, and that there would not be multiple exits, etc.
You're think of the IAEA, and yes, your recollection is correct. I have read, but have not confirmed to my satisfaction, that there's been some turnover at the IAEA in the last 8-9 years, and guess who helped select the new guys.
I have read, also, that the guy fingered as being in charge of explosive initiator design, is really there to help them produce nanodiamonds: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2011/11/on-nuclear-iran-allegations-nanodiamonds-aint-nuclear-bombs.html On the one hand, sure sounds like it could be dual-use expertise that he's got, on the other hand, he pretty much wrote the book on using explosives to produce nanodiamonds.
"the" alternative? There's only one? If we ate much less meat than we do now, perhaps we could make do with grass-fed (this is inevitably true for suitably chosen values of "much less", but I'm not sure what that would be). Or just fake it in some other way; I've eaten some vegetarian "fake meats" that really surprised me (and some that did not, oh well). If the vat-meat isn't competitive with the plant-protein-based fakes (in terms of cost and quality), it's probably no-go.
This is entirely an issue with scale of production and distribution channels; if the people raising that grass-fed beef could get the farmer's equivalent of $25/lb for it, don't you think they would? If all beef was grass-fed, it would be scarcer and more expensive. Cheap grass-fed beef is essentially an anecdote, against the huge amount of feed-lot-raised beef in this country.
I would add, also, that if you do it yourself, if you have the land, absolutely, you can raise cattle on the "cheap" (ignoring cost of land). We did it when I was a kid, we had all the milk we could drink, all the butter we felt like churning, heavy Jersey cream on our breakfast cereal every morning, and we periodically slaughtered and ate our cow's offspring, and it was darn tasty. The fact that we could do this on our five Florida acres says not one thing about the price of milk, cream, butter, or beef at the grocery store or how it is produced.
Because, uh, nobody lived in the New World to eat (and breed, corn in particular) that food until the Europeans showed up?
I note, also, that tetanus, botulin, diphtheria, and shiga toxins are all proteins.
Old-style crossbreeding is rather different from some of the stuff we're doing now. Bt (bacillus thuringiensis) proteins, that was never in anything that we ate before. On the one hand, there's all sorts of harmful stuff that we tolerate now and even build up immunity to (here, a great story about nightshade soup, read on down: http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/References/TheInterviews/DebDuchon1.htm ), on the other hand, profit-oriented business in the US has a long track record of telling us that whatever happens to make money for them is totally harmless. You'd have to be a complete idiot to not be skeptical of whatever happy talk you heard from anyone selling you stuff. Caveat emptor.
I assume by Texas and Georgia, you mean Houston and Atlanta. My impression is that on average Georgia-outside-cities is worse, but East Texas has some pretty darn rednecky towns. Research Triangle area in North Carolina might be worth a try.
More like dumb habits, and old-school social networking that we take for granted.
For example: my father introduced a now-retired VC to the woman he married. That got me in the door, years ago, for a discussion about whether our startup had a prayer. My advisor introduced a currently-famous VC to the woman HE married. We're multiply-connected as FOAFs; he might know me by sight, we've been to parties and my advisor's funeral together, where we got into a raging argument about global warming with a mutual friend.
Friend of mine (one of the F's in FOAF above) was working for Apple years ago, was talking to them about how they recruited, and discovered that they recruited from the same habitually-white schools that most of the people already there came from. Not intentionally discriminating against blacks, but de facto, not getting many of them in for interviews.
Worked for a startup A years back, when we were later trying to pitch our startup B, the founder of the startup A very, very generously gave us loads of advice about business plans and pitches. Networking, again.
On the supply side, you have blacks disproportionately living in poor places (meaning, schools not as good), from parents that might lack education (meaning, less exposure to stuff that upper middle class whites take for granted, like early reading etc). All these disadvantages are correlated with not doing so well in school. Any discrimination experienced in education along the way also thins the pool. Doesn't have to be conscious, either -- assume that we're all capable of making mistakes, including some really unfortunate ones.
And this stuff takes loads and loads of time to change. When I was a gradual student, I went to a programming languages conference, and there were more albinos in the audience, than blacks. One of the guys on my thesis committee was Richard Tapia, and he has been busting his ass for the last 30 years (at least, that's just what I know) to get more Hispanics into the sciences. When I got my PhD, it was right around the time that the first big cohort of women also got PhDs in CS; they're still underrepresented, but that cohort started advising/mentoring/role-modeling wore women, and over time there's been (so it seems to me) more and more.
You do understand that in a pedestrian zone speeding "just a little" is a huge increase in risk. It's a completely different animal from speeding on a highway. The source Google just found for me quotes two studies, and the lower estimate is 5% fatality rate at 20mph, 37% fatality rate at 30mph. If it were linear in speed, 22mph would have a fatality rate of 11.4% -- over double. There's a quadratic component -- 40mph rate is 83% -- but it's not that large, and estimating double risk at 22mph is reasonable. So in a place where pedestrians might be, especially low-mass pedestrians, it's appropriate to declare that the speed limit is 20mph, period.
And how many miles of school zone do you drive through per day? 15mph, vs 20mph, is a minute per mile. I just eyeballed some of the local elementary school zones on Google Maps, and none of them is more than 1000 feet long. That's 12 seconds.
So, raised in the south, on the one hand, OF COURSE towns do this, they all do, but on the other hand, how clueless can you be? You see a town, you see speed limit signs going down, down, down, duh, of course it's a speed trap.
It was useful to take driver's ed from an ambulance driver. He had good stories. The cop probably has similar stories, and was probably thinking "Darwin Award Candidate" when he said "Have nice day!"
The frequency of crashes is quite low, so it you can drive carelessly for years without much in the way of negative feedback. HOWEVER, when you do get that negative feedback, the outcome of the 70mph crash is likely to be worse than the outcome of the 55mph crash. And that's on highways; in residential neighborhoods, where you might hit a person, the risk of death goes up fast with speed.
Are you sure this was not intended for farm equipment? The fact that they want you close to the curb, and admit the possibility of only one lane, suggests to me that that is what this is about.
There are, to an engineering approximation, NO people in the left lane driving the speed limit. I usually (not always) drive between 0-5mph over the posted limit on limited access highways, which puts me in the slow lane or next to it, depending on how much entrance/exit ramp activity there is (according to a reference on the wikipedia Solomon curve page, those guys are responsible for 44% of crashes, which is how "driving slowly" gets such a bad reputation). Every single person in the fast lane is passing me, always.
You're not required to drive at 99.9% of the posted speed. Why not drive 5 or 10mph below posted, so you can pay proper attention to the road? We had a similar problem with kids on a bike trip once; a couple had speedometers on their bikes, and they spent way too much not looking at what was around them. Of course, they were kids.
Problem is that crashes and near crashes are a low-frequency event, so people manage to delude themselves into thinking that however they happen to drive, is "safe". And often, when there is a near crash (or even a crash), they find some way to convince themselves that it was the other guy's fault, so they are still a safe driver.
I had a cousin die in a motorcycle accident a few years ago; it was a team effort where he was a minor player. What was eye-opening was that all it required was two mistakes by drivers, timed just right, to set up the fatal crash, and a third mistake to make it happen. "Normal Accidents" (Charles Perrow) applies here. People make single-fault mistakes almost continuously. When I drive, I try very hard to figure out the mistake that I am about to make, so I can not make it.
"Reporting on these results in 1971, academics West and Dunn confirmed the findings of Solomon and Cirillo,[11] but found that crashes involving turning vehicles accounted for 44 percent of all crashes observed in the study and that excluding these crashes from the analysis greatly attenuated the factors that created the U-shape of the Solomon curve.[12] In 1991, Fildes, Rumbold, and Leening collected self-reported crash data from 707 motorists in Australia with less than 200 reporting they had been in an accident but, unlike Solomon and Cirillo, the researchers found no relationship between slower speeds and increased crash involvement.[13]"
People quote the result that they agree with. In particular, in two studies it looks like there's nothing particularly unsafe about driving slowly IF you exclude turning traffic (traffic suddenly appearing on the road, traffic abruptly slowing to turn) . There are also crashes, and crashes; the higher the speed, the greater the violence of the crash.
The other important thing about the Solomon effect is that it is not a statement about safe speed for a given road; it is a statement about safe speed in a given herd. "Hauer provided a theoretical foundation for the Solomon curve in 1971 – “for example, if I drive at 45 mph, while the median of the pack is 60 mph, how many cars will pass me in an hour and hence have a chance to collide with me ” – that showed that the theoretical distribution was nearly identical to the Solomon curve." So if increased traffic enforcement changes the speed of the entire herd, then the new "safest speed" is the 85th percentile of the new herd speed.
That continental shelf is misleading in that picture. It is true that there are a few places where you can stand 3 miles out with your head above water at low tide, but it does generally slope off to a decent depth. Within a few miles of the coast of Pinellas and Pasco counties, 50 feet. There's also no "bedrock" to speak of; it's all clay, sand, and porous limestone (karst, think sinkholes, caves, underground rivers). I grew up there; I have topo and LORAN maps for the west coast.
The main problem with exposed pools of algae is "weeds" and "pests". Florida's got a lot of those.
I think, before you promote algae, that you should do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many square miles of algae you would need to expose to sunlight. I once did the BOTE on corn ethanol -- if we converted our entire corn crop to ethanol, it would cover 21% of our gasoline consumption. You think you can scale up algae to 5x our national corn crop?
Slashdot Mirror
You're cherry-picking the data: http://www.skepticalscience.com/hiding-the-incline-in-sea-level.html
So, intentional deception, or uncritical parroting of the party line?
And no deal was done with the manufacturer to install a backdoor?
The vaccination is trivial to make, assuming you have a cow with active cowpox. Requires a needle to scratch your skin, and a Q-tip to swab from the sore on the cow to infect the scratch. Done, no prep required. Precautions: be sure the cow is from a brucellosis and TB-free herd. If you then do human-to-human propagation, it helps to have a team of known-good (no HIV or hepatitis, etc) humans to spread from. Risk factors for bad cowpox infection are eczema and/or immunosuppression.
It's unclear how widespread it is in the US cattle population, however. The cow we hand-milked when I was a kid did have what looked like an episode of it (and it's clear how milkmaids would get it, because if you're going to milk the cow, that's where the sores are, so you've got about 10 minutes skin-to-skin contact).
I don't know why you would think smallpox would make a good strategic weapon. It's taboo -- deploying it would legitimize a nuclear response.
I think you are confusing variolation with vaccination. Cowpox is not trouble-free, but I have never read that it was a dangerous as 1 in 1000. I was vaccinated as a kid, and so was everybody else. We had a hand-milked cow when I was in my teens, and I was re-exposed (but did not get it again).
And yeah, versus smallpox in the wild, I would not hesitate to re-infect myself with cowpox. Same for my kids. In a population where everyone under 40 had never received any vaccination at all, smallpox would be grim.
Country X embarks on a comprehensive vaccination program.
How stupid do the leaders of country Y need to be, to not respond in kind?
This assumes that you SECRETLY immunize your population ahead of time. Otherwise, that action gives the game away.
My assumption has always been that IF there was an outbreak, I would contact every dairy farmer I could till I found a cow with cowpox, and do an old-school vaccination. Nobody in the family is immune-compromised, and the odds of safety are pretty good (crossed a street lately?)
The way the article reads, this is intended for use at/in the entrance to an underground bunker, to blow down internal doors, so that it could be followed by a fuel-air explosion that would kill everyone in the place. However, this seems to assume that the blast door would be right there at the entrance for the bomb to blow down, and that there would not be another one, behind it, and that the blast would not be attenuated through the design of the tunnels and the doors, and that there would not be multiple exits, etc.
You're think of the IAEA, and yes, your recollection is correct. I have read, but have not confirmed to my satisfaction, that there's been some turnover at the IAEA in the last 8-9 years, and guess who helped select the new guys.
I have read, also, that the guy fingered as being in charge of explosive initiator design, is really there to help them produce nanodiamonds: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2011/11/on-nuclear-iran-allegations-nanodiamonds-aint-nuclear-bombs.html
On the one hand, sure sounds like it could be dual-use expertise that he's got, on the other hand, he pretty much wrote the book on using explosives to produce nanodiamonds.
"the" alternative? There's only one? If we ate much less meat than we do now, perhaps we could make do with grass-fed (this is inevitably true for suitably chosen values of "much less", but I'm not sure what that would be). Or just fake it in some other way; I've eaten some vegetarian "fake meats" that really surprised me (and some that did not, oh well). If the vat-meat isn't competitive with the plant-protein-based fakes (in terms of cost and quality), it's probably no-go.
This is entirely an issue with scale of production and distribution channels; if the people raising that grass-fed beef could get the farmer's equivalent of $25/lb for it, don't you think they would? If all beef was grass-fed, it would be scarcer and more expensive. Cheap grass-fed beef is essentially an anecdote, against the huge amount of feed-lot-raised beef in this country.
I would add, also, that if you do it yourself, if you have the land, absolutely, you can raise cattle on the "cheap" (ignoring cost of land). We did it when I was a kid, we had all the milk we could drink, all the butter we felt like churning, heavy Jersey cream on our breakfast cereal every morning, and we periodically slaughtered and ate our cow's offspring, and it was darn tasty. The fact that we could do this on our five Florida acres says not one thing about the price of milk, cream, butter, or beef at the grocery store or how it is produced.
Because, uh, nobody lived in the New World to eat (and breed, corn in particular) that food until the Europeans showed up?
I note, also, that tetanus, botulin, diphtheria, and shiga toxins are all proteins.
Old-style crossbreeding is rather different from some of the stuff we're doing now. Bt (bacillus thuringiensis) proteins, that was never in anything that we ate before. On the one hand, there's all sorts of harmful stuff that we tolerate now and even build up immunity to (here, a great story about nightshade soup, read on down: http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/References/TheInterviews/DebDuchon1.htm ), on the other hand, profit-oriented business in the US has a long track record of telling us that whatever happens to make money for them is totally harmless. You'd have to be a complete idiot to not be skeptical of whatever happy talk you heard from anyone selling you stuff. Caveat emptor.
I assume by Texas and Georgia, you mean Houston and Atlanta. My impression is that on average Georgia-outside-cities is worse, but East Texas has some pretty darn rednecky towns. Research Triangle area in North Carolina might be worth a try.
Wow, pretty appalling comments down below.
More like dumb habits, and old-school social networking that we take for granted.
For example: my father introduced a now-retired VC to the woman he married. That got me in the door, years ago, for a discussion about whether our startup had a prayer. My advisor introduced a currently-famous VC to the woman HE married. We're multiply-connected as FOAFs; he might know me by sight, we've been to parties and my advisor's funeral together, where we got into a raging argument about global warming with a mutual friend.
Friend of mine (one of the F's in FOAF above) was working for Apple years ago, was talking to them about how they recruited, and discovered that they recruited from the same habitually-white schools that most of the people already there came from. Not intentionally discriminating against blacks, but de facto, not getting many of them in for interviews.
Worked for a startup A years back, when we were later trying to pitch our startup B, the founder of the startup A very, very generously gave us loads of advice about business plans and pitches. Networking, again.
On the supply side, you have blacks disproportionately living in poor places (meaning, schools not as good), from parents that might lack education (meaning, less exposure to stuff that upper middle class whites take for granted, like early reading etc). All these disadvantages are correlated with not doing so well in school. Any discrimination experienced in education along the way also thins the pool. Doesn't have to be conscious, either -- assume that we're all capable of making mistakes, including some really unfortunate ones.
And this stuff takes loads and loads of time to change. When I was a gradual student, I went to a programming languages conference, and there were more albinos in the audience, than blacks. One of the guys on my thesis committee was Richard Tapia, and he has been busting his ass for the last 30 years (at least, that's just what I know) to get more Hispanics into the sciences. When I got my PhD, it was right around the time that the first big cohort of women also got PhDs in CS; they're still underrepresented, but that cohort started advising/mentoring/role-modeling wore women, and over time there's been (so it seems to me) more and more.
Standard work-around is to also claim the computer with the software loaded into it. Shazam, a "thing".
You do understand that in a pedestrian zone speeding "just a little" is a huge increase in risk. It's a completely different animal from speeding on a highway. The source Google just found for me quotes two studies, and the lower estimate is 5% fatality rate at 20mph, 37% fatality rate at 30mph. If it were linear in speed, 22mph would have a fatality rate of 11.4% -- over double. There's a quadratic component -- 40mph rate is 83% -- but it's not that large, and estimating double risk at 22mph is reasonable. So in a place where pedestrians might be, especially low-mass pedestrians, it's appropriate to declare that the speed limit is 20mph, period.
And how many miles of school zone do you drive through per day? 15mph, vs 20mph, is a minute per mile. I just eyeballed some of the local elementary school zones on Google Maps, and none of them is more than 1000 feet long. That's 12 seconds.
So, raised in the south, on the one hand, OF COURSE towns do this, they all do, but on the other hand, how clueless can you be? You see a town, you see speed limit signs going down, down, down, duh, of course it's a speed trap.
Quantum tunneling through the intersection?
It was useful to take driver's ed from an ambulance driver. He had good stories. The cop probably has similar stories, and was probably thinking "Darwin Award Candidate" when he said "Have nice day!"
The frequency of crashes is quite low, so it you can drive carelessly for years without much in the way of negative feedback. HOWEVER, when you do get that negative feedback, the outcome of the 70mph crash is likely to be worse than the outcome of the 55mph crash. And that's on highways; in residential neighborhoods, where you might hit a person, the risk of death goes up fast with speed.
Are you sure this was not intended for farm equipment? The fact that they want you close to the curb, and admit the possibility of only one lane, suggests to me that that is what this is about.
There are, to an engineering approximation, NO people in the left lane driving the speed limit. I usually (not always) drive between 0-5mph over the posted limit on limited access highways, which puts me in the slow lane or next to it, depending on how much entrance/exit ramp activity there is (according to a reference on the wikipedia Solomon curve page, those guys are responsible for 44% of crashes, which is how "driving slowly" gets such a bad reputation). Every single person in the fast lane is passing me, always.
You're not required to drive at 99.9% of the posted speed. Why not drive 5 or 10mph below posted, so you can pay proper attention to the road? We had a similar problem with kids on a bike trip once; a couple had speedometers on their bikes, and they spent way too much not looking at what was around them. Of course, they were kids.
Problem is that crashes and near crashes are a low-frequency event, so people manage to delude themselves into thinking that however they happen to drive, is "safe". And often, when there is a near crash (or even a crash), they find some way to convince themselves that it was the other guy's fault, so they are still a safe driver.
I had a cousin die in a motorcycle accident a few years ago; it was a team effort where he was a minor player. What was eye-opening was that all it required was two mistakes by drivers, timed just right, to set up the fatal crash, and a third mistake to make it happen. "Normal Accidents" (Charles Perrow) applies here. People make single-fault mistakes almost continuously. When I drive, I try very hard to figure out the mistake that I am about to make, so I can not make it.
"Reporting on these results in 1971, academics West and Dunn confirmed the findings of Solomon and Cirillo,[11] but found that crashes involving turning vehicles accounted for 44 percent of all crashes observed in the study and that excluding these crashes from the analysis greatly attenuated the factors that created the U-shape of the Solomon curve.[12] In 1991, Fildes, Rumbold, and Leening collected self-reported crash data from 707 motorists in Australia with less than 200 reporting they had been in an accident but, unlike Solomon and Cirillo, the researchers found no relationship between slower speeds and increased crash involvement.[13]"
People quote the result that they agree with. In particular, in two studies it looks like there's nothing particularly unsafe about driving slowly IF you exclude turning traffic (traffic suddenly appearing on the road, traffic abruptly slowing to turn) . There are also crashes, and crashes; the higher the speed, the greater the violence of the crash.
The other important thing about the Solomon effect is that it is not a statement about safe speed for a given road; it is a statement about safe speed in a given herd. "Hauer provided a theoretical foundation for the Solomon curve in 1971 – “for example, if I drive at 45 mph, while the median of the pack is 60 mph, how many cars will pass me in an hour and hence have a chance to collide with me ” – that showed that the theoretical distribution was nearly identical to the Solomon curve." So if increased traffic enforcement changes the speed of the entire herd, then the new "safest speed" is the 85th percentile of the new herd speed.
That continental shelf is misleading in that picture. It is true that there are a few places where you can stand 3 miles out with your head above water at low tide, but it does generally slope off to a decent depth. Within a few miles of the coast of Pinellas and Pasco counties, 50 feet. There's also no "bedrock" to speak of; it's all clay, sand, and porous limestone (karst, think sinkholes, caves, underground rivers). I grew up there; I have topo and LORAN maps for the west coast.
The main problem with exposed pools of algae is "weeds" and "pests". Florida's got a lot of those.
You were joking, right?
I think, before you promote algae, that you should do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many square miles of algae you would need to expose to sunlight. I once did the BOTE on corn ethanol -- if we converted our entire corn crop to ethanol, it would cover 21% of our gasoline consumption. You think you can scale up algae to 5x our national corn crop?