Geodog

SARS Watch Org 10, Geodog 1

Well, SARS Watch Org. made the #2 on Technorati interesting newcomer list today. It's strange. I am much prouder of my writing on Geodog's MT Weblog than I am of what I am doing at SARSWatch.org, which is mostly aggregating and reporting on other people's work, but as I've discussed before, for obvious reasons SARS Watch is a much more popular site. I hope that at least I am providing a public service with it.

Taking a break, sort of

Between SARSWatch.org, which is turning into close to a full time job, and attending the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference for the rest of this week, I suspect that I won't write much here over the next week. See you all at the end of the month.

Complements can keep you going

I was thinking of knocking off early tonight, then I read this:

Sarswatch is doing an extraordinary job of filtering and collecting the latest information on the disease, chronicling the story as it unfolds worldwide.

The Peking Duck

*Blush* That, plus the emails that I have been getting from China, made me feel like I have an obligation to my readers to stay up and write. I confess, I love it. I like the idea that I am doing something, no matter how small, that is useful to the world. Thank you, Richard, and thank you, all you much abused citizens of China.

Cross posted at SARSWatch.org and The Midnight Blog

Quote in comments without fear

I complained about how Robert's very nice comment visibility thingy got broken easily, by people using quotation marks in their comments, but did I fix it, or spend more time investigating it, in spite of getting several useful hints? No, I didn't do anything about it.

This week Robert very nicely implemented a fix for the problem. Quote in comments without fear.

I'm trying to decide if this makes me smart for having waited, using my personal version of the lazyweb to solve the problem, or a parasite for depending on someone else to solve my problems. I'll let you decide.

The next task is to implement Phil Ringnalda's suggestions for documenting comment usage.

Now if only someone could tell me who to implement the comment visibility feature in Rick Ellis' PHP based pMachine. I have almost a thousand visitors a day to SARSWatch.org, and almost nobody leaving comments. Hint...

Oct 9, 2003 Note: I didn't mean comment spam.

Was the fall of Saddam's statue a U.S. staged media event?

Two years ago, when friends suggested to me that the sudden rise in energy prices in California was the result of collusion between the energy companies, I laughed at them and called them conspiracy theorists. Now, as we all know, they were right. The events of the last two years, and the Orwellian management of the news by the "Americans need to watch what they say" White House, have made me a lot more open to things that I would previously have considered far-fetched.

Today I saw some evidence, linked to by Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, that the toppling of the statute of Saddam Hussein in downtown Baghdad was a staged media event, produced by the United Stated military, possibly with the assistance of Iraqi exiles flown into Iraq by the Pentagon. Do I believe this is true? I don't know, but it certainly bears more investigation. See the evidence yourself at:

A tale of two photos and The photographs tell the story...

If it is true, it is the most cynical manipulation of the media we have seen in a long time, and it will prove that, as my friends said, you can't be too cynical.

When blogging gets serious

I have been devoting way too much time to my weblog/portal on SARS, www.SARSWatch.org, so much that I had one correspondent ask me, "What happened to Geodog?" Well, Geodog is going light on tech and political blogging. It seems that I am able to fulfill a need for information and connection regarding SARS, so that is where I am devoting my blogging energies these days. However, as we saw with the issue of Agonist's plagiarism, the closer weblogging gets to journalism, the more webloggers have to deal with the same issues as journalists. This happened to me today.

Someone in China who saw SARS Watch Org sent me a blistering email, about how the Chinese government censors information on the internet, even searching bulletin boards and comments on websites for discussion of prohibited topics. The email also described how the AIDS epidemic in China was been hushed up, and how "the person told the truth to western media was put into jail for 10 years." The person's anger at the policies of the Chinese government was papable, and while the person's email invited me to quote it, the email was also full of personally revealing details.

I was faced with a journalist's quandary -- how much to report what was said, and how much to protect the person who reveals the information. Blogging is just a hobby for me, but my correspondent might be risking jail for "revealing state secrets." All of a sudden blogging felt very different. I debated what to do. Clearly, the person wanted that information published, yet I could not in good conscience just publish the whole letter. He would be a sitting duck for anybody in the Chinese hierarchy who took offense. I wasn't comfortable fictionalizing it or "changing the details to protect the innocent." I don't have any particular credibility in the news world, and once you start changing details, it is a slippery slope that ends up in places like to Jimmy's World. So I eventually decided to not to publish portions of the email, and to redact other parts. I am even now eliding some details in this writeup. But I published the rest. Was that the right decision? Have I screwed up somebody else's life?

I hope it was the right decision, and I hope that I haven't screwed up my correspondent's life. But I don't know. All of a sudden blogging seems more serious, and I miss just spouting off political opinions, or pointing to other people's cool creations on the web.

Comments encouraged.

The power of a polite question: the Gray Lady responds

It is amazing what you can find out if you ask, instead of just ranting and raving. I received this very polite email reply (bold emphasis is mine) from David Seitz of the New York Times to my question:

It has always been our policy to place articles in our archive after a period of about 1 week after initial publication (or first appearance on website). This policy has been in effect for a number of years, and was not altered last week. The archive has always been a paid-access site, and as far as I know, there are no plans to change that. Perhaps there was a redesign of the site, which I think did occur due to war coverage, that affected certain links you had been using to older content that were not requiring payment because the links had been captured prior to the articles' placement in the archive. If a link is captured prior to this time, it will hold indefinitely without payment required to view, unless a redesign of the website occurs, which it seems was the case last week.

Please see our standard response regarding linking below, in case the above was not clear:

If you would like to link to an article at www.nytimes.com, anyone following that
link will be asked to register (free) with www.nytimes.com to access the
article. Users already registered will flow right to the article. If the
linked article resides in the Premium Archive (generally more than one week
old), users will be asked to pay for access to the article. There are
instances where articles are held outside of the Premium Archive for longer
periods, but I can not tell you if that's the case for the content you're
interested in. Also, if you happen to have the URL for the article prior
to its move to the Premium Archive, it may continue to work for some time
without payment, and you are welcome to link to it--we do not have the
former URLs for articles that have passed over to the Premium Archive, so
you would have to make a note of it before that.

Please do not hesitate to contact me with any other questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

David Seitz

While not crystal clear, and not promising that all links will work for ever, it is a nice and encouraging response. I'll continue to link to the NYT. The power of a polite question is amazing. It is also a testament to the power of the net -- I was able to find the NYT linking policy FAQ and the right email address in about 5 minutes.

An open letter to the Gray Lady: Are the archives back for Blogistan's use?

According to the less than always reliable Dave Winer, the New York Times has reversed itself on its link policy. Now links into past content work again. In both cases, the changes were without public announcement or discussion, at least as far as I can find. The only thing that I have been able to find on the New York Times site is one mention in the New York Times Linking FAQ. After reading the FAQ above, I decided why not ask the New York Times itself what the story is? So I sent the following email to the person in charge of links (rights@nytimes.com) and to the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., (publisher@nytimes.com)

Dear Gray Lady,

I don't know if you know this, but there has been a lot of discussion over the internet since April 5 as to whether The New York Times' linking policy had changed. Specifically, did the New York Times change their website last week so that direct links to older content were directed to a request for payment for access to archives? Then was it changed back this week? That is what appears to be the case from the outside, yet no mention of it was made anywhere on the NYT site that I can find. A search of the site for "links" didn't turn up any related results. All that I have been able to find is the following, from your linking FAQ (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/linkingfaq.html):

Q. How long will links to New York Times articles remain before breaking? A. Links to the homepage or section fronts may remain indefinitely. Links to articles, established within the first week from the publication date will also remain stable for an indefinite length of time, unless a redesign of our website occurs that causes the links to break.

It would be nice to be told the official word. Has the policy changed, or are you planning on changing it?

I also wanted to say that while I respect your right as a content owner to do what you will with your content, it would be a shame if you put all your past content behind the archives wall. Over time it would reduce your position as the newspaper of record, as fewer people online linked to your content.

Sincerely yours,
Tim Bishop

I promise to publish any response I get. We'll see if there is any. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting, but I figured, why not ask? In the meantime, I guess I'll go back to reading the NYT first every day, but not use it exclusively for links. Dave notes that the BBC keeps links to content alive permanently, which is a good reminder that it is always good to vary reading and writing, and to get that other perspective.

Best quote yet on SARSWatch

"A disease hasn't truly arrived until it has its own blog and portal"
rsanders at Slouching toward Bethlehem

True enough. It is a strange world we live in.

The face of war

Real Live Preacher points to a truly obscene image from the War on Iraq. He says:

"This image is too sacred to support any idea about the war. This image stands above ideology. What are "idea words"?

This image is beyond our capacity to comprehend. This image stops the mind. This image causes protesters to fall silent and patriots to drop their flags. ..." and more.

For once, I disagree with him. The image doesn't make my protests fall silent. If anything, the image strengthened my desire to speak out and act out against this madness. The image is an obscenity in the true sense of the word. It can be found directly at A boy's life forever changed. Warning, strong stomach required.

What is worth doing that?

Outages

I apologize for the the site outages today and yesterday. I'm not sure what is happening, as my hosting service, www.phpwebhosting.com, seems to have crawled under a rock and died, at least as far as communication goes.

I have put my SARSWatch.org site on DR2.Net hosting. I haven't had enough experience with them yet to recommend them, and I have had two very brief outages with them in the first week of use, but when I send an email or post something on the bulletin boards, I usually get a reply within minutes, and the longest I have waited is a couple of hours. It makes a huge difference to customer satisfaction!

SARS in Berkeley? No, but how close a call?

The Daily Californian, the student newspaper of the University of California-Berkeley, reported on Friday that:

the student was back in school Thursday after sitting next to a man on a flight from Tokyo who thought he had contracted a deadly virus, ... The student was kept in the plane for two hours, along with the other passengers, after it landed at San Jose International Airport. Several passengers on the American Airlines flight complained of symptoms similar to SARS, but none of them turned out to have the deadly virus.
...
The Center for Disease Control advised the student to put herself into "temporary quarantine" until further notice, Felde said. The student stayed home from school for one day until the Center for Disease Control later reported that none of the passengers were infected with SARS, Felde said.

While I hear Dr. Hughes of the CDC's statement that "if you haven't been to Asia, there is no evidence that you are at risk at all [from SARS], stories like the one above make me wonder how close the margin of error is. California currently has 30 suspected and actual cases of SARS. What if the worse case scenario did take place, and the person on the plane was incubating the disease, and he or she was one of the super-infectors, and passed it on to the student, who then passed it on to her classmates? The school community, with lots of people packed closely together, and with each person interacting with lots of other people, is a classic environment for the rapid spread of infectious diseases, as any parent of a child in daycare rapidly learns. Would we then have to deal with 100 plus cases of SARS in Berkeley, where I live? This scenario is unlikely, and I am sure that public health authorities in the City of Berkeley and at UC Berkeley are keeping a careful eye on things, but it certainly isn't an impossible scenario. The weak link in the current system of epidemiological control is the lack of effective screening of travelers -- as long as that is the case, we are all running some risk, because outbreaks will continue to occur. We can just hope that they are rapidly contained.

Cross posted to The Berkeley Blog and SARSWatch.org

The fight in the fields

Tonight, we watched one of my all-time favorite movies, Brother from Another Planet, by the great John Sayles. While rewinding the video, I stumbled across the movieThe Fight in the Fields, Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers' Movement playing on PBS. I stayed up watching it much later than I intended to, plus being me, after it was over I got on the web to find out more about the movie, the companion book Cesar Chavez, farmworkers, and the United Farmworkers Union.

What a moving story on so many levels! While it isn't clear to me how successful the UFW has been as a union, I imagine that victories like getting Porta-Johns in the fields and getting el cortito, the short hoe, banned from the fields, have made a significant difference for farmworkers' lives. And although there is evidence conditions in America's fields haven't changed that much since Ed Murrow's classic documentary 40 years ago, Harvest of Shame, life for many of the people depicted in the film clearly has. Like the union movement in general, which gave us such innovations as the weekend, through the experience of forming the UFW, many people who had been on the outside of society found dignity, self-respect, and recognition from the rest of American society. It also gave a lot of Mexican-Americans their first experience in speaking up in public, in organizing, and in politics. The Farmworkers' struggle sparked the rise of Latino political power in California. Given that 7 out of every 10 children born in California today is born to Latino-American parents, and that Republicans went out of their way to offend Latino-Americans in the 1980's and 1990's, I imagine that the children of the first wave of organizing will be the Democratic leaders of our state in the first half of the 21st century.

The Fight in the Fields is a very well done movie, that tells a very important story in the history of California and of the US. See the trailer (quicktime). Recommended.

I miss real Democrats, like George McGovern

Do you remember when the Democrats used to stand for something? The earliest political activity I remember is going to civil rights marches and Anti-Vietnam war marches in Washington DC. The next was being the organizer for George McGovern in my Junior High School in the suburbs of DC, passing out McGovern bumper stickers and pins, and working against Junior High School Nixon organizer Stuart Birch, whose father was a Republican Party figure of some note who later got entangled with a third-rate burglary in an apartment complex in downtown Washington DC. I thought George McGovern was great then, and I think he is great now. Nobody ever wondered what George McGovern stood for. I was delighted when Oberlin chose him as the graduation speaker while I was there, and I got to shake his hand.

He has just written a beautiful and blistering article in the Nation, The Reason Why, exposing the insanity and immorality of Bush's policies, especially his war on Iraq. A few samples, but I encourage you to read the whole article:

Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness. Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.

The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, He sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis--all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God's will.

I think often of another Jefferson observation during an earlier bad time in the nation's history: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

George McGovern may have lost the election of 1972, but his candidacy effectively ended the Vietnam war, and rescued the soul of the Democratic party from the dark hole that LBJ had trapped it in. Today's Democrats could do (and are doing ) do a lot worse than emulating George McGovern, soldier, politician, hero, and decent human being. Highly Recommended. Even if you don't agree with the politics, you have to love the writing.

New, unusual and interesting weblog

Tonight (because she had linked to SARSwatch.org, I ran across veiled4allah, which is one of the more interesting sites I have run across recently. She has a very different perspective on life, and approaches issues from a different place than I do. It is nice to be jolted out of the world of lefty-libertarians and geeks who can write, which is the part of the blogosphere that I usually inhabit. I'm not a religious person, but for some reason I seem to be drawn to the writings of religious people recently. Plus, she meets my most important criterion -- she writes well. Her weblog is a real pleasure to read (plus she has some cool blogtech -- maybe she is a geek in disguise). Recommended.

CDC/WHO webcast write up

I did a write up of today's CDC/WHO webcast on SARSWatch.org. There wasn't a lot of real news in the webcast, at least not if you are following SARS as closely as I have, but there were some interesting details from Dr. Joseph Sung about the epidemic in Hong Kong, and a useful assessment of what we know and what we don't know from Dr. James Hughes of the CDC.

What they don't tell you about parenting before you have your child

I just stopped by Real Live Preacher for my daily read, and found another fine story, about parenting (among other things). It reminded me that nothing is sweeter than the highs of parenting, and nothing is as grievous as the lows. A single moment, like when your child giggles non-stop at a stupid joke you've made at breakfast, or when you see the Eureka light go off in their head when they figure something out, can brighten up your whole day. Other times, like when your child is sick in the hospital, or somebody is mean to your child, you feel like you have had your heart surgically removed and impaled on the fence outside your house, with a sign on it inviting strangers to whack it with a stick as they walk by. Parenting is the most intense and rewarding experience yet -- I wouldn't trade it for anything.

What some people will do to get readers: be like the 5 o'clock news

An enduring topic among people who write weblogs is how to get people to read your weblog. People have strategies that go from the crude, like Kalsey's TextAds, to the arcane, like andersja's advice on how to make your blog more Google friendly. I have stumbled across a new strategy: reach people through their fears and anxieties. I didn't plan it that way, but that's how it has worked out. Now I know why the local news always leads with fires, murders, and kidnapped kids. It does get people's attention.

It wasn't always this way. I had two sure-fire strategies that I employed to get readers. One, I found that when I wrote nice things when I discovered some good writing that I liked, the person whose weblog I wrote about often found out about it and checked out my weblog. So I wrote nice things about people's writing. The second strategy was to have a large family, which I do, and to bug them weekly with the question, "didja read what I wrote?," which I did.

So I had been happily bumbling along, with a slowly growing readership. I know that I am long winded and tend to bloviate on, but I'd like to think that the brilliance of posts like Geoworks, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, US law says it's ok to lie if the truth would hurt, George Bush, master of the big lie, Why Bush Sticks In My Craw, and Hearts and Minds made up for it and kept people coming back. Judging from the comments and emails, I seem to have about 25 or so people who regularly stop by, and I'm happy with that, although I do wish they would leave more comments. Judging from the referral logs, there is a larger group of people who come here via Google or episodes where one of my posts gets linked to by an "A-level (Sorry, Burning Bird) blogger", or when I have written about an event like Supernova 2002, The Spectrum Policy Debate, or the John Brady Kiesling talk at UC Berkeley that briefly gets a lot of Net mindshare.

So what happened? Stepping back for a moment, two years ago a good friend gave me Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and I devoured all 750 pages of it, fascinated. Then I ran out and got her second book, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health and stayed up late for a week, reading it. Since then, I confess I have become a bit of an epidemiology/emerging diseases junkie. I have read tons of books on the subject, from thriller novels like Richard Preston's Cobra Event to heartrending tomes like Paul Farmer's Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. I even subscribe to the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal, although I confess I usually just skim it.

A week ago, I was becoming alarmed about how little attention was being paid to the SARS epidemic, and wrote about it, perhaps a bit hysterically, to several people who have much wider audiences than I do, hoping that they would focus in on it. They declined to do so.

Well, I had some time, it was clear that my efforts at stopping Bush's War on Iraq and bringing World Peace to planet Earth weren't working, I had been looking for an excuse to play with a new piece of software, and it seemed like an opportunity to turn that formerly useless knowledge to some good. So on March 30th, I launched www.sarswatch.org.

The response has been beyond my wildest imagination. I've had more visitors in 5 days than Geodog's MT Weblog has had in the last 6 months. Clearly, people are scared, and are very eager for information. I hope that I'm providing a useful service. At least current reports on the epidemic front are encouraging.

Writing about the SARS epidemic has been made much easier by the fact the CDC and WHO get the Net. The CDC is posting tons of material on its SARS website, it is updating and revising the information in a very public way. It posts transcripts of its media briefings online. Ditto for WHO. They have done a great job of enabling what Dan Gillmor called the We Media. The politicians seem to have learned their lesson from the anthrax fiasco, and they are leaving communicating with the public in the hands of the public health professionals, who realize that the better informed people are, the better decisions they make. Of course, Bush is also planning on cutting the CDC budget by $700 million this year, but that's a topic for another post.

Duck and Cover

I found this interesting site, propagandacritic, through email that I recieved from somebody who saw my SARS weblog. It doesn't have anything to do with SARS, but it is very relevant to today's political atmosphere. Plus, the site proprietor has put together some classic propaganda films. My favorite is the "Duck and Cover". Recommended.

CDC Director Gerberding to speak at UC Berkeley April 8

Dr. Julie Gerberding, the Director of the U.S. Center for Disease Control, is currently scheduled to talk at the U.C. Berkeley School of Public Health's Dean's Colloquium in the Anita Baldwin Auditorium at 4:00 PM on April 8, 2003. Given current events, I wouldn't be surprised if the event is canceled or rescheduled, but if the talk is held I'll be there and will report on it for www.SARSWatch.org.

CDC Webcast on SARS Friday, April 4

The U.S. Center for Disease Control will webcast a presentation, Preventing the Spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) on Friday April 4, 2003, from 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM ET, and will rebroadcast it again at 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM ET. (Real Player required). The CDC historically does a good job of communication when politicians don't get in the way, so this should be good. Many of the big names in the public health field will be on the webcast, as well as at least one clinician with hands-on experience:

David Heymann, MD, Executive Director, Communicable Diseases, World Health Organization (WHO)
Julie Hall, MD, Medical Officer, Global Outbreak Alert and Response Operations, WHO Geneva
Joseph JY Sung, Professor of Medicine, Chairman and Chief of Service, Department of Medicine & Therapeutics, Prince of Wales Hospital, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Julie Louise Gerberding, MD, MPH, Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
James M. Hughes, MD, Director, National Center for Infectious Diseases (NCID), CDC
Linda Chiarello, RN, MS, NCID, CDC

The presentation will also be broadcast via satellite and on audiobridge. For information, see the CDC's broadcast information page.

If you want up to date information directly from the people in a position to know best, this is probably the best way to get it. Highly Recommended. I plan to write up my impressions of it on http://www.sarswatch.org.

Movable Type comment protection?

I've discovered once again the hard way that if someone posts a comment with an apostrophe ' or double quote " in it, my MT weblog gets scrambled. The The entry following the comment becomes a hyperlink, the second column never starts, etc.

Anybody have any idea why this happens and what do do about it? I'm still using Movable Type 2.51 -- would upgrading to 2.63 help?

I am using the firstNwords plugin to display the first 50 words of the comment on the title of the hyperlink for the comment. I suspect that there is a problem with quotes in titles, but I'm not sure and don't know how to protect against them. I guess something that would properly encode the comments before entering them in the DB is what I want?

Thanks in advance for any and all advice.

Dubya as War Leader

There is an amazing profile of Bush as war leader in USA Today. I found it scary for our nation. A few samples:

"He's a critic who sees himself as the aggrieved victim of the news media and second-guessers... he regularly watches war coverage on the nearest TV, which is in the private dining room next to the Oval Office. He knows when heavy bombardments of Baghdad are scheduled and sometimes tunes in to see them.

News coverage of the war often irritates him. He's infuriated by reporters and retired generals who publicly question the tactics of the war plan. Bush let senior Pentagon officials know that he was peeved when Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the Army's senior ground commander in Iraq, said last week that guerrilla fighting, Iraqi resistance and sandstorms have made a longer war more likely. ... He has a special epithet for members of his own staff who worry aloud. He calls them "hand-wringers."

Bush believes he was called by God to lead the nation at this time, says Commerce Secretary Don Evans, a close friend who talks with Bush every day. ... Bush was elated when he was told there was a chance to kill Saddam on the eve of the scheduled start of the war ... even some of Bush's allies say privately that they wish the president would be a little less certain and more willing to reassess decisions.

On March 17, before he delivered a 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam, Bush summoned congressional leaders to the White House. They expected a detailed briefing, but the president told them he was notifying them only because he was legally required to do so and then left the room. "

I can't think of anything to add, but I thought this piece was important enough to break my rule that posts which are only links go in The Midnight Blog linklog. God help us. Highly recommended.

Books in Berkeley

One of the joys of living in Berkeley is all the people who UC and related institutions bring in to talk, often for free. I just got the Cody's Books calendar for April, and it is a stellar line-up of authors. Here are my picks:

Alston Chase on Unabomber: The Making Of An American Terrorist.    Thursday, April 3

Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran present Emma Goldman: A Documentary History Of The American Years, Volume One: Made For America.    Monday, April 7

John Murray reads from A Few Short Notes On Tropical Butterflies.    Wednesday, April 9

Oscar Casares on Brownsville.    Monday, April 14

Atul Gawande on Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes On An Imperfect Science.    Tuesday, April 15. Note Special Time: 12:15 pm At Telegraph Avenue

Tamim Ansary on West Of Kabul, East Of New York: An Afghan American Story.   Wednesday, April 16

Wes "scoop" Nisker on The Big Bang, The Buddha, And The Baby Boom.    Monday, April 21

Robert Stone on Bay Of Souls.    Saturday, April 26

There are a lot more, see Cody's online calendar for more speakers and details about these speakers. All authors listed here speak at 7:30 pm at the Telegraph Ave. store, unless otherwise noted.

Happy April fools

I decided to take a break from disasters and indulge in a little humor. One of my relatives, who has a Jack Russel terrier, sent me this photo that she got somewhere on the net. At first I thought it was her dog. After putting a little more thought into it, I realized that my relative would not sit there taking a photo while her dog peed on an expensive laptop. It made me wonder, who would? The photo isn't obviously photoshopped. Maybe this is all over the net and I'm just the last to get it, but I enjoyed the photo.

P.S. Also, check out the image of the day at the cellar. The Undertoad has been on a roll recently. Isn't this microbat too cute?

Cool DNS tools

I was having some problems with the DNS for one of my web sites, and I got referred to DNS Report, which helped me diagnose the problem. Recommended.

Doing the SARS numbers

In a discussion on Dave Farber's IP list, someone asked:

>1.    If a virus is aerosol and has an 

>incubation period of 7+ days, is it

>possible to contain it geographically 

>without ceasing all air travel?

It isn't clear from my reading whether people infected with SARS can transmit it before they have symptoms; it sounds like the CDC doesn't know either. From the updated CDC FAQ posted today:

How long is a person with SARS infectious to others?
Information to date suggests that people are most likely to be infectious when they have symptoms, such as fever or cough. However, it is not known how long before or after their symptoms begin that patients with SARS might be able to transmit the disease to others. (CDC SARS FAQ)

If infected people can transmit the disease before they feel ill, then until we have a reliable test for the virus that causes SARS, it seems the only way to stop the spread of SARS is to cease all air travel to and from areas where it is endemic, or to quarantine travelers for 7-10 days. This is how epidemics were stopped before the modern age of medicine, and until there is a vaccine/treatment, this will be the only way to stop SARS. Of course, the economic costs of stopping travel will be enormous - no one wants to face that. However, they don't get any cheaper by waiting. I can't believe that there are still flights from Hong Kong landing in the US every day. But it's true. The longer we wait before instituting quarantines, the greater the number of people who are going to die, and the greater the economic costs.

> 2. At last check, there were approximately 50 deaths of 2500

>reported cases. Given that the number of actual "exposures"

>is likely significantly higher and that many individuals who

>contracted the virus were able to defeat it without major

>symptoms and therefore did not report; Are viruses with a

>mortality rate of less than 2% (potentially MUCH less)

>considered a global crisis? Is there possibly some other

>reason for the significant media coverage?

Given than SARS is a diagnosis of exclusion, and the definition is currently very wide, I suspect that it is equally likely that a lot of people are labeled as having SARS who don't, so the true mortality rate could be considerably higher than the 4% they are currently guessing. Until we have a reliable test for the virus, we won't know what the true mortality rate is. Even so, if this became as prevalent as the flu, which around 15% of the US population gets every year (http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/diseases/flu/fluinfo.htm), a mortality rate of 2% gives you *870,000 deaths* in the US a year. That's pretty big. And if the mortality rate is 4%, the US would lose one and half million people. Makes Osama bin Laden look like a piker.

The other part is that for every person who has died of SARS, there are at least 10 people still in hospital intensive care units breathing only with respirators (In 10%--20% of cases, the respiratory illness is severe enough to require intubation and mechanical ventilation http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5212a5.htm). Using the math above, that gives you ***6 and a half million people in ICU's on ventilators***, which isn't going to happen. That is both horrifying from a human perspective, and alarming for the kind of stress it would put on our already stressed medical system. We don't have 1/10th that many ventilators. The mortality rate will go up a lot if SARS gets that widespread.

I think that there is enough in the disease itself, and in likely hypothetical scenarios, to explain all the media attention. I just wish there was more media attention, and more demands for preparation and action.

Cross posted at SARS Watch Org

"It’s all about Rummy and the truth"

The Seymour Hersh New Yorker article, that everyone has been talking about, Offense And Defense, The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, is finally online. And it says loudly what a lot of people had been saying quietly before the war -- many of America's professional soldiers have been very unhappy with the way that Bush's War on Iraq was planned and is being run. It is clear from the article that the many in the military fear another Vietnam, in the sense that during the Vietnam war the officer corps was corrupted by the Johnson and Nixon administrations requirements that the officer corps adhere to the official US administration message, even when it contradicted the observed facts. That brought us "body counts", "the credibility gap", "we had to destroy the village to save it", and landed a blow on the integrity of the US military that it took a generation to recover from. I guess a lot of career army officers and pretty determined not to let that happen again. I hope so.

The article is well worth reading. Recommended. A few samples:

Rumsfeld’s personal contempt for many of the senior generals and admirals who were promoted to top jobs during the Clinton Administration is widely known. He was especially critical of the Army, with its insistence on maintaining costly mechanized divisions. In his off-the-cuff memoranda, or “snowflakes,” as they’re called in the Pentagon, he chafed about generals having “the slows”—a reference to Lincoln’s characterization of General George McClellan. “In those conditions—an atmosphere of derision and challenge—the senior officers do not offer their best advice,” a high-ranking general who served for more than a year under Rumsfeld said. ...

Gradually, Rumsfeld succeeded in replacing those officers in senior Joint Staff positions who challenged his view. “All the Joint Staff people now are handpicked, and churn out products to make the Secretary of Defense happy,” the planner said. “They don’t make military judgments—they just respond to his snowflakes.”

In the months leading up to the war, a split developed inside the military, with the planners and their immediate superiors warning that the war plan was dangerously thin on troops and matériel, and the top generals—including General Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, and Air Force General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—supporting Rumsfeld. After Turkey’s parliament astonished the war planners in early March by denying the United States permission to land the 4th Infantry Division in Turkey, Franks initially argued that the war ought to be delayed until the troops could be brought in by another route, a former intelligence official said. “Rummy overruled him.”

...

Rumsfeld, during a question-and-answer session, was asked about his personal involvement in the deployment of combat units, in some cases with only five or six days’ notice. To the astonishment and anger of the generals, Rumsfeld denied responsibility. “He said, ‘I wasn’t involved,’” the official said. “‘It was the Joint Staff.’” “We thought it would be fence-mending, but it was a disaster,” the official said of the dinner. “Everybody knew he was looking at these deployment orders. And for him to blame it on the Joint Staff—” The official hesitated a moment, and then said, “It’s all about Rummy and the truth.”

Congratulations to Seymour Herch, journalist extraordinaire.