Well, even those bullshit low ass estimates are fun:

Based on the CDC’s model and expert predictions of a relatively mild H1N1 strain that could sicken up to 35 percent of Americans, the study found that 15 states would be at or exceed hospital bed capacity.  These include Arizona (117%), California (125%), Connecticut (148%), Delaware (203%), Hawaii (143%), Maryland (143%), Massachusetts (110%), Nevada (137%), New Jersey (101%), New York (108%), Oregon (107%), Rhode Island (143%), Vermont (108%), Virginia (100%) and Washington (107%).

Twelve more states would be between 75-99% of capacity (and seriously, 99%? That’s pretty much the same fucking thing as 100% in this case, isn’t it?).

My plans have changed from buying a coffin if I get sick to just not getting sick. I’m tougher than this fucking thing, but be forewarned: cough in my presence and I’ll shoot you in self defense.

Full article here with more scary numbers.

A homeowner says a Phoenix police officer shot him six times in the back during a 911 home-invasion call, and the 911 tape recorded the officer’s partner saying, “That’s all right. Don’t worry about it. I got your back. … We clear?” The family says the officers were not aware that the 911 call was still recording as they spoke about covering up the shooting.

Full article here.

H1N1 (to be an overly accurate horse’s ass, 2009 A (H1N1)) is on my mind. I have asthma. My father has COPD (like emphysema, only doctors can make you feel stupid by speaking alphabet soup to you). If either of us catches this swine flu shit, odds are not good. Probably slightly better for me (I’m 45 years younger), but you know? Not really great for either of us. Well, depending on who you believe. The WHO and the CDC have contradicted themselves on the issue, and the data sets they’re using are pretty flawed anyway.

More data out there than I care to go into, but the CDC, for instance, is tracking “confirmed and probable” cases. No distinction made between the two. That’s like the difference between Jim Bob saw a possum and Jim Bob thinks he saw a possum.

In July, the CDC said 40% of all Americans were likely to be infected with swine flu. That’s a big fucking number. How does the CDC determine these numbers? As it turns out, they might as well be guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar.

Quoting from Pundita (way back in May of this year):

The CDC has no idea how many deaths there are each year from the flu because the number is a computer-generated guess based on mathematical modeling — a model that’s been used for more than 40 years, and which needs serious updating.

As the CDC’s spokesman, Curtis Allen admitted a few years ago to medical journalist Kelly O’Meara, it’s not a “real” number. He told her, “There are a couple problems with determining the number of deaths related to the flu because most people don’t die from the influenza…We don’t know exactly how many people get the flu each year because it’s not a reportable disease and most physicians don’t do the test [nasal swab] to indicate whether it’s influenza.”

However, using the CDC’s own data, O’Meara managed to turn up that, “The greatest number of actual influenza deaths recorded since 1979 were 3,006 in 1981.”

That’s recorded deaths, not actual deaths, so who fucking knows. The number is bound to be higher, especially among infants, the elderly, and the “immuno-compromised” which is a hell of a word. Most flu deaths are probably attributed to pneumonia.

From Deirdre Imus writing for The Huffington Post in July:

Influenza is notoriously hard to predict, and some experts have shied away from a forecast. At a CDC swine flu briefing Friday, one official declined to answer repeated questions about her agency’s own estimate.

(That article I link to is worth reading as it makes you realize the CDC might be working just about as well as FEMA, and swine flu just might become that agency’s Katrina Event).

Internationally, the WHO really isn’t offering much in the way of comfort, either. The WHO declared swine flu as a phase 4 pandemic on 27 April of this year (a Monday). By Wednesday of that week, it was a phase 5 on WHO’s hit parade. It reached maturity at phase 6 (there is no phase 7) on 11 June. Based on what? Country-by-country reporting of the number of cases.

We’ve already seen how reliable that is in the US. Maybe other (smaller) European countries have better data collection and reporting systems (Jean Pierre definitely saw a possum), but I can’t imagine most of the second and third world countries providing much useful data (not a condemnation—they’re beleaguered, that’s all I’m saying).

In July, the WHO stated that “as many as two billion people could become infected.” Could? Awesome. I could shit myself if that’s wrong in a bad direction. That number would be a global analog to the influenza epidemic of 1918, which killed a third of the population of Europe (two bil’s about a third of the planet). In our much more crowded, connected, New York-to-Tokyo-to-Rome, world, this fucking thing could spread like … the common cold.

However, in August, the WHO said the symptoms of swine flu were usually no more severe than “regular” flu, and that most people who contracted it would recover. Cool! Crisis over!

Well uh maybe not. Before announcing swine flu was like regular flu, only bacon flavored, the WHO announced they intended to stop publishing data on the course of the pandemic, but would keep everyone informed when another country caught it.

WHO will no longer issue the global tables showing the numbers of confirmed cases for all countries. However, as part of continued efforts to document the global spread of the H1N1 pandemic, regular updates will be provided describing the situation in the newly affected countries. WHO will continue to request that these countries report the first confirmed cases and, as far as feasible, provide weekly aggregated case numbers and descriptive epidemiology of the early cases.

That doesn’t make a whole lot of fucking sense to me, but it could be consistent with a  “this data is useless and we’re not even sure what it means” situation. It’s a little troubling that they’re basically saying “let us know when you get it and how the early cases go, but other than that, we’ll call you.” Troubling because the latest research I’ve read on it (which may not be the latest research) indicates swine flu may have a mortality rate comparable to avian flu, because the two behave the same way (except for the whole swine flu being a fuck of a lot easier to catch thing). And what is the WHO basing the statement “most people who contract it will recover” on? Positive thinking? If they don’t track the later stages of the disease, we might be looking back on a world depopulated by “pneumonia.”

There’s a lot of other information out there, a lot of it goofy, but there’s enough credible material and second-hand “this is a weird thing I heard from my doctor” rumors floating around (here’s a good one: people in the UK are apparently being told, by NHS, not to go to their doctor if they think they may have swine flu. WAT?) to make me really wonder if we’re looking down the barrel of something that may be a hell of a lot more serious than we’re being told. And just maybe we’re not being told because it’s a hell of a lot worse than the WHO, CDC, etc. can deal with.

It’s got me worried. Especially since, you know … I have asthma (if you read that last link, you’d know why I’m basically writing my will if I catch this shit).

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/24/swine-flu-could-hit-up-to_n_244760.html

read more | digg story

The above inserted with some neat tools digg.com has going on.

One of the comments on digg was along the lines of “they’d better not send religious fundamentalists up there for this study.” I agree, in practice (fundamentalists tend to have pretty much all of their figuring out figured out, and are closed to new ideas). In theory? Nah. Another guy said, in response to that, “if it’s physiological it doesn’t matter.” My characteristically long-winded and probably pedantic reply to both follows.

“I could just say ‘Go watch the second-third of Contact!’ but I do (at least partially) agree with RobertCrumby. Where I disagree is on the exclusion of ‘religious fundies.’ Regardless of whether we agree with them, the perceptions of those with whom we might ideologically differ is as important and illustrative as our own perception, be it secular or spiritual, in trying to measure human reaction when exposed to the immeasurable.

I need to make a dick and/or fart joke after having typed the above. I’ll think of one and get back to you.

And in response to rchargel, it’s a Cartesian philosophical issue, I guess, but unlinking the physiological from psychological or numinous experience seems like trying to tune in a radio station without a radio. We’ve got to use the tools we have to measure the things we can’t see, and spirituality and physiological response might be two words for the same thing. The issue, I think, is one of sequence.

Now that joke may need to involve poo or monkeys. I’m getting out of here before I get in more trouble.”

Still working on the monkey dick/fart/poo joke. Man that is a bad string of words to put slashes between.

The blob of nerves forming the brain of the robot was taken from the neural cortex in a rat foetus and then treated to dissolve the connections between individual neurons [excerpt taken from here].

Dr. Ben Whalley (notice I didn’t say “scientists,” which is my pet peeve of the moment—these people should not have to be anonymous white coats) has conducted experiments that involve making a little neural margarita out of rat brain cells and sticking them on top of a little robot with wheels. In the “don’t tell them how to actually make nitroglycerin” maneuver, the article doesn’t say how the following was accomplished, but somehow

The brain cells have been taught how to control the robot’s movements so it can steer round obstacles and the next step, say its creators, is to get it to recognise its surroundings.

Then they plan to change the surroundings to simulate memory loss to see how the brain … mush … changes. Anything that cures something like Alzheimer’s is alright with me, but I can’t help feeling sorry for the rat fetuses the brain cells are taken from (and presumably the uh rat that the fetuses are taken from—doubt they called in a midwife for that).

It does raise the obvious (to me) questions about the intersection of organic and inorganic, sentience and synthetics, and the question of the “ghost in the machine,” or the soul trapped in the robot.

The “ghost in the machine” phrase is one you hear a lot for one reason or another (the 1981 Police album, the anime series and movies, probably mostly because it has two words people who speak English dig in it) but it orginates in a book by philsopher Gilbert Ryle as a jab at Descartes’s mind-body dualism (Descartes, dead for just under 300 years at that time, didn’t deign to respond).

Descartes pondered the question of where the body and the mind (or, really, the soul) intersect (he settled on the pituitary gland, as it’s the only “single” he could find in the head—two eyes, two ears, two jaws, everything else lobed and symmetrical). Descartes’s idea that the physical and the “aphysical” are separate and distinct has lasted a hell of a long time. Some people disagree.

Ryle basically had a problem with dualism (the whole concept that mind/soul and body are separate but somehow coexisting and intersecting) and evidently felt that Descartes and everyone who believes in dualism (which, though I doubt they realize it, is about everyone who isn’t a philosopher who studies this shit) fails to use the concepts correctly. For what it’s worth, I think using a concept in any manner that approaches a greater inherent understanding, whether that understanding can efficiently—or at all—be communicated to other people is a perfectly acceptable use of the human mind. I offer a gentle-but-firm “Fuck you, Ryle” to my fellow Leo (19 Aug), but expect no response as he is now as dead as Descartes.

Descartes was one of the first guys to walk down a path (on which, to be fair, Plato and Aristotle may have swung machetes) that has been more recently trafficked by people interested in artificial intelligence, all of whom (to my knowledge) have been dualists. The “philsophy of the mind” is sort of a hobby of mine, and it quickly gets messy with issues of dualism, “substance dualism” versus “property dualism” (“it’s stuff” vs. “it’s created by stuff but isn’t stuff itself”, sort of), monism (I’m not even going to get into it), and various other really fucking confusing issues and questions.

The closer we get to artificial intelligence—and every time I read a story like the one linked to above—the more I wonder about the nature of the soul, whether it exists and if so is created or creates itself, and ultimately if the soul is the purview of man (and/or animal), or if souls can exist outside of organic beings that may or may not be sentient. I’ll leave my (predictably messy) beliefs out of it, but I’ve got a pretty firm grasp on some suppositions. Shit like rat-brained robots scuttling around pens (read the article!) don’t make these questions any easier to answer, however.

When we get to a point (and we will) where we can essentially up- and download sentience in one form or another into manufactured forms, the question may answer itself, or become impossible to ask. I dunno. My mind and body both want a drink, at this point.

After the band’s halcyon days, Doug “retired” from music (do you ever really retire from music?) and opened the barbershop, which he ran pretty much right up until his death in 1985. Doug was a hell of a drummer—they once played a show at a used car lot in Waldorf and people could hear the drums three miles away (apparently someone reported “gun shots” to the police, who tracked the sound to the used car lot, and Doug Wray’s drumming).

By the way, the Wikipedia article linked above is a little inaccurate. The song was performed in Fredericksburg, VA for the first time, but “hot-miked” (Ray Vernon Wray, Link’s other brother, jammed the microphone he’d been singing into right into one of the amps), which produced that really loud, distorted, buzzy sound that hadn’t been heard outside of basements and bedrooms with busted, cheap ass amplifiers of a certain vintage.

Link had a practice “studio” (usually called “The Three Track Shack”) in Accokeek, MD., where I grew up (about five miles south of DC). The studio didn’t have the best equipment, so when they later practiced Rumble, as it came to be called (the song was originally called Oddball), that trademark proto-grunge sound was still there, a result of some pretty blown high-end response. When they went to record it at Cameo Records in Philadelphia, (the song was eventually picked up by Cadence, in NYC, release number 1347), they couldn’t quite get the sound right. Link solved the problem by walking around the studio with a pen, stabbing holes in tweeters (but leaving the woofers unmolested) until the guitar sounded about right.

Link would have been seventy-nine today.

As someone who’s always been fascinated by surveillance and intelligence, this is a good flick. Obvious nod (or rip off) to Antonioni, and would make a good “double-feature.” Maybe. Blow Up might be one of those things you need to see and then go do something else for a while.

Conversation’s great, though. I’m not sure if I’ll listen to the Coppola track, I just can’t stand him sometimes.

Some specialists say the word may have originated during the Great Portuguese Discoveries, giving meaning to the sadness felt about those who departed on journeys to unknown seas and disappeared in shipwrecks, died in battle, or simply never returned […] The state of mind has subsequently become a “Portuguese way of life”: a constant feeling of absence, the sadness of something that’s missing, wishful longing for completeness or wholeness and the yearning for the return of that now gone, a desire for presence as opposed to absence—as it is said in Portuguese, a strong desire to “matar as saudades” (lit. “to kill the saudades“).

I’ll be a bit indulgent here (it’s my blog, I’m allowed). I love the word because it neatly encapsulates my view of so much loss. Death (I’m sorry you didn’t get my letter in time, A.—I think you have it now. Thanks again for the books, rest well, and keep an eye out for my cat, if you don’t mind), lost youth (the perfect functioning, natural comfort and ease of use we have in our bodies when we’re children), disillusionment (everyone likes me and the world is my friend!), and about a thousand other things I can see in the shadows but can’t call out by name at the moment. And I don’t feel like waving a flashlight around, I’ve only had one cup of coffee today.

And now for the mundane part of this entry to drag it down from the unbearably romantic to the stolidly ubiquitous. I was re-loading my MP3 player (link goes to the SanDisk e260, highly recommended despite the occasional weird firmware issue and reboot bugs, see this site if you have any kind of MP3 player) by crawling through my music files one at a time (using Winamp, also highly recommended), determining what makes the cut and what doesn’t, finding some temporarily forgotten favorites and some things I can’t believe I ever bothered to download. Er, buy. Ha ha. Right-click, remove, physically remove selected item(s), yes. I think some smart ass P2P user uploaded a lot of shit to my computer, because I seriously would never have downloaded Barbie Girl, for instance. Even as a joke. Or a Gregorian Chant version of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Actually, maybe that one was me.

I found an old song by Love & Rockets (is all this linking getting annoying yet?) called, as you may have guessed by now, Saudade, which I probably first heard when I was fifteen or sixteen, hanging out with Ken (I’d link here too, but he’d kill me) in his room or driving back from Tower in DC, listening to music, smoking cigarettes down to the filter (and probably drinking to excess). Can’t say I’ve got much saudade for smoking or driving around drunk (O, the things we do when we are still immortal), but I definitely wouldn’t mind being sixteen again if for no other reason than to hear certain songs for the first time. And OK, maybe I do have a sense of fond longing for the distant-future return of driving around drunk, at least.
Recent events alluded to in the first paragraph inspire a strong sense of saudade, and though the word may be impossible to translate, I think I’ve got a native speaker’s grasp of it. The wikipedia article goes on to say:

The same feeling is also found in Brazil, the destination of immigrants who never saw their homelands again. The feeling was so much ingrained into the Brazilian mind that virtually every immigrant settled there learned this notion and incorporated it (even people from radically different mindsets, like German and Japanese immigrants to Brazil, soon understood it). Another permanent source of saudades for Brazilians is the vastness of the country itself, still mostly jungle, which in the past caused people to feel alone almost everywhere.

Being the progeny of Irish immigrants, I can connect to that at least culturally, as the Irish seem to have a similar sense of “forlorn longing for homeland” embedded somewhere in a genetic sequence or two. There’s a great line from a Pogues song: “Wherever we go, we celebrate the land that makes us refugees,” and I’ve definitely seen that in my own third-generation, never been to Ireland, don’t know the first thing about Irish history (outside of the Famine and the Troubles) immediate family. Hell, we even celebrate the tiny coal mining town my father left, in search of work in the late forties when the mines were shutting down. My grandfather died of black lung. Some things don’t deserve celebration.

Oh, the song made the cut (even though it hasn’t particularly traveled well) at 3.87 gigs out of a possible 5.59. I’ve got 1.72 more gigs of music to choose, then the audio books and lectures for the two gig flash card, so it’s time for more coffee and less romantic moaning.

I know I have Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” somewhere on my primary hard drive, but I don’t feel like looking for it (I’m still “unpacking” after my move from my old computer—it’s getting to be as protracted a process as if I had actually moved house, and I can easily foresee myself “living out of boxes” for some time yet). So I turn to my usual source for music I don’t yet own, and start searching for Freebird. Within thirty seconds, I’ve got the album version of Freebird downloading, a live version ostensibly from a bootleg recording (you never know with this shit until you download it and listen to it—I’ve seen stuff so mislabeled and fucked up that it makes all the “wikipedia is unreliable” arguments sing and dance in my imagination (same issue: ignorant sources substituting bad guesses or malicious erronity (!!) as definitive data)), another track called “David Cross — Freebird.mp3″ and a cover version (again, pending download, probably a cover version) of Freebird by Cat Power. I think the David Cross thing is a cut from one of his comedy albums. I’ll probably listen to it (again? I vaguely remember it) and discard it. But the Cat Power thing could be awesome. It could be my new favorite version of this song … and if I hadn’t been lazy and misplaced the copy of Skynyrd’s “Freebird” that I already have, I never would have found it.

Music piracy (uh if that was in fact what I was doing instead of uh legally purchasing copies of everything I’ve just mentioned through whatever website(s) you use for that) is an incredibly democratizing and liberating force, if you extend it in its natural directions (I have a huge library of books I’ve downloaded—and the bulk of the ebook material available through peer-to-peer networks is made up of instructional manuals).

I’m profoundly ambivalent about it, and I’m sure the dichotomy doesn’t escape those who regularly read this thing. I’m paranoid enough about my (shitty first draft) writing being ripped off that I hide it behind layers of passworded bullshit, but when I want to feed on the lifework of any recording artist, writer, film production crew, etc., past, present or future, I expect to be able to swing a machete overhead, cut a vine, and suck like an explorer in a Tarzan movie.

I’m not sure if there are any conclusions to be drawn. I’m just rambling. I sometimes try to imagine a world without currency or mortgages or rent, where musicians and writers and trash men and doctors and maybe lawyers (but I’m not so sure about lawyers) do their jobs without pay, and somehow still have nice houses, nice cars, excellent healthcare and opportunity for education and fulfillment … but I can’t make it work in my imagination. So even though it’s rewarding and enlightening for me to sit here and rip off recording artists (assuming, of course, that that is in fact what I was doing and not lawfully blah blah blah), it’s still (probably) immoral and wrong. Oh, and illegal.

But it’s so fucking cool.

I finally decided to work on a “crappy science fiction” project with the pompous working title “The Ark in Ice.” It’s about a long-haul interstellar colony ship that suffers some sort of accident, which cripples a lot of its automatic systems, destroys most of its library, and kills about 90% of its population, both “waking” and those in whatever cliché for suspended animation I end up using. Lot of room there for all kinds of alienation and “search for a purpose in life” themes, which I appear to be harping on quite a bit these days anyway. If I can avoid writing shitty science fiction, it might be readable. I’ll post an excerpt later today (or I won’t, but will soon).

I’ve been listening to a real schizophrenic mix tonight. Some Elliot Smith (stuff off of From a Basement on the Hill) a bit of the Hedwig and the Angry Inch soundtrack, a bit of the Wig in a Box tribute album, Zero 7 (some Simple Things), My Bloody Valentine (a bunch of stuff), Laverne Baker (ditto), Massive Attack (Mezzanine, I think I’m trying to decide if I actually like them or just don’t dislike them), The New Pornographers (Electric Version), TV on the Radio (the Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes album, which is reminding me of The Doves’s Lost Souls a lot right now), Brian Eno (always a staple, Music for Films tonight), and right now The Polyphonic Spree (I forget which album this is, I think it’s Together We’re Heavy, which, considering there are a hundred thousand people in this band …). All of this music is connected by pretty clear lines in my mind. If you can guess what they are, I’ll burn my entire music collection to a series of DVDs for you.

Last but not least, the decaf isn’t bad, for decaf. I think I’m going to switch to tea, push on to a thousand words, and try to get to sleep. If I were ambitious and bold, I’d provide links for all of the bands I just mentioned. I’m sure there’s some way to select the text and have Google milk the internet’s honeyed teat for you. Be bold, be ambitious.