The concept of a tradeoff between transmissibility and virulence is not universally accepted for influenza, due to the ability of carriers to transmit asymptomatically, as I mentioned in another post. Here is a good explanation of the reasons.
It already IS really, really lethal. One of the things that makes influenza so dangerous is that it is contagious for several days before the host presents with symptoms, thereby allowing the host to infect many others before getting sick and dying. Ebola, on the other hand does not spread easily while the host is non-symptomatic. Also, H5N1 survives for days on surfaces like doorknobs. Viruses don't de-select for lethality unless the host dies before he or she can re-infect, which unfortunately is not the case with influenza.
The conditions for a pandemic spreading far and fast are much better now than they were in 1918, thanks to auto, train, and air travel and the millions who travel every day. Also, the huge urban populations that are like petri dishes for growing and spreading the virus did not exist then. While some of the advances in medicine will help, especially with secondary infections, one of the more interesting things about H5N1 (and the Spanish flu) is that most of the young healthy patients did not die from secondary infections, but from the cytokine storm generated by an overreacting immune system. The healthier the immune system, the worse the effect of the storm. Thanks to modern nutrition and better health care, we have healthier immune systems now than our grandparents did in 1918.
The study assumed an absenteeism rate of 50%. About one out of every four people in the U.S. caught the last bird flu to become pandemic in human populations (the Hong Kong flu). And only a very small percentage of them died, about.06%. The current bird flu (H5N1) is 1000 times that lethal. Even if it becomes much less lethal when it becomes contagious to humans, it will far outkill the Hong Kong flu. So, once the bug arrives in a city and people start becoming sick and dying right and left, how many people will decide they will just go to work as usual. My guess in nearly none.
That is because the 1969 flu (the Hong Kong flu) was not very lethal at all. In the US, 50 million were infected, with an estimated 33,000 deaths, which is a mortality rate of 0.06%. By comparison, H5N1 (the current bird flu) has a mortality rate of about 60%, more than 1000 times as lethal as the Hong Kong flu. It may become less lethal as it becomes more transmissible, but it has a very long ways to go before it becomes as harmless as the Hong Kong flu.
It is more of a pet peeve than a technology nightmare, but it is the one tech thing that pisses me off the most often. It is obviously not necessary for a remote control to force you to press 007 to change to channel 7. How hard would it be for the code to wait for a couple seconds and if less than three digits were pressed to assume that was the user's intention? It should have been done right in the cable box or TV changer code, but if it wasn't, there is no reason that the remote control couldn't have been programmed to compensate for the stupidity or laziness of the TV or cable box programmer and add the leading zeros. Maybe it is because I know that there was no excuse for the bad design or sloppy code that it irritates me so much.
A lot more than $8B was spent fixing the Y2K mess. Estimates run as high as $1.5 trillion worldwide. It was an enormous problem and the fact that the dire predictions never materialized is a testament to the people who alerted the world to the seriousness of the problem and to the thousands of IT personnel who labored for years to fix the bug and to prevent the worst from becoming reality. Y2K was not a flop by any stretch of the imagination. It was an overwhelming success story.
"The records are well engineered, and she uses wonderful instruments; still, her beautiful sound is her own.
Best of all is her musical imagination, which finds original things to say about the most familiar music. "
Ha!
You are also somewhat correct. All influenza viruses have the same ability to be transported through the air. That is, they are all "airborne", as you say. I think what you are tying to say is that H5N1 is not yet easily contracted by humans by inhaling the airborne virus. Nor do humans who are sick with H5N1 normally aerolsize and expel the virus. This is because it binds lower in the human respiratory track than seasonal influenza viruses do and therefore it is not readily spread by coughing or sneezing. This is one of the primary reasons that H5N1 is not efficiently transmitted from human to human.
While the technologies are different, they both convert a digital representation of a 3D object into a physical object by spraying construction material out of a nozzle. From tiny ear bones to four bedroom ramblers.
Did you RTFA?
"A 300 Kbps free tier of service for use by all residents, businesses and visitors. This 300 Kbps tier is adequate for most basic Internet tasks such as web, email and even VoIP."
You make excellent points. But given your pessimism for solving the problem without significant technological advances, do you hold out any hope that those technological advances will come in time to prevent the coming global disaster? I do not personally place the odds of that very high. On the other hand, I do think that, if there is a sea change in the political direction and will of the nations most responsible for the problem, and that looks more promising today than it did a few weeks ago, that there might still be a chance. Some of the most resolute deniers are now becoming believers, thanks in large part, I presume, to Al Gore. Maybe it will turn into a landslide of enlightenment more rapidly than anyone could have predicted. And when political and public pressure become great enough, it might turn the vested corporate interests around. I am not convinced that will happen or be sufficient, but it is the only hope I hold at the moment. Well, that and cold fusion, of course.;-)
The reason that people go up the hierarchy in an activist organization is because they are good at gaining and using influence. And it is the job of the higher ups to gain and use their influence. But the question is for what? In general, they are still working in the interest of their original ideals, the betterment of the planet and its inhabitants, and not for money, not for profit, not for any bottom line or increase in stock price. I am sure that an exception can be found here and there, but in my experience as a volunteer for many environmental organizations over the years, this is the case. So, there is no contradiction between being powerful and influential and being an environmentalist. It is how you become an effective environmentalist.
I would say that the definition of an "actual environmentalist" is one whose interest is in the general welfare of the planet and its inhabitants. So, yes, you do have to be an actual environmentalist to "have an interest in the general welfare of a planet and its species." Or more accurately, you become one by having that interest.
Corporate and political policy is not always at odds with the environment, that is true. But it depends largely on the industry and the company. The oil industry has a very difficult time not being at odds with the environment because their product is responsible for so much of the damage that we do to the environment. Just like the tobacco industry has a very difficult time not being at odds with public health. The nature of their industry makes it virtually impossible. In both cases, if the company wants to increase or protect their bottom line, they must work at odds with that which will bring it down. Decreasing oil consumption brings down the bottom line of the oil companies. Decreasing smoking brings down the bottom line of the tobacco companies.
And, as we all know, the boards of directors of corporations represent the financial interest of the stockholders. So their job is to protect and increase the bottom line of the corporation. Boards of large corporations take this duty much more seriously than do boards of very small corporations, but that is the primary responsibility of the board. And the board directs the actions of the company. Hence, the abdication of responsibility to do anything altruistic unless it positively affects the bottom line. Hence the responsibility to direct the corporation to do whatever nefarious deeds necessary, including deception of the public if necessary, if those deeds stand a better chance of increasing the bottom line rather than decreasing it.
This is the primary flaw in our economic system. There is no line on the balance sheet that does not have a dollar sign on it.
Except that environmentalists interests are for the general welfare of the planet and its inhabitants, not for the increased wealth of acorporation and its stockholders. A rather significant difference, wouldn't you agree?
Wood frame houses may be better than some other options, but the Incas really knew how to build earthquake-proof buildings. The great Cusco quake of 1950 destroyed most of the colonial and modern buildings but left the ancient Inca buildings intact. The stones comprising the walls were very tightly fitted together in an interlocking pattern without the benefit of mortar. Ollantaytambo has some good examples of the Inca stone work.
Yes, but what about religious fanatics who believe that mass annihilation is an excellent way to cleanse the Earth? This is the "kill them all and let God sort them out" mentality. Such people exist and it is only a matter of time until one of them gains access to an infectious agent capable of starting and fueling a pandemic, the easiest way to accomplish these ends. It does not take a nation with nuclear weapons or a maniacal head of state to launch an attack on the entire population of the Earth today. And Sting's hope that the love for one's children will prevent such an attack ignores the existence of the fanatics who are afflicted with this brand of insanity.
With the exploit described in TFA, you run a big risk of getting caught unless you have an untraceable credit/debit card. You can tell the machine to dispense the twenties as if they were fives, but it doesn't give out any money until you swipe a valid credit/debit card. So, you are going to be on the short list of suspects once you get your paltry sum of ill-gotten gains. And if you go to the well more than once, you will probably be promoted to the number one suspect. And anyone who took the money and ran will most likely have their account dinged for the extra money they took without reporting the windfall. So, unless you can get an untraceable credit card, you aren't likely to be able to keep your swag.
The Eudaemonic Pie is a classic tale of a few brilliant UCSC physics and math majors building a roulette predictor using the KIM-I 6502-based single board computer. The guy with the KIM timed successive rotations of the ball around the wheel to get its decelleration. He used switches in his shoes connected to the KIM if I remember right. And from the decelleration and the position of the ball at the start of the timing, the KIM computed the octant into which the ball was most likely to fall. It then transmitted the octant by RF to the bettor who was ignoring the table so as not to attract the attention of the house. The bettor had an RF receiver attached to some simple electronics that activated one of eight vibrators attached to different places on his body. The bettor then bet on the numbers in the appropriate octant and achieved a significant advantage over the house. The students had a professional wheel in the basement of their house on which the tested their system. I believe that one of the students was instrumental in developing the basis for chaos theory when he wasn't working on the roulette cheater. Or maybe it was the other way around. And one or more of them went to work at Los Alamos National laboratory after leaving Santa Cruz.
I found this story very interesting and exciting, not the least reason for which was that I also had a KIM-I computer (my first electronic comuter) for which I had written some software to automate my darkroom, and I was considering programming it to cheat at Blackjack in a similar, if much less technically advanced, way. I never went through with my project, but I still have my KIM-I on my wall, right next to my first non-electronic computer, an abacus.
Of course it is an object. It is an instance of the class FilamentaryStructure. Its only constructor is both private and static, which suggests that it is a singleton.
There are a few of us. While I wasn't a carnie for long, I did run the Gun Ball game for a few weeks in California. I am now a tech writer, which doesn't make me literate exactly, as you might know if you read many software manuals.
Our game was rigged, by the way. It wasn't until the fourth day on the job that anyone knocked down the pyramid of plactic cylinders and won a prize. I was so astonished and confused, I honestly didn't know what to do. I just stood there staring for the longest time.
I also learned that the stereotype of the crooked ex-con carnie was right on the money, by the way. Everyone cheated everyone else all the time, all the way up the money chain.
Slashdot Mirror
The concept of a tradeoff between transmissibility and virulence is not universally accepted for influenza, due to the ability of carriers to transmit asymptomatically, as I mentioned in another post. Here is a good explanation of the reasons.
It already IS really, really lethal. One of the things that makes influenza so dangerous is that it is contagious for several days before the host presents with symptoms, thereby allowing the host to infect many others before getting sick and dying. Ebola, on the other hand does not spread easily while the host is non-symptomatic. Also, H5N1 survives for days on surfaces like doorknobs. Viruses don't de-select for lethality unless the host dies before he or she can re-infect, which unfortunately is not the case with influenza.
The conditions for a pandemic spreading far and fast are much better now than they were in 1918, thanks to auto, train, and air travel and the millions who travel every day. Also, the huge urban populations that are like petri dishes for growing and spreading the virus did not exist then. While some of the advances in medicine will help, especially with secondary infections, one of the more interesting things about H5N1 (and the Spanish flu) is that most of the young healthy patients did not die from secondary infections, but from the cytokine storm generated by an overreacting immune system. The healthier the immune system, the worse the effect of the storm. Thanks to modern nutrition and better health care, we have healthier immune systems now than our grandparents did in 1918.
The study assumed an absenteeism rate of 50%. About one out of every four people in the U.S. caught the last bird flu to become pandemic in human populations (the Hong Kong flu). And only a very small percentage of them died, about .06%. The current bird flu (H5N1) is 1000 times that lethal. Even if it becomes much less lethal when it becomes contagious to humans, it will far outkill the Hong Kong flu. So, once the bug arrives in a city and people start becoming sick and dying right and left, how many people will decide they will just go to work as usual. My guess in nearly none.
That is because the 1969 flu (the Hong Kong flu) was not very lethal at all. In the US, 50 million were infected, with an estimated 33,000 deaths, which is a mortality rate of 0.06%. By comparison, H5N1 (the current bird flu) has a mortality rate of about 60%, more than 1000 times as lethal as the Hong Kong flu. It may become less lethal as it becomes more transmissible, but it has a very long ways to go before it becomes as harmless as the Hong Kong flu.
It is more of a pet peeve than a technology nightmare, but it is the one tech thing that pisses me off the most often. It is obviously not necessary for a remote control to force you to press 007 to change to channel 7. How hard would it be for the code to wait for a couple seconds and if less than three digits were pressed to assume that was the user's intention? It should have been done right in the cable box or TV changer code, but if it wasn't, there is no reason that the remote control couldn't have been programmed to compensate for the stupidity or laziness of the TV or cable box programmer and add the leading zeros. Maybe it is because I know that there was no excuse for the bad design or sloppy code that it irritates me so much.
A lot more than $8B was spent fixing the Y2K mess. Estimates run as high as $1.5 trillion worldwide. It was an enormous problem and the fact that the dire predictions never materialized is a testament to the people who alerted the world to the seriousness of the problem and to the thousands of IT personnel who labored for years to fix the bug and to prevent the worst from becoming reality. Y2K was not a flop by any stretch of the imagination. It was an overwhelming success story.
"The records are well engineered, and she uses wonderful instruments; still, her beautiful sound is her own. Best of all is her musical imagination, which finds original things to say about the most familiar music. " Ha!
You are also somewhat correct. All influenza viruses have the same ability to be transported through the air. That is, they are all "airborne", as you say. I think what you are tying to say is that H5N1 is not yet easily contracted by humans by inhaling the airborne virus. Nor do humans who are sick with H5N1 normally aerolsize and expel the virus. This is because it binds lower in the human respiratory track than seasonal influenza viruses do and therefore it is not readily spread by coughing or sneezing. This is one of the primary reasons that H5N1 is not efficiently transmitted from human to human.
On the morning news in San Francisco, his daughter said that he had a marine radio aboard and a rubber dinghy. Let us hope for the best.
Today I read two articles about 3D printing, TFA and one about printing micro miniature machine parts.
While the technologies are different, they both convert a digital representation of a 3D object into a physical object by spraying construction material out of a nozzle. From tiny ear bones to four bedroom ramblers.
What an age we live in!
Did you RTFA? "A 300 Kbps free tier of service for use by all residents, businesses and visitors. This 300 Kbps tier is adequate for most basic Internet tasks such as web, email and even VoIP."
You make excellent points. But given your pessimism for solving the problem without significant technological advances, do you hold out any hope that those technological advances will come in time to prevent the coming global disaster? I do not personally place the odds of that very high. On the other hand, I do think that, if there is a sea change in the political direction and will of the nations most responsible for the problem, and that looks more promising today than it did a few weeks ago, that there might still be a chance. Some of the most resolute deniers are now becoming believers, thanks in large part, I presume, to Al Gore. Maybe it will turn into a landslide of enlightenment more rapidly than anyone could have predicted. And when political and public pressure become great enough, it might turn the vested corporate interests around. I am not convinced that will happen or be sufficient, but it is the only hope I hold at the moment. Well, that and cold fusion, of course. ;-)
The reason that people go up the hierarchy in an activist organization is because they are good at gaining and using influence. And it is the job of the higher ups to gain and use their influence. But the question is for what? In general, they are still working in the interest of their original ideals, the betterment of the planet and its inhabitants, and not for money, not for profit, not for any bottom line or increase in stock price. I am sure that an exception can be found here and there, but in my experience as a volunteer for many environmental organizations over the years, this is the case. So, there is no contradiction between being powerful and influential and being an environmentalist. It is how you become an effective environmentalist.
I would say that the definition of an "actual environmentalist" is one whose interest is in the general welfare of the planet and its inhabitants. So, yes, you do have to be an actual environmentalist to "have an interest in the general welfare of a planet and its species." Or more accurately, you become one by having that interest.
Corporate and political policy is not always at odds with the environment, that is true. But it depends largely on the industry and the company. The oil industry has a very difficult time not being at odds with the environment because their product is responsible for so much of the damage that we do to the environment. Just like the tobacco industry has a very difficult time not being at odds with public health. The nature of their industry makes it virtually impossible. In both cases, if the company wants to increase or protect their bottom line, they must work at odds with that which will bring it down. Decreasing oil consumption brings down the bottom line of the oil companies. Decreasing smoking brings down the bottom line of the tobacco companies. And, as we all know, the boards of directors of corporations represent the financial interest of the stockholders. So their job is to protect and increase the bottom line of the corporation. Boards of large corporations take this duty much more seriously than do boards of very small corporations, but that is the primary responsibility of the board. And the board directs the actions of the company. Hence, the abdication of responsibility to do anything altruistic unless it positively affects the bottom line. Hence the responsibility to direct the corporation to do whatever nefarious deeds necessary, including deception of the public if necessary, if those deeds stand a better chance of increasing the bottom line rather than decreasing it.
This is the primary flaw in our economic system. There is no line on the balance sheet that does not have a dollar sign on it.
Except that environmentalists interests are for the general welfare of the planet and its inhabitants, not for the increased wealth of acorporation and its stockholders. A rather significant difference, wouldn't you agree?
Wood frame houses may be better than some other options, but the Incas really knew how to build earthquake-proof buildings. The great Cusco quake of 1950 destroyed most of the colonial and modern buildings but left the ancient Inca buildings intact. The stones comprising the walls were very tightly fitted together in an interlocking pattern without the benefit of mortar. Ollantaytambo has some good examples of the Inca stone work.
I think that they are pretty cool. I wrote one to display my photographs: http://tinyurl.com/rlo63/
No, they didn't make them (well they made some of them), but they did provide the API for the gadgets, without which there would be no gadgets.
Yes, but what about religious fanatics who believe that mass annihilation is an excellent way to cleanse the Earth? This is the "kill them all and let God sort them out" mentality. Such people exist and it is only a matter of time until one of them gains access to an infectious agent capable of starting and fueling a pandemic, the easiest way to accomplish these ends. It does not take a nation with nuclear weapons or a maniacal head of state to launch an attack on the entire population of the Earth today. And Sting's hope that the love for one's children will prevent such an attack ignores the existence of the fanatics who are afflicted with this brand of insanity.
Ouch! I missed that point in TFA. No more speed-reading TFAs.
With the exploit described in TFA, you run a big risk of getting caught unless you have an untraceable credit/debit card. You can tell the machine to dispense the twenties as if they were fives, but it doesn't give out any money until you swipe a valid credit/debit card. So, you are going to be on the short list of suspects once you get your paltry sum of ill-gotten gains. And if you go to the well more than once, you will probably be promoted to the number one suspect. And anyone who took the money and ran will most likely have their account dinged for the extra money they took without reporting the windfall. So, unless you can get an untraceable credit card, you aren't likely to be able to keep your swag.
The Eudaemonic Pie is a classic tale of a few brilliant UCSC physics and math majors building a roulette predictor using the KIM-I 6502-based single board computer. The guy with the KIM timed successive rotations of the ball around the wheel to get its decelleration. He used switches in his shoes connected to the KIM if I remember right. And from the decelleration and the position of the ball at the start of the timing, the KIM computed the octant into which the ball was most likely to fall. It then transmitted the octant by RF to the bettor who was ignoring the table so as not to attract the attention of the house. The bettor had an RF receiver attached to some simple electronics that activated one of eight vibrators attached to different places on his body. The bettor then bet on the numbers in the appropriate octant and achieved a significant advantage over the house. The students had a professional wheel in the basement of their house on which the tested their system. I believe that one of the students was instrumental in developing the basis for chaos theory when he wasn't working on the roulette cheater. Or maybe it was the other way around. And one or more of them went to work at Los Alamos National laboratory after leaving Santa Cruz. I found this story very interesting and exciting, not the least reason for which was that I also had a KIM-I computer (my first electronic comuter) for which I had written some software to automate my darkroom, and I was considering programming it to cheat at Blackjack in a similar, if much less technically advanced, way. I never went through with my project, but I still have my KIM-I on my wall, right next to my first non-electronic computer, an abacus.
Of course it is an object. It is an instance of the class FilamentaryStructure. Its only constructor is both private and static, which suggests that it is a singleton.
No, the universe is not in the universe. The universe is the universe. There is a difference.
I would add capitalism to the list. I wrote a longer post about this under the title of "Realistically?".
Our game was rigged, by the way. It wasn't until the fourth day on the job that anyone knocked down the pyramid of plactic cylinders and won a prize. I was so astonished and confused, I honestly didn't know what to do. I just stood there staring for the longest time.
I also learned that the stereotype of the crooked ex-con carnie was right on the money, by the way. Everyone cheated everyone else all the time, all the way up the money chain.