*Sigh* U.S. "lawmakers" claim that the U.S. is too dependent on Russkiean rockets.

This is mind-warpingly stupid. Experts tell science and technology illiterates that US is too dependent on Russian rockets

Ya think? Now why could that possible be?...hmmm.

Since we mothballed Apollo we haven't had a real rocket development in the US. Why? Becuase short-sighted politicians from Reagan--whom Edward Teller infamously got him and his administration to to back the stooopid Space Defense Initiative(SDI)--to Obama there has been zero leadership on hard science initiatives.

Reagan was perhaps the most scientifically illiterate president ever; until GW Bush perhaps wrested the title away.

Why are lawmakers believing these all sceinced out geeks now? For the only reason they EVER listen to reason..it is less politically palatable to do otherwise. These Washington hacks that couldn't tell a meson from a double-decker bus terrorizing the streets of Boise, Idaho by running against traffic on Interstate 84, are now ready to listen to people that they cannot understand because it scores easy political points.

These are the same people that refuse to do anything substantive about the greatest threat to our existence; global climate change, yet when it comes to ceding rocketry to the Russians, are only all too happy to listen to another set of sciency geeky types to score easy political layups. This is--in a nutshell--what is really wrong with this country.

Global climate change? "The science is still out." (Duh-fuh?)

Big giant threat from Russian rocket superiority..a problem which was directly caused by those now tasked to bridge the gap. No wonder I have glaucatomous eyes. I think that my eyes are the relief valves that keep my head from exploding over obvious hypocrisies.

I firmly believe that there should be a basic level of scientific literacy that anyone running for any office where these matters are to be entrusted. Call it the SSATs(Scientific Scholastic Aptitude Test(s)) for aspiring politicos.

I take no joy in pointing out the lack of scientific literacy among our elected officials. It gives me great pains to expose them. Let's take William Jefferson(can you imagine the nerve?) Clinton's level of scientific literacy. I don't know what kind of creds you need to be a Rhodes Scholar, but apparently skills in mathematics and a high level of scientific literacy aren't part of that program. Clinton was so scientifically challenged that he had to get advisors to explain to him the likelihood of Richard Preston's pretty awful book "The Cobra Event" becoming manifest. I will give Clinton credit. He knew that he didn't know shit about science, and took the advice of real scientists to move a tiny chunk of his policy. "It's the economy, stupid" nothwithstanding. Politically savvy, maybe, but Clinton might have had a legacy if he had ascted on global climate change. His eight years of doing nothing of importance remain a terrible waste.

There are smart people in this country. Alas, very, very few of the best minds ever run for public office.

Bing and Firefox 30

Here's another tech. post. Sorry.

I have now switched to Bing as my search provider of choice. Why?

Google wants to know everything about me, you, and the other 7 billions of humans inhabiting this grossly overpopulated rock.

Firefox 30 now gets the nod as my default web browser. Why?

Google Chrome still doesn't really offer a way to set the cache at 5MB. That's where I have Firefox set. I would state that FF 30 loads pages faster as well, but I'm not currently well enough sighted to run the requisite tests to make that call. Yes, FF still uses egregious amounts of system RAM whilst running, but faithfully releases all those MB to the pool with the closure of the browser.

Google's newest version of their terms of use is appalling.

It's beginning to shape up as Google Services vs. Microsoft Bing Services for the soul of true computing.

I don't know what Apple is doing, as I still don't understand the appeal of tablets, and as for the iPhone, when it's $30 sans contact, I may give it a look. MP3 players are not worth more than 25USD. That's why I have two Sandisk Sansa Clip+s that I paid less than a combined 50USD. I picked up some 32GB micro-SD cards for 8USD ea., and I'm beholden to no xTunes bloatware and insane prices.

I am de-Amazoning as well. I buy less and less there, as other etailers commonly offer the products and services that I need and/or want for less cost.

The Mozilla Foundation is a great group of geeks. Microsoft now seems the lesser of all evils, and the earth still isn't round. A circle is round. The earth is perhaps best described as a slightly oblate spheroid...without getting all geometry happy.

The best thing that all this competition has done is offer you, me, us, wider choices of quality products from which to choose--and many are now, or will soon be--ostensibly free. Read those Privacy/Terms Of Use Statements.

Why am I still using Blogger? Now that, is a good question. I have written some decent blog scripts in Perl, but I can't see hosing a blog, and if I was to publish on my Comcast/Xfinity pages, my blog would have even less visibility than it does even now. That does seem more than a bit of a dodge. In fact, I do believe that it is. I can't fix all of my privacy ills in a day. There is no true anonymity on the 'Net. I really dislike this personality quirk. *shrugs*

That is all from the consumer end of my cave.

Hacking Tesla Motor car..

Yawn. Link to frivolity. This is a controlled event..or rather, non-event.

I think it would be fairly easy given enough time to hack into a true motor car. But Tesla has made all the rules, and most certainly made getting the 10K USD prize a most unlikely event against an opponent that has had time to harden itself against the particular type of hack that will bring home the 10K.

Tesla Motors should give the prize to any team that downs the vehicle's communication. It would be fun to see if Tesla's comm. could thwart a seriously intense DDoS(Distributed Denial of Service) attack. That would be much harder to defend against, esp. if a talented group could--I'd offer "would" here--take down Tesla's nascent version of SkyNet. There is no doubt that anything plugged into a network that is connected to an external source will be hacked. It is just a matter of time and technique. Remember when Macs "didn't get viruses?" I do not, but then security is quite important when working on enterprise level systems. Macs have been, will be, now, and forever, be hacked.

I know better, and I was once, while not hacked, taken over by ransomware that took me a day to totally clean out.

Tesla, you will be hacked, but not likely while you are watching. One possible way to defeat what is certain to be a hardened target is from the inside. Too easy.

DARPA is going to take a hot on their "Hack-Proof" drone software and hardware. If it flies, it is open to various forms of attack. Simple signal disruption, to a brute force EMP may not technically be hacking, but it'll kill a drone, or anything else with even a mild form of electronics. Enigma wasn't hackable, until it was. Every time one of these schemes is launched, sooner or later, they are compromised. Of course if DARPA finds the hacker, they'll really have only two choices: 1) Hire the hacker(s), or 2) Make them disappear.

I am pretty certain that I could build a decent EMP generator that would knock out a whole field of drones on the tarmac. Building a non-directional EMP generator is absurdly easy. One can envision that with proper shielding that the device could be made directional. Generating intense RF signals is hardly a secret. While I was at Uni. as an undergrad, we had BS sessions about building such things..and this circa 1980-81. In lieu of building powerful RF generators, we decided to toss together a whole series of cast off traffic lights and variably strobe them using plans that I sketched out in perhaps 15 minutes, and yes, I used the school's lithography equipment to make up a few boards to neaten up the wiring.

The EE undergrads were the hit of keg party light show spectaculars.

In the truest spirit of all-good-things-must-come-to-an-end, there was a dorm fire, and all our lighting gear was seized, never to be seen again. Many inquiries were made, but I suspect that some faculty member thought that our clever little experiment was just too cool to be given back. Traffic lights are much larger than they appear. All of ours were nearly a meter in height.

Of course we made other devices. I had just turned 18 when I entered Uni. In my six years there, I think I left some sort of mark.

I still cannot see well.

I

Still can't see, but retinal Specialist may get all Luke Skywalker on my eyes.

Alas, my IOP isn't as low as it needs to be. After 16 days of drug therapy, my IOP is still too elevated. Not by too awfully much, but a few mm Hg too high. My new bad eye is @ 23mm Hg, when my RS wnats it to be around 20. I am trying everything to get it down to permissible levels.

40 mins. of hard aerobic activity each day, more fish oil, nuts, proper hydration, eye pressure specific lowering exercise, and a host of other things.I go back in a month's time. If no progress has been made, it's laser time to the trabecular meshwork.

I need some new bits as well, but they are available, and should restore my vision in my better eye.

Aging can suck. It is utterly baffling. My internal medicine is that of a fit teenager, but my eyes are those of a centenarian..well, not really. I don't have AMD as yet. I am having a hard time getting my BP over 120 Systolic directly after aerobic work. My pulse gets into the 120PBM range, so the cardio system works.

Is there a reason for today's post? I'm certain that there is, but I am still sort of freaked out over my eye docs. appt., and my attention span has suffered...where was I?

Tommy Ramone died yesterday. Bummer.

I really have drawn a blank. Now, in Scrabble that would be good thing indeed, but not when trying to construct a blog post. Sorry about that.

My eye is still wonky, but the US might get haggis!

No news on the eyeball front. Since it is now beyond 1:30 PM EDT, I feel that a reading of my eyeball angiographs must not require immediate surgical intervention. Yay for small things. I was much more worried than my last post indicated.

In other exiting news, the US is considering lifting the ban on haggis! How exciting is that? Of course it's only a wee bit of a omnibus trade deal between the US and the UK-EU empire of evil. Just kidding to the three Americans clamoring for genuine Scottish haggis.

I cannot really read the news as yet. However, from Fox News Science comes Ancient Asteroid Destroyer Finally Found and it's a new kind of meteorite. Can Fox shit out a headline or what? At any rate, the reason I picked Fox News to provide my gentle reader with a sciency story is because of all the the great headlines found in the right sidebar...courtesy of Live Science.

Danger! Falling Rocks: Meteorites and Asteroids (Infographic)

Fallen Stars: A Gallery of Famous Meteorites

and

When Space Attacks: The 6 Craziest Meteor Impacts

Yes, gentle reader, those are the actual headlines from Live Science. Sigh.

These are four reasons why I don't use Fox News as a source..don't most of their science denying audience believe in a 6000 year old creation myth?

Live Science is pandering to the truly uninformed. Sure, the last article is a very geo-centric bit of provincialism, but to not at least give a passing nod to Shoemaker-Levy 9 and its really spectacular series of impacts on that Jovian planet seems like a "swing and a miss" to this astro-geek.

That's all for today as I am on eye rest, and DNS(Dragon Naturally Speaking) is giving me fits!

Given my paucity of posting, you'd think I put an eye out

Well, my gentle reader, the answer is not that far removed from reality. I have had a Central Retinal Vein Occlusion in my right eye for in excess of six years. I'll abbreviate that to "CRVO." My retinal specialist is keeping my eye pressures in the normal range, but--and this is huge and really sucks--I am now having symptoms of a Branch Retinal Vein Occlusion in my left eye, formerly "the good one."

It is still the less troubled eye, as my central vision is almost unaffected. However, the prognosis is not great.

My retinal specialist is going over my flourescein angiographs this weekend and we are going to explore treatment options on 06.30.2014..yep, Monday.

I had the new eye issue come to the fore exactly one week ago.

I was totally asymptomatic prior to both eyes becoming afflicted. I urge everyone over 50 Y/O to get their IOP(Intraocular Pressure) checked at least annually. If there is glaucoma in your family at least twice per year is recommended.

Lest you think that my condition is due to elevated blood pressure, it is not. My typical readings are 116/68. My retinal specialist confirmed this for me years ago. I can almost throw quotation marks around his remarks. He said that IOP hypertension, and arterial hypertension are some rimes linked, but not in all cases. I have great BP, but pretty lousy IOP--unless treated with prescription eyedrops that either reduce aqueous humor, or facilitate outflow through the retinal system.

There are specific groups that are genetically and/or hormonally predispoed to elevated IOP, and subsequent development of glaucoma. Then there are people that do not present elevated IOP, but develop common open-angle glaucoma. This is what I have, with comorbidity of Retinal Vein Occlusions. I'm not a medical professional, just a patient that is simply not satisfied until he has all the known facts about his condition. Thank nature I have zero other physiological issues.

That's all I have today. This post was very cathartic for me. I really need to find a way to get all Zen around these issues. More data is usually the key that unlocks the path to reasoned contentedness for me. Way down on my list of things to be concerned about is the fact that July is my birth month, and I'm due for a motor vehicle license renewal this year. There are times when the blind, pitiless universe really shows itself to be rife with just those attributes.

This post was generated with much help from Nuance's "Dragon Naturally Speaking" Premium Edition v12.

It has been a pretty lousy week.

While this isn't strictly science, it is important.

Noam Chomsky on our extinction..and other musings.

While I think that Dr. Chomsky misses the larger point that it is the greater "we" that allowed "corporate elites" to flourish, there is not much on the science side that one can easily refute. Capitalism is the exterminator of worlds. Sorry, to twist the phase that J. Robert Oppenheimer pulled from the Bhagavad Gita, but while the many ills that the Manhattan Project brought to humanity, none can compare with Capitalism. Imagine if you will a system that only thrives by extracting more and more forever from a finite world. That's Capitalism. Okay, I know what you're thinking, as I'm thinking it as well. "What the hell is Todd going on about here?"

I'm glad that you asked. Well, truth be known, I'd rather not have to answer this, but I shall :)

Capitalism, as it is now practiced, is the greatest threat to our planet. Unfettered Capitalism since the Industrial Revolution has done more to toxify the planet than perhaps all other things combined.

I have already deconstructed the notion of the "noble savage" in this post. Human beings pretty much suck for all life forms--including human life.

Unfettered Capitalism has only accelerated species extinction, and all the ills that entails by many orders of magnitude.

Since I am on a no bullshit tirade, I have to blame medicine here as well. Modern medicine has taken the principle of Malthusean catastrophism and turned it into a once quaint notion. This is most certainly NOT a food production issue, although increased food production has played a secondary role.

Take a look at this, and tell me that we are not--by any reasonable means--entirely fucked.

Oh, and while I'm pointing fingers, economists are not scientists by any reasonable yardstick. If you think I jest, while you can be continually wrong and still be practicing science, you have to make predictions that pan out. The Economist magazine is held up as some kind of Holy book, but see Massimo Pigliucci's deconstruction of "the dismal science" as practiced by The Economist in: Nonsense on Stilts I really don't know where that came from, but it holds water.

It has been said that paleontology isn't a "science" because it lacks predictive value. While paleontology cannot yet make predictions about future fossilizations, the predictive power of paleontology has yielded spectacular results. Why do you think Neil Schubin knew exactly where to look to find Tiktaalik roseae? Because evolutionary biology combined with the known dates of lobed finned fossil fish, and early amphibians were known to a high degree of accuracy. Der.

I am really getting off-base here. Shorter post: Chomsky and science 1, planet wrecking Capitalists, 0.

Bullshit about The Great Barrier Reef...missing all key points!

Stupid as is Stupid Doesn't..or some such horseshit. I thought Gump was way over-rated.

This article seems --if you don't ACTUALLY READ IT--to state that The Great Barrier Reef handles climate change with aplomb. The study only focused on cooling climates during periods of glaciation. That's not what's happening today. The reef is dying! It's not just about warmer sea water surface temperatures, it's about UV levels--remember the ozone holes?--and it's about rate of change, and still more, it's about pollution of the oceanic waters. I'm not going to beat the CO2 drum any longer. The VoA is a very odd place to find anything science related.

The headline is entirely misleading. I find this very troubling on a day when GOP tapped EPA heads are overwhelmingly calling for far more to be done about the issue of climate change than even current oval office sitter, Barack Obama has called for..astounding! This is the kind of stuff that gives my forehead wrinkles. No, it's not ALL due to me bashing the front of my skull into various harder things. It's also due to decades of eyebrow raising due to the apparent ignorance of others.

Amazon misses by a bit, Apple misses by miles.

I live in the tech. world. Unlike many people that write about technology stuff, I have patents.

This alone does not give me super powers, but I do have street cred.

Apple launched a new iMac(?) today with some specs that are circa 2006. A 1.4Ghz i5 mobile processor in a desktop. The mobile i5 1.4Ghz processor has about as much FPU performance as a 2006 Athlon X2 5600+. One can infer that since Intel has not made an all new architecture here, that a 1.4Ghz dual core i5 will deliver FPU performance even lower than the venerated and decrepit old AMD processor. If the "Apple club for poor performance per dollar spent" crowd comes through, they'll eat this thing up. After all, it's a mere 1,100USD.

For that level of performance you can buy a Dell XPS box with a blazingly fast real desktop CPU in a real tower and GPU AND a 24" 1920x1200 IPS panel that will demolish the iMac in any benchmark that anyone cares to throw at both machines. The Dell can often be had very well equipped for 649USD and the monitor for 375USD. The Dell machine will be roughly a billion times faster when performing intensive tasks. Okay, so that's hyperbole. I cannot give you--my gentle reader--an apples to apples comparison, because no i5 processor has ever been delivered with such a low clock speed.

One can state with a fair degree of accuracy that overall system thoughput on the Dell i7-4770 machine will be approximately 4x as fast in multi-threaded applications.

You'd have to love those rotten apples to bite into that fruit.



Amazon misses the boat by 50USD per phone and picks sub-par carrier at launch.

Amazon new Fire Phone. The phone itself seems evolutionary, not revolutionary. 3D phones don't seem to have many advocates. So, the phone is 3D. Sort of a yawn at this juncture. What Amazon failed to do was execute on two fronts. First, they have partnered with ATT which is a disaster in my area. What Amazon should have done was to make the phone available on every carrier. No doubt, ATT is getting major kickbacks for every user that signs up a Fire phone with a 2 year 'agreement.'

Secondly, they missed the price point I said earlier that they had to hit to get penetration. 150USD for the device. This is what you're going to get with your new phone. A provider that has spotty nationwide coverage, a phone with a perverted version of the Android OS, and one year of 'free' Amazon Prime. OH! And 3D that no one's really going to use on a 4.7" screen.

Unlike the new iMac, the Fire phone is at least innovative. Amazon, more than any other tech. co. of late, has been at the fore of newer, better, faster.

The Amazon Fire has millions of built-in users. Still, the phone is hobbled by price sensitivity, and carrier choice.

The iMac should be DOA, but the legions of Apple fans may buy this out of intellectual laziness. It doesn't take a semiconductor engineer to see that this is a set of VASTLY overpriced hardware, in a market where price sensitivity has always been a major concern. The new, slower, cheaper, iMac isn't even a product that loyal Apple eaters should love.

Water, water, everywhere!

Hidden Ocean Discovered on Saturnian Moon. I think it's pretty cool that inference of the ocean was derived at by gravitational anomalies in the Saturnian moon's gravitational fields. This is why curious persons everywhere should support at least unmanned spacecraft and flights. If not for the Cassini spacecraft's close fly-by, this unexpected result would have gone unnoticed. Basic science doesn't always yield unexpected results, but compared to all other human activities, science yields more unexpected results than all others combined.

More water news via scientific inquiry..

"Oceans" of water found locked within earth. No, this isn't the biblical "waters of the deep," but it's almost a certainty that religious types will try to spin it as such. Go read the article. I am literate enough in these areas simplify things further with accuracy, but for any reader of this blog, it's a easy read.

More water...

Namib Beetle Inspires C nanotube device to remove H2O from driest places on earth Carbon nanotubes are a highly interesting substance. In the water collection iteration, C nanotubes are set up as a hydrophilic, and hydrophobic array. Call me a geek--you won't be the first--but "water-loving" and "water-repelling" are clunky terms. In one of my personal favorite uses of C nanotubes, they are used to Instantaneously boot computers by enabling system RAM to enter the non-volatile state, and to replace all manner of flash memory. A very disruptive technology. Sorry about the digression into other nanotube technologies.

With that, I, am. outta. Here.

I may have Lyme..No, seriously.

After my tirade about Lyme or borrelosis, or whatever medicine ultimately calls the typically tick vectored disease, your humble blogger may have been infected. I removed an adult I. scapularis earlier today. I cannot fathom how the tick got through my multi-layered tick defenses. Nonetheless, the little arachnid got through, and 'got me good.' I am on doxycycline prophylaxis right now.

The offending tick was DOA. This is where reality and the CDC part company. The tick was confirmed as an adult, and while I was telling my arachnid tale of woe, the APRN concurred with my observation that adult I. scapularis do indeed have the capacity to transmit Lyme to humans. Her other degree is as a PhD entomologist.

While it was no fun BEING the news, it was good to see what laypersons here in NH have long suspected--and some knew--borne out. I should note that my vitals were checked, and my BP was high at 150/80, and my temperature was low at 87.6 F. Since my visit, I have checked my BP, and it now reads 119/66. Stressors have always given me spikes in BP that are short in duration.

Given my low temperature reading, it is likely that the possible infection hasn't yet provoked a typical immune response. This was good news. The bite area(center of sternum)shows much inflammation, and the possible beginnings of the erythema migrans rash typical of Lyme.

I knew I was at risk, so I did everything that I could to lessen the likelihood of getting bitten. Okay, the one thing that I refuse to do is to stay indoors. Here's what I have done:

1) Applied permethrin to clothing and gear

2) Applied 40% DEET to boots, pants, and exposed skin

3) Performed tick checks after each outdoor excursion

4) Stayed out of areas with leaf litter and other tick harboring areas

5) Showered after going out of doors

There appears but one way to avoid tick bites: stay inside. I am still befuddled as to how the tick managed to burrow so deeply in what must have been a relatively sort amount of time.

Ticks are supposed to be an indicator of a healthy ecosystem. I agree with this right up to the time I get bitten. I am no alarmist, but the incidence of vector-borne diseases of all kinds are on the rise in the US. Will a time come when every first-aid kit will contain antibiotics? How about anti-virals, like Acyclovir? I'll be honest, I keep a stock of Chlorhexidine gluconate handy for an AB wash. I don't use it frivolously. If the faeces ever contacts the oscillator--and I for one, am not counting on it--preparation will be key to short and long-term survival.

Don't read this and think I'm an anti-government crackpot. It is not the continuance or fear of government that motivates my preparatory activities. I'd like to see humanity reduced by say 70%. I just don't want to be in that 70%.

Less weirdness later.

Still on a vector-borne disease "crusade"

Okay, so "crusade" isn't at all accurate. I'm a pretty hardcore materialist. It is not that I am wedded to an entirely naturalistic cosmic view of everything. Given extraordinary evidence to support a god or gods belief, I would shift my cosmic perspective without issue, or comment.

Moving back to the point... After yesterday's post, I decided to look around for Lyme information. I struck tick vector gold!

Discover Magazine gives Frontline Coverage of Tick stuff. Sorry about the use of "Frontline" while posting a link, but it does work.

Discover Mag has much more than the fascinating article referenced above. If you are at all interested in this subject, be sure to read the comments. Kerry Clark, who likely has done more than any other individual to bring southern Lyme to the fore engages reader's comments. The medical community in the southern US is as bad as the medical community here in NH as to the realities of tick-borne diseases.

Also on Discover:

A fairly comprehensive treatment of the whole Lyme debacle.

The CDC(Centers for Disease Control) appear to finally coming around to the prevalence of Lyme.

CDC reports that Lyme is ten times more common than previous estimates. Ten times more prevalent. Still, even given the latest data on Lyme, the CDC is sill sticking to the old data that 95% of Lyme cases are confined to the usual suspects geographically speaking. Looking at this table, New Hampshire had the highest incidence per state on a per capita basis in 2012. That the infection rate my be ten times the number of reported cases is alarming. Even though much of what the CDC has been shown to be wrong, here's the CDC's clearinghouse for Lyme. Once again, science is way ahead of the official governmental stance. There has been much made of the medical community's slow response to Lyme and possibly Lyme-like disease. The offending bacilli are of the Borrelia genus.

In addition to the above clusterf*ck, every source I can find states that Lyme is spread only via the nymph stage of I. scapularis. This is completely wrong. Adult I. scapularis ticks are also vectors to human disease. How do I know this? It's pretty simple. My brother Bryan contracted Lyme from an adult I. scapularis. We know this to be true, as the feeding tick was collected, and two labs confirmed the species, the stage of development, and the presence of Borrelia burgdorferi; the only bacterium currently acknowledged by the medical community to transmit Lyme to humans. Discover is correct. The debate over Lyme or Lyme-like illness borders on being insane. With migratory birds, and other species that keep the disease circulating in nature having no respect for state and national boundaries, the affected areas are truly largely unknown. Anyone that gets bitten by a tick of any species in any area that has a reasonable chance of harboring tick borne vector disease should be given the option of at least a short, prophylactic course of antibiotics. That's how the medical community should be handling this issue.

One more thing, bedbugs are another potential Lyme vector. Read the bit on other Borrelia species found in the paragraph titled: Bedbugs and Infectious Disease, and go to bottom of page for an account of a potential transmission.

The more we know about Lyme, the worse the picture gets. The funding for reasearch for what looks like a national health crisis--that's only likely to get worse--is astonishingly paltry.

If you develop symptoms that are typical of Lyme disease, try a physician. Given the rise of treatment resistant bacteria, many physicians are loathe to prescribe a course of antibiotics. While this is typically a good call, there are times--and this is certainly one of them--where the medical community is miles behind the data. Living in one of the densest areas for confirmed cases of Lyme, I wouldn't leave the office without a script. When a colleague had to have a pacemaker implanted due to a missed case of Lyme, it alters your outlook on these things.

Pound the damned table if you must. Advanced Lyme is nothing you want.

I got nothin' today...Wait! I have vector-borne diseases

No science news today. I'm certain that stuff that's actual science, not the application of science, which is technology was reported on today. I could probably really fudge another post(as I did last night), but I would much rather post less, and offer either more information than even that reported by "science news" sites. I was involved all day with applied botany. Lifting and toting many bags of softwood mulch and digging holes in mother terra can be quite tiring in ninety degree(F) weather with relatively high levels of relative humidity.

I also applied mulch, watered many plants, and did other planty things.

We also feed thirty-two(so far) identied species of avian life, and I did time aiding all those hundreds of individual birds by building and putting up a stagimg perch where the birds can hang whilst waiting a turn at the wild bird feeders.

Other yard/garden work was performed as well. I am something of a non-expert on Platycodon grandiflorus cultivars, and while not a plant completist, one that is as engaged as I am in gardening should learn as much as possible about their favorite plants. Balloonflower(Platycodon grandiflorus) is my area of study. I am also engaged in building up wildlife habitats on my little part of the world, and have been pretty successful in habitat restoration efforts.

I now count as garden/woodland regulars more amphibians and reptiles than I encountered as a youth in a more 'wild' setting.

Well, that does bring up a science related topic of concern: tick-borne pathogens.

7 April was World Health day, and this year's focus was on vector-borne diseases. I do not believe that one thinks of New Hampshire USA as a hotbed of vector-borne pathogens. Even twenty years ago this wasn't a real concern. The times have certainly changed.

The medical community was really behind the curve in NH. While we have the highest per capita incidence of Lyme, the medical community even five years ago did not generally recognize the risk. In the past five years the standard treatment for tick bites has gone from a wait-and-see if Lyme develops, to the now standard for ANY tick bite of a three day course of doxycycline(as long as doxycycline is not contraindicated), to the standard twenty-one day course if Lyme has been confirmed. I found AN article, which while only a year old, is no longer truly current.

Other rick-borne pathogens in New Hampshire:

But Lyme disease is not always the correct diagnosis.

"A lot of people are aware of Lyme, but they're not as aware of Babesiosis, Bartonellosis and Ehrlichiosis," Giard said. "Those have a devastating effect on people, and we're really concerned. So it's very important that when people go to get tested that they ask to be tested for all those tick-borne diseases, which are at epidemic levels."

Babesiosis is a human disease related to malaria parasites. It is associated with voles, chipmunks, mice and shrews. The white-footed mouse is the primary reservoir host. The Blacklegged tick is the main vector. Most human cases occur during summer.

Symptoms range from mild to life-threatening, including fever, fatigue, chills, sweats, headache, and more. Severe symptoms are more likely in people who are immunosuppressed, have had their spleen removed, and/or are elderly. Onset of symptoms is one to six weeks after the tick bite.

"When we test in our office, we're testing Lyme as well as those other organisms to determine if someone has been infected by a tick-borne bite," Giard said. "And I like saying 'tick-borne bite' because we've had patients come in whose symptomatology really points to Babesiosis rather than Lyme. We treat it as if we're treating malaria."

"Babesiosis in particular is quite nasty," Giard says, noting that it can enlarge the spleen and liver.

Giard retests patients every six hours because of the way these organism shed their DNA.

Bartonellosis can infect humans, mammals and a wide range of wild animals, according to lymedisease.org. Its bacteria are known to be carried by fleas, body lice and ticks. Scientists suspect that ticks are a source of infection in some human cases of Bartonellosis. Some people who recall being bitten by ticks have been co-infected with Lyme and Bartonella.

According to lymedisease.org, Bartonellosis is often mild, but in serious cases it can affect the whole body. Early signs are fever, fatigue, headache, poor appetite, and an unusual, streaked rash. Swollen glands are typical, especially around the head, neck and arms.

Ehrlichiosis is the name for several animal and human diseases. Victims usually report flu-like symptoms — headache, fever, muscle aches, fatigue — and sometimes gastro-intestinal symptoms or rash. Symptoms typically appear five to 10 days after being bitten by an infected tick. The lone star tick is the primary vector.

All in all, a rather sobering set of prospects.

I would be remiss if I didn't include Hantavirus, an often fatal bio-safety level four pathogen, with the white-footed Deer Mouse the most common vector, as well as a whole host of recent mosquito vector diseases.

Jamestown Canyon Virus And Powassan Virus are now found in NH. The former has a mosquito vector, and the latter a tick vector. We have been dealing with Eastern Equine Encephalitis(mosquito vector, transmissable to humans via mosquito feeding) and West Nile Virus(Mosquito vector) for over a decade.

I'm sure I have missed a few. In early June this year, it has been tick-borne disease that has garnered most of the coverage as our fierce winter--and subsequent spring runoff was great for tick survival, but--according to those in the field--really kept the mosquito counts down. No science, but lots of outdoor perils to be aware of..of course, prevention is the real key to stopping vector-borne disease. Mosquito repellent high in DEET should keep you free of the mosquito vector pathogens.

In contradiction to the popular--and demonstrably wrong--views about DEET being an effective tick repellent, it is simply not so. DEET is a poor tick repellent, Permethrin is a great tick repellent. I have personally fairly saturated my very light tan boots with forty percent DEET repellent and have watched black legged ticks(Ixodes scapularis..primary vector for Lyme and a few other pathogens to humans) crawl right across my boots as if I was wearing no repellent. This was at most thirty minutes after application. These were the poppy seed sized nymphs that are the most active feeders on humans, and the primary transmitters to us. DEET being effective for controlling ticks may work for some subset of the population somewhere, but here in central New Hampshire, Permethrin is the safe choice.

I would be remiss if I didn't say a bit about "bug" repellent safety. These are toxins. I cannot state with any degree of certainty that these agents are safe to use. I have read everything that I can find about the relative safeties of these two agents, and can draw no firm conclusions. Read all that you can, but consider this a warning, NO 'natural' products I have tried provide effective safety. Living here, I have tried dozens to date. One more thing, once bitten you are at risk. The longer an infected tick feeds the greater the hazard, but no one living where tick-borne disease agents exist is ever one hundred percent safe once bitten. Staying out of areas where ticks are known to be found isn't a great option. Please do not take my word for any of this. Consider it a starting point with which to conduct your own research. Have fun in nature, but try and lessen your overall risks.

Science Quiz Wrong Answer Buzzer and Mathematical Models of Evolution

First off, I reveal my one error in the CS Monitor's Scientific Literacy Quiz.

I could not recall the formula for computing acceleration in Newtons. If you take the quiz, you'll come across the 200 gram question..That's the one that got me. NO. I'm not giving you the answer. Please be honest. No resorting to Stephen Wolfram's Alpha search to glean answers. If you do this, you reinforce everything negative found in The Shallows. Don't be shallow. Wolfram Alpha was called "the coolest thing I've ever seen on the 'Net" by an astrophysics major at Hah-vid. That's Harvard to everyone not a Kennedy. We geeks know all the coolest stuff on the 'Net.

So now you know that I forget stuff I learned in HS physics. Shame that.

Okay, too much about my long-term memor..where was I going with this?

MIT Has the coolest stuff on this coast. Those CalTech kids no doubt have their biases as well. In strolling about the MIT Press journals I came across the Journal Of Computational Evolution. One would think that someone that did a summer at the venerated Cambridge, MA school would get a free sub. to a few journals..so what if I did work there in 1984. But no, I'd have to cough up $39/yr for a sub. Of course I can get the IEEE stuff gratis, but I am a member of the IEEE! A quick glance at this free article illustrates just how far CE modeling has come.

Using MatLab or Stephen Wolfram's Mathematica(there's S. Wolfram again)--simply for relative ease of development--the current algorithmic models are not only powerful tools for analyzing noted changes, but have predictive power for future courses of genetic mutations and subsequent expressions reaching all the way to phenotype. So, what does all this mean?

For my purposes, it all equates to irrefutable evidence for the fact of naturalistic evolution, and yes, toying with the equations is sort of fun.

I'll revisit this once I get some sleep, and after further cogitation of the consequences of the various algorithms.

Even the most casual observer will likely be shocked by the sophistication of these models. I find them almost endlessly fascinating, but I fear that I am wired differently than the balance of humanity.

I very likely posted this too quickly. I did not fully examine the algorithms in close enough detail to provide any useful commentary. For that I apologize.

Unlike the media, I'd much rather be accurate, than first with an observation.

Hey Maw, the Youngin's Getting Dirty Again..That's A Good Thing!

It has been said that the Internet is causing heavy search engines users to think less deeply. In fact, I just read the book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, It's not as corny as the title might lead one to believe. It concerns itself with neuroplasticity. While this is, in and of itself factual, the good news is that out search engine transformed noodles can--thankfully--be switched back to modes of heavier lifting in very short order.

So, just what does this have to the topic at hand? Good question. The answer is that it really doesn't have a thing to do with dirty misbehaving rugrats. However, I do have a method. The Internet is a great big messy database of some useful, but mostly it seems, useless information. That said, the Internet allows hacks like me to tunnel tight into hard science journals. That, gentle reader is the reason for the tortuous route I've had you folliow to get to the heart of the matter.

Without further ado, this segment of "as my stomach turns" burrows right into The Journal Of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. Here's where those carpet roaming fresh humans come into play.

Yes, the link gives you access to the full journal paper. Is that so shallow? Nah. For those not inclined to read dry scholarly treatments, the paper can be summed in a few simple words.

Let your infants get some exposure to allergens and bacteria. In other words, let 'em get dirty! The payoff can be enormous. Heck, I'll even quote from the paper:

Methods

The Urban Environment and Childhood Asthma study examined a birth cohort at high risk for asthma (n = 560) in Baltimore, Boston, New York, and St Louis. Environmental assessments included allergen exposure and, in a nested case-control study of 104 children, the bacterial content of house dust collected in the first year of life. Associations were determined among environmental factors, aeroallergen sensitization, and recurrent wheezing at age 3 years.

Results

Cumulative allergen exposure over the first 3 years was associated with allergic sensitization, and sensitization at age 3 years was related to recurrent wheeze. In contrast, first-year exposure to cockroach, mouse, and cat allergens was negatively associated with recurrent wheeze (odds ratio, 0.60, 0.65, and 0.75, respectively; P ≤ .01). Differences in house dust bacterial content in the first year, especially reduced exposure to specific Firmicutes and Bacteriodetes, was associated with atopy* and atopic wheeze. Exposure to high levels of both allergens and this subset of bacteria in the first year of life was most common among children without atopy or wheeze.

Conclusions

In inner-city environments children with the highest exposure to specific allergens and bacteria during their first year were least likely to have recurrent wheeze and allergic sensitization. These findings suggest that concomitant exposure to high levels of certain allergens and bacteria in early life might be beneficial and suggest new preventive strategies for wheezing and allergic diseases.

I know what you're thinking.."Hey, this study only applies to urban cradle crawlers. I live in the sticks." Fear not uptight parent. One can certainly apply the data here to your rural papooose filler.

A really close look at the data is quite revealing. Essentially, the younger the child is during exposures, the healthier they are as they mature. At least to the age of three to four years. Exposure at three years or older gives the expected result of the child having more allergic reactions, and susceptibility to bacterially induced wheezing and atopy.* At first blush it seems that the study's authors were expecting a different outcome. Even upon further reflection this could indeed be the case. The inverse relationships between early exposures and later lack of symptoms is both a bit counterintuitive and refeshingly positive. Human endogenous immune responses continue to amaze and delight. Okay, maybe not you, but me.

* Atopy is the tendency to be "hyperallergic." Atopy has a strong genetic component. In this study, one can infer that the atopic reactions are wheezing and allergen related asthma.

Take The Science Literacy Test, and Terran Train wrecks!

Of all the places to find a very basic Science Literacy Test "The 'Christian Science' Monitor" seems a most unlikely place. The test is pretty short, and fun if you know a bit of science. Your humble author got one wrong in the test(perhaps that's why I'm feeling so humble today). Nevertheless, I scored in a rarified segment of folks geeky enough to bother finishing the whole test. Tomorrow I'll tell you which question I got wrong, and why.

Go ahead and take the test. I promise it's really easy save for two or three questions. Then we'll compare blunders.

In real news, Moon Rocks Provide More Evidence that our moon's formation was indeed due to an earth and other unknown(yet oddly named)* planetary mass 'sized' bodily collision. Her name was Theia. This really does explain a great deal about why our largest natural satellite is so massive in relation to its 'parent,' and to the paucity of water and volatile compounds. The lack of isotopic differences between the bodies--the moon and earth--while pointing to a well, common ancestry, isn't definitive proof as other planets' moons are thought to have formed alongside their more more massive parents.

The new evidence shows a difference a 12 PPM of in oxygen isotopes between the earth-moon system. The difference most likely points to that interloper Theia colliding with the earth around 4.5 billion years ago. This does beg the question that if such a massive object collided with the earth, and the crust hadn't yet formed, why can the two bodies show differing amounts of oxygen isotopes in crust rocks and minerals? The moon's surface is--with good reason--believed to have been locked in place at the time of it's genesis.

The oldest dated crust on earth is 4.4 billion years old, so the impactor's influence on terran crust would be negated by the 100 million year age difference. Still, there are almost certainly evidences yet to be discovered. One can imagine that the blast ejecta would have orbited the young earth for a great many years. If a truly early meteorite could be found with the lunar isotopic oxygen signature--or better yet--an earthly and unknown other ratio, that would almost certainly seal the case as far as the scientific community is concerned. I suspect that such early meteorites have either been eroded away, or subsumed in tectonic action, but to dismiss the possibility seems more than a bit premature.

Wouldn't it be grand if such a find were made?

I have made no claim to be a scientist--other then in semi-conductor theory and parallel computing--so I am perhaps wildly speculating, but my lifelong love affair with geology hasn't been neglectful of continued study in the field. If some kind reader wishes to send me back to uni. I promise, I will not stop working until I have a post-grad degree in geology. Heck, I promise to work so hard as at my MS, that anything shy of a doctorate will not satisfy me.

*I stopped being amazed as to why humans have to name pretty much everything. The naming of one of the earth impactors seems a bit weird to me. Why doesn't the Chicxulub impactor have a name, when it is almost certainly the event which sounded the final death knell for the dinosaurs and lead to the 5th mass extinction event at the K-T Boundary? We have mountains of evidence for that event, and given our penchant for naming everything, why not that impactor? This is almost certainly THE event that gave rise to the age of mammalian dominance, and hence to us. How can the asteroid not have a name? Okay, I'm overdone.

This is a test

Testing, one two..ad infinitum, ad nasuseum. Yep. I've swapped in a bog standard template. Until I can re-enable commenting and all the other stuffs on the Blog, this Template will serve as a very easily read, very minimalist page. I do like the minimalist approach, but it could use some stupid CSS tricks to make it more "me."

Blog Name Change and some Tech. Babble

First of all, I am changing the blog's name. I know not what at present, but I don't want a "me, too" type of name. I have been working on the new Stylesheet, but Blogger and "don't be evil" Google seem to always find some way to break my CSS. If you look at my page source, you'll see that there is a lot of perfectly usable CSS that is maddeningly difficult to incorporate it into the latest Blogger software. Oh, it's easy enough to dump in there, but it doesn't display the way it would on, say, a less script heavy format. My pages used to display wonderfully. I used to keep my CSS current with Blogger updates, so all it took was a wee bit of tampering to have my pages appear well across browsers of any sort. I may simply open a new Blog to use as a CSS testbed. That really reeks of a disingenuous use of an ostensibly free resource, but what's a custom CSS developer to do? Too much about that.

In technology today, I found some interesting stuff.

Apple unveils new Prog. Lang.

WIRED reports programmers went "nuts" over the presentation. I yawned. Apple should support open standards. Ruby and Python are proven, and developers like working with them. "Objective-C" is new-ish, and doesn't seem to offer anything in the way of newer, better, faster, stronger, codebase development for guys like me, for instance. For almost half a year, I have been working on a email plug-in that might revolutionize the way in which people deal with a certain aspect of email nuisances. I have written it in Extensible Markup Language(XML), as well as in every language that requires special case handling to account for the differences in mail clients and/or operating systems. Sorry about that digression. Getting back on track.. I hope Apple coders like the new language, but Apple should have made the best of all moves, and used an open programming language. OpenCL and OpenGL simply aren't that open. This is really only an issue for game developers and those really tweaking UIs, but still, come on! These things are only truly open if they're supported at the hardware level, not through porting, or worse, emulation. Eek!

In other tech. news, it finally looks like Amazon is FINALLY going to be launching the long rumored "smartphone" on 18, June. I wish Bezos and Amazon well. It looks to be a 3D phone..I really don't know why that's so interesting. It very much reminds me of Douglas Adams's pronouncement: "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea..." In all seriousness, smartphones aren't all that. Call me a techno-snob if you wish. Many others have. So the phone is going to have projection capabilities. It seems only natural as Amazon had to do SOMETHING to differentiate itself from the pack. Of course Amazon does have something of a built-in userbase of millions and millions of shoppers. My forecast is that Amazon is will use existing hardware platforms--a new processor design and any attendant major tweaks to the "support staff" would not have escaped this blogger's attention--and will sell for at most 150 USD...at launch.

There was a lot more that I noted yesterday and today, but this is not a technology blog. I get enough of that at the office.

Science later!

My, But That's a Big One

No. Not that. We're talking about exo-planets FKA "Extra-solar Planets"."

Newly Discovered Exoplanet 17 Times More Massive Than Earth

Okay, if you read the article it states--I kid you not--that the newly discovered exoplanet is "17 times heavier than our planet." Heavier? For whom are these people writing? I really feel like banging my forehead into my keyboard. Are we that mathematically and scientifically challenged to have mass wrongly conveyed as weight in order for people to understand just what has been discovered?

Sigh.

The discovery itself is interesting for a whole host of reasons.

I'll choose two for illustrative purposes:

Firstly, theorists weren't certain that a 'rocky' planet could have this much mass and mot be a gas giant..like say, Jupiter. Well, I wonder just how this theory(more like speculation) was arrived at. It's foolish to base prejudices on what we see in our little insignificant eight planet system. One has to believe that more massive rocky planets have yet to be discovered. It seems to me that--mathematics aside--since the new planet "Kepler-10c" has an orbit very close to it's star, that hydogen and helium would have literally gravitated to the more massive star than a close, less massive object. I'm sure that some variant of the inverse square equation would put that right.

Secondly, if the scientific community is correct about the age of Kepler-10c--a mere 3 billion years after the universe's 'creation'--, heavier elements were available for planetary formation and much more interesting forms of chemistry. Very early life, anyone? This doesn't really surprise me as really massive hot burning stars have very short lives indeed. Lots of supernovae equate to lots of heavier elements.

I'm sort of shocked that the astronomical community has such a parochial view of things. This Pale Blue Dot(much thanks to the late Carl Sagan) is truly inconsequential on the galactic scale, much less the universal. Provincialism it seems, is not only the purview of politicians and other assorted charlatans.

Please don't get me wrong. I hold the scientific community in the highest regard possible for human beings. Nature, on the other hand, humbles us all the time, and the surprises that this discovery illuminate serve to show us just how wedded our thinking is to this insignificant speck of the universe. That said, it's the only place we have. We make our stand right here. That, in a great many ways, is a shame.

No Surprise Here: Humans, not climate, account for Disappearance of Pleistocene Megafauna

Humans, not climate, to blame for Ice Age-era disappearance of large mammals, study concludes

This poor author would have been shocked if the research pointed in ANY other direction. Heck, even though I am but a lowly semiconductor engineer, I have long thought that the latest mass extinction event was due to human activity; and just not since the Maori dined on the last Moa. We're apex predators, and the extinction vector(time of extinction and human migratory activities) of large land faunae just fit too well to dismiss the most likely factor in the onset of the Holocene Extinction Event. One could further speculate at this point that the period under the latest finding likely does not extend far enough back into time, as pre-modern hominids were likely also thinning populations of large terrestrial vertebrates to the point of no longer being able to sustain mating practices. With very few exceptions, the notion of the "noble savage" is wholly unwarranted.

I have been arguing the reason behind the megafauna extinction point with people in the field for several decades. Some have been in total agreement, others outright denial. What is really no longer open for debate is that "we" are causing, and being witness to, the sixth mass extinction event known to afflict this planet.

It is my hope that we are smart enough to start to curb species extinctions now. Our history here isn't at all promising.

The one thing we should give our children is a planet worthy of their custodial duty. It is our collective duty to make this a reality. Whilst my fingers are crossed, the rainforests burn, and the oceans become less able to trap atmospheric carbon as both surface temperatures rise, and plankton dies. There's no reason to be optimistic. But still, we must do whatever we can to mitigate the decline of the planet's toxification and subsequent species destruction.