Flu the Farmer

In our H7N9 post we described the possibility reducing finishing time may select for greater virulence in influenzas. That is, reducing the age at which poultry are sacrificed may select for increasing the damage influenza incurs.

There may be immunological fallout as well,

By increasing the throughput speed, and reducing the age of food animals at slaughter, the livestock industry may also be selecting for strains able to transmit in the face of younger, more robust immune systems, including, should spillover occur, in humans.

Broiler Explosion

As early as the 1820s, high-pressure engines [on the Mississippi River] were technologically residual; they were dirtier and more dangerous than the low-pressure engines that were employed on steamboats elsewhere. They could, however, generate more power than low-pressure engines; they made it possible to run boats faster and harder–over sandbars, against the current, past the competition, and so on. They were also cheaper…That high-pressure engines were more likely to explode and faster boats more likely to sink when snagged were known risks, deliberately taken. Competition in the steamboat business spurred technological degradation rather than technological innovation. Danger was built into the boats. –Walter Johnson (2013)

A new influenza has spilled over from poultry in and around Shanghai. As of April 15, Chinese authorities have reported 60 human cases of H7N9 and 13 deaths. The most serious cases have suffered fulminant pneumonia, respiratory failure, acute respiratory distress syndrome, septic shock, multiorgan failure, rhabdomyolysis, and encephalopathy.

Virologist Richard Webby reports molecular adaptations suggesting the new variant is evolving toward human specificity. “This thing doesn’t any longer look like a poultry virus,” Webby said, “It really looks to me like it’s adapted in a mammalian host somewhere.”

He Is Risen

On this holy day, Easter 2013, a few brief stanzas from the Book of Dialectics.

In practical terms, the dialectical–extending in the West back to Socrates, Spinoza, Rousseau and the Bible–can be embodied by complex parameter spaces in which variables can be parallel in effect in one part and suddenly in opposition in another.

Indeed, there are second-order manifestations. The very space describing such relationships can itself be subjected to punctuated shifts.

Or a single variate can take on a dual character depending on its framework. For instance, an object (or organism or ecosystem) in (physical or evolutionary) motion is both found at a particular spot and by definition no longer there (unless Δt=0, which in the everyday is never the case).

For Friedrich Engels, life itself is defined by this ostensible contradiction–this composite process of being and becoming. Our being is found in its repeated death (and rebirth).

Bird Flew

When the red ants discovered that a new variety of canned goods had arrived, they mounted guard around the cassoulet. It wouldn’t have been advisable to leave a freshly opened can standing; they’d have summoned the whole nation of red ants to the shack. There are no bigger communists anywhere. And they’d have eaten up the Spaniard too. –Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1934)

Conservation biology explores how best to protect and restore biodiversity. The applied science aims at maintaining diversity at a variety of levels of biological organization, including genes, subspecies, species, ecosystems and biomes.

But conservation efforts aren’t interested in preserving things alone. Ecologies are defined by processes; competition, predation, symbioses, and higher-order nutrient cycling among them. Organisms are actualized in part by the actions they take upon, or with, each other.

In any environment we look at we’ll find a food web of some sort. In losing species, local ecologies can degrade and the ability of an ecosystem to buffer a disturbance of one sort of another can be compromised.

Pscience Unchained

Calvin Candie: I’m curious, what makes you such a mandingo expert?
Django: I’m curious what makes you so curious.
–Quintin Tarentino (2012)

A friend’s Facebook post inspired this rejoinder. It’s no sectarian dig, mind you, no sucker punch.

I mean only to dial up a call I made here previously for the kind of people’s science that in Owenite England, unchained from the socioeconomic dictates of the aristocratic church it fought, prefigured Victorian naturalists by decades,

The term ‘hall of science’ was first mooted in the Co-operative Magazine of October 1829, which reported a lecture by Frances Wright: ‘Turn your churches into halls of science, and devote your leisure day to the study of your own bodies, the analysis of your own minds, and the examination of the fair material world which extends around you.’

In Alfred Russel Wallace, a scion of the halls of science, like that of the South London Rational School depicted in our graphic, the largely independent lineage matched the reluctant Mr. Darwin to a theory of natural selection. No mean feat for a people’s science or pscience (for which, to riff off a recent flick, the “p” is silent).

Happy Our

Happy People (2010) NR. 94 minutes. Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams) recuts a Russian documentary about white trappers along the Siberian taiga’s Yenisei River. It’s now a moving meditation on human ingenuity (which the trappers intimate includes the wherewithal to avoid its own apocalyptic fulfillment). Happiness here emerges out of a community’s willingness cum obligation to support members who–in stunning footage–love to lose themselves in the play of their (very hard) work. But as the indigenous peoples in and around the village are marginalized into boozy oblivion, there is too a very dark downside indeed.

Coffee Filter

It’s hard obviously to imagine a house which doesn’t have a door. I saw one one day, several years ago, in Lansing, Michigan. It had been built by Frank Lloyd Wright…[T]here appeared something like an open-work roof that was practically indissociable from the vegetation that had invaded it. In actual fact, it was already too late to know whether you were indoors or out…A dozen more or less similar houses were scattered through the surrounds of a private golf club. The course was entirely closed off. Guards…were on duty at the one entrance gate. –Georges Perec (1974)

Dosage and tolerance mark the thin line between palliative and poison.

The caffeine that perks up one patron in the coffeehouses of snowbound Minnesota can rocket another into rare tachycardia and cardiovascular collapse. It’s a chance many are willing to take. Even the jitters tell us we’re still alive in -40 wind chill. And look on the bright side, as one must here under the penalty of death, should a slurper keel over, a table in a popular joint is suddenly free for the rest of the day.