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.