Couldn't help thinking of Dian Chapman when I read this:
“It's Good Weather for a Race”:
"because when it comes to their service and sacrifice, warm words and gestures are more than warranted, but they're not nearly enough."
People exposed to the 1957 flu pandemic may have some immunity to the current H1N1.
Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors' blog: Swine Flu Genome Hints at Milder Virus:
"Ralph Tripp, an influenza expert at the University of Georgia, said that his early analysis of the virus' protein-making instructions suggested that people exposed to the 1957 flu pandemic--which killed up to 2 million people worldwide--may have some immunity to the new strain. That could explain why older people have been spared in Mexico, where the swine flu has been most deadly."
Swine Flu Genes From Pigs Only, Not Humans or Birds | Wired Science:
"‘The new neuraminidase gene that came in from Eurasian swine is one we’ve never before seen circulating in humans,’ said Rambaut. ‘That’s one of the reasons it’s spreading rapidly. Very few people will have any immunity to this particular combination, which is what gives the concern that this will be a pandemic rather than just a normal seasonal flu outbreak. It remains to be seen how much and to what extent there is existing immunity.’"
"The new swine flu virus appears to have done more swapping than usual, with genetic segments from four different sources: North American swine influenza viruses, North American avian influenza viruses, one gene segment from a human influenza virus, and two gene segments that are normally found in swine influenza viruses in Asia and in Europe.
"Parts of it are from the original 1918 virus, parts are similar to the current circulating H1N1 strain from seasonal flu," says Sasisekharan..."
Ford finally beat my 1990 Honda CRX :)
Ford Fusion hybrid hypermiles, goes 1,445 miles on a single tank:
" On the 1,445.7-mile trip, the Ford Fusion hybrid was pushed to an average of 81.5 mpg."
An earlier post expressed skepticism about how effectively masks prevent transmission of flu. Now a clinical trial has shown they can prevent transmission of disease from others to the wearer:
Worried about the flu? Get a mask: Scientific American Blog:
"All of the participants were initially healthy but at risk for catching viruses from their children, who had documented cases of respiratory illness. The researchers found that, after a week, the non-mask wearers were four times more likely to catch a variety of viruses, including the common cold and flu, than those who wore them properly (meaning they strapped them on whenever they happened to be in the same room as their sick children). The masks appeared to be equally effective."
A few comments on pandemic influenza:
"The acting-director of the CDC has already said: "There are things that we see that suggest that containment is not very likely." That is a remarkably candid statement. I think it's very clear that the cat is out of the bag."
Fear, anger and fatalism over swine flu in Mexico:
"But it may be too late to contain the outbreak, given how widespread the known cases are. If the confirmed deaths are the first signs of a pandemic, then cases are probably incubating around the world by now, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, a pandemic flu expert at the University of Minnesota.
No vaccine specifically protects against swine flu, and it is unclear how much protection current human flu vaccines might offer.
In Mexico City's Zona Rosa neighborhood, teenagers with spiky hair and tight jeans laughed at the danger.
'People are giving too much importance to something that isn't that big of a deal,' said Oscar Zarate, 19, shouting over the loud music and the jostling crowd outside a packed night club."
"Very little is known about the benefits of wearing facemasks and respirators to help control the spread of pandemic flu."
In an article published in 1919 that details the progression of the 1918 influenza epidemic at Camp Cody, New Mexico, the authors describe a parallel outbreak of pneumonial disease among their laboratory guinea pigs.
A Little Air Pollution Boosts Vegetation’s Carbon Uptake / Science News:
"‘Surprisingly, the effects of atmospheric pollution seem to have enhanced global plant productivity by as much as 25 percent from 1960 to 1999,’ Mercado notes."
Found this excellent introduction via Looking for quotes about Buildout.
Developing Django apps with zc.buildout:
"...
Finally, Buildout generated a bin/python interpreter."
An Introduction to W3C Widgets:
"The king of browser compatibility tables, ppk, recently posted an introduction to W3C Widgets:
"
Gratis ago ad Ted Leung for posting his summary of Lang.NET 2009. It seems like every time I see one of his summaries, my reading and projects lists grow.
Newspeak and Hopscotch
More reading here. Ted also links indirectly to the video of Gilad Bracha's talk.
Powershell
[Jeffrey Snover] seemed to think that UNIX shells could gain a fair amount of PowerShell’s capabilities by recognizing that pipes ship bytestreams, adopting a data format (like JSON or XML) for those byte streams, and proceeding from there. That might be true technically, but that would be a huge cultural change for that community.
/usr/bin_json/ sitting alongside /usr/bin. The first prototypes of the utilities therein could be based on David Beazley's tutorial "A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency". (Start at slide 34 of the presentation slides.)[Erik Meijer] then used mindless symbol pushing to demonstrate that [IEnumerable and IObservable] were duals of each other, and that they obeyed the rules for monads.
I suspect that this is the only conference I will go to all year where Macs are the minority.
(My earlier note is here.)
.:: Aero-News Network: The Aviation and Aerospace World's Daily/Real-Time News and Information Service ::.:
"Rex Tippetts of Grand Junction's Walker Field (GJT) estimates he'll need 2,000 additional security checks and badges. 'It's out of control. We have a large maintenance operation here with 400 people. We have a large interagency fire-fighting operation here, with maintenance facilities.'
To defray costs of the programs, pilots needing access to the ramp at Grand Junction will be charged $130 each for badges... which will not be honored at any other airport."
"Under the current version of the directive, pilots based [emph. added] at air carrier airports are required to undergo a security threat assessment and receive a security badge in order to continue to have unescorted access to their airports."
Ford plans to increase efficiency by dramatically reducing weight:
"Ford plans to cut 500 to 750 pounds of flab from each automobile that it redesigns. A reduction of weight on this magnitude should allow Ford to reduce the size of the engine powering the vehicle, further increasing fuel efficiency. "
I recently bought a new Mac Mini, and wanted to connect my ~ 2 year-old Seagate 500GB drive[1] to it. I'd hooked up a couple of other drives via USB without incident. But the Seagate started giving me headaches right away.
Folders on the Seagate kept disappearing. When I'd try to disconnect the drive to cycle power on it, the Finder would report that it was still in use. If I went ahead and cycled power, I'd get a nasty warning dialog, but the drive would come back undamaged.
The system logs showed that the kernel started getting read errors on the drive just before each disappearing act.
Sometimes the problems would start almost as soon as the drive was recognized by the system. Sometimes they'd appear more than eight hours after the drive came online.
I've used this Seagate for a couple of years with no problems, on an iMac, via Firewire 400. I tried connecting it to the iMac again, this time via USB. No disappearing folders. Hmm.
I've read reports of Mac and Windows users having issues with Seagate drives whose firmware settings cause them to spin down after a few minutes of inactivity; they never spin back up. That doesn't seem to be the cause of this intermittent problem, but I can't rule it out.
In any case, a few days ago I ordered a Firewire 800-400 cable from Amazon, and used it to connect the Seagate to the Mac Mini's FW 800 port. So far — fingers crossed — all is well!