Blasts from the Past

Two things, unconnected except they both recalled my past:

The Post is running "Classic Doonesbury". In a recent one Alex, the daughter, is giving her father her Christmas list.  She wants a Pentium PC so she can keep up with her classmates, and a 288 modem.   I want to say I remember my first modem, but I don't.  Could it have been 120/240 baud or 1200/2400 baud?  I definitely remember the big advance up the ladder to a 28.8K baud modem.  I suspect these days few people remember a "baud" (1 bit per second, where 8 bits equal one byte, which was one character).   Back then I was going on-line through Compuserve.  So much has changed since then.

Going back even further in time, at some point in the 1940's-50's our poultry flock was hit with Newcastle disease. We had a run of diseases at that time, leading us to change the hatchery supplying our chicks, so I don't remember how bad it was, how many hens it killed, how many eggs weren't laid.  I do remember the death toll one of the diseases took, taking the dead hens out and tossing them off a hill into a swamp (I know, not good, but that was another time).  

The NYTimes had a Science article on virologists being able to use the  Newcastle virus as a means of inserting a vaccine into humans.  (Newcastle doesn't do much to people.)

Will the Cost of Fighting Covid-19 Exceed the DAmage It Causes?

John Hinderaker at Powerline blog ends a post on the Covid-19 virus (he uses "Wuhan virus" which is an indicator of his viewpoint) with this sentence:

" But policymakers need to consider the possibility that the damage done by the extreme measures being taken to slow the spread of the virus will ultimately prove to be greater than the harm done by the virus itself."

My reaction was--we should hope that's the case.   But I've had to struggle with figuring out whether my kneejerk reaction was valid, or just liberal bias.  Let me try now:

1. Covid-19 is a case of natural disaster.
2. Natural disasters vary widely in their causes and destruction: think of Hurricane Katrina or Sandy; earthquakes and tsunamis, droughts, floods, forest fires
3. It seems to me that forest fires are a decent parallel with forest fires.  Why-both fires and epidemics occur over significant time, not the minutes of an earthquake or the days of a hurricane. That extended time period means humans can fight them, can hope to mitigate effects, limit their scope. 
4. So consider the Paradise CA fire of a couple years ago.  Suppose, instead of a downed transmission line, it had started as campfire which escaped the firepit. But there was a fire station near enough and someone with a cellphone who saw the escape. In short, the Paradise fire was contained within a couple acres by the exertions of a fire crew over a day.  The cost of fighting the fire would maybe have been $1K, more than the burn damage.  Given that scenario,should we not fight the fire because of a cost-benefit ratio.
5. In summary, when considering natural disasters the correct cost-benefit analysis is not money expended versus damage incurred; it's money expended versus some combination of probability of damage and the cost of the damage.

Good News Today: Multiple Myeloma

The NYTimes has column today on good news this week.  I'll add to it:  

Kevin Drum reports on the progress being made on multiple myeloma--the disease he's been fighting for years.  He's hopeful, which is great news for many, but especially for devoted readers of him, which I am.

Remember Ebola?

"“Ebola has crystallized the collapse of trust in state authorities,” columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Washington Post. Ron Fournier, writing in National Journal, hit the same theme. “Ebola is a serious threat,” he wrote, “but it’s not the disease that scares me. What scares me is the fact that we can’t trust the institutions that are supposed to deal with such threats, and we can’t trust the men or women who lead them.”

From American Prospect article on government successes.  I'm sure Krauthammer and Fournier now think more highly of the Federal government.

The Problems of Top Down Thinking

Some of the security on the Internet is based on "certificates"; different authorities provide trusted certificates to say that A is really A (i.e., http://google.com is really Google).  ComputerWorld has a piece on some hackers who got into a Dutch authority and got the certificates for the CIA and Mossad.  It's a reminder of potential problems in designed and centralized systems: the more security is concentrated in one place, the greater the rewards for a successful hack job.  If I never provide my credit card number on line, it's never at risk.  If I provide it to Amazon, along with 100,000,000 other people, the rewards to a hacker of getting into Amazon's charge card database are enormous.

Buried in this post at edge.org (hat tip Marginal Revolution) is a similar consideration of "smart cars"--the idea is that once all our cars are smart, they can operate much more efficiently than today.  But, as the writer observes, it also means the rare accident could be horrendous.  (Just as railroads increased the possible top-end death toll from one accident by orders of magnitude over stagecoaches.)

The Advantages of Modern Life: Vaccines

That thought resulted from reading this part of a newsletter from ancestry.com:

This portion of an 1880 schedule from Cottonwood Township, Brown County, Minnesota, shows a devastating diphtheria outbreak that took the lives of multiple children in several of the households.

A look at nearby townships showed even more diphtheria deaths, and a quick internet search revealed that it had reached epidemic proportions around this time. If your ancestor’s family disappeared from the area around that time, this could be an explanation. You may find evidence of other events in mortality schedules. I wrote this article about a story I found in some Boston mortality schedules that led to details about a fire in a cotton factory.

The Volcano and Modern Agriculture

Strikes me that the effect of the Icelandic volcano, whose name I will not bother with, on air travel might be a metaphor for disasters and modern agriculture.  Perhaps I'm super sensitive to agriculture's vulnerability because I've been reading some about the Irish potato famine of the 1840's, but here's my comparison:

First air:

• Modern society has evolved to become dependent on air travel and air freight, which assumes an absence of volcanic ash in the atmosphere
• it's a system which works very well, connecting people and products from different countries and continents.
• the overall effect is greatly to improve the standard of living globally
• the system is vulnerable to disruption by volcanic eruptions, grounding air travel

Now commodities:

• modern agriculture has evolved to become dependent on a small number of varieties for each major crop
• it's a system which works very well, maximizing the return from inputs of fertilizer and water and providing uniform outputs
• the overall effect is greatly to improve the standard of living globally
• the system is vulnerable to disruption by plant diseases which attack the varieties in use.

A Really Surprising Sentence

From a surprising MSNBC article on AIDS in Haiti in which the news is very surprising because it's mostly good:

"More Haitians know about modes of transmission than high school students in the U.S.," Pape said.

Safety, Safety, Where Is Safety?

Sara at Down To Earth writes about how to use reusable cloth bags safely. It's a reminder not to take safety for granted, there's a continual conflict between "them (viruses, bacteria, etc.)" and "us", and perhaps also that it's possible to sweat the small stuff too much.

The Iron Lung

The Post carried an AP story about an NC woman who lived 61 years in an iron lung. For those who may be too young, the iron lung added significantly to the fear we had of polio when I was growing up. Epidemics/outbreaks of infectious disease were common enough in my childhood, although down significantly from the previous century. That history makes me very impatient with those who don't vaccinate their children. (And makes me follow Respectful Insolence, a blogger who mocks such people.)

H1N1 Flu and Locavores

Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain sees things differently than I did here--he believes locavore pig farmers won't be hurt, indeed will be helped, by the flu headlines. Perhaps he and his wife have more faith in the ability of people to resist scares. Or perhaps he's right, his niche is better bounded and more secure than I think. Time will tell (and hopefully I'll remember to check back on the issue. If not, blame senility.)

North American Flu and Locavores

It's not "swine-flu", it's "North American flu" because it is a mixture of strains of flu (human, bird, swine) so WHO says to call it by its location.

I assume foodies like Obamafoodorama will jump on it, as in this:

"There are all kinds of environmental and "nutritional" arguments for smaller, regional and local food production, and an event like the current pork pushback is yet another reason why unchaining American Ag from the vagaries of global trade makes sense in the 21st century. Local and regional food sourcing is also a better model in terms of general food safety (we currently are capable of inspecting less than one percent of our own imported foods). Our recent domestic foodborne disease outbreaks have been national in scope because of our trans-continental distribution system, in which a single peanut or pistachio plant can poison the entire country. Smaller and more local also makes much sense in terms of economic security for American farmers, because they're not put at risk for economic destruction by the decisions---perhaps panic based--of distant foreign governments."

It seems to make sense, but I doubt it. The problem is the market is not truly local. For example, if CAFO's can't export pork, they won't plow under the pigs, they'll sell the pork in the U.S. Now a locavore pasture-raised pig grower probably depends on being able to charge a significant premium for her higher-quality pork. But if a pork chop at the Safeway goes to half price, that's likely to draw away customers for the locavore pork. And the lesson learned over and over in agriculture is that the big boys have the reserves to ride out the hard times.