Ebola vs excellent medical care

Mark Reiff sent me a couple of ebola-links, and the New England Journal of Medicine report was particularly interesting. The patient described isn’t exactly typical: he nearly died of a secondary infection as well, but he had top of the line medical care all along the way after he arrived in Hamburg. Among other things he got about 10 liters of plasma every day for a while (8-13) since he was losing 8 via diarrhea! There was no way he’d have survived without heroic treatment.

Grab a dictionary and have a look at the article.

One thing that was pretty startling is Figure 2, showing the levels of viral RNA detected in various body fluids. The blood levels decrease for a while and then drop like a stone—maybe the result of flushing by the plasma? The levels in urine track the projected decline in blood levels A report from the earlier outbreak in Congo found nothing in urine, but evidently their tests weren’t sensitive enough yet. Sweat levels drop too—and then rise with the onset of the secondary infection and then decline more slowly! At day 63 when the report was written the levels had dropped to undetectability. And of course we’ve heard the reports that viral RNA was found in semen 60 days after infection.

I take this to mean that the virus is holed up in some tissues: skin for one. And that someone can be infectious to touch for a while after they’ve recovered from the disease. The latter seems to conflict with earlier work, but the patient was atypical. Without the heroic treatment he wouldn’t have survived to touch people; maybe the typical survivor isn’t hit as hard. Or maybe not.

Still, something to keep in mind. (Texan99 seems to have been right about high performance medical treatment.)

University of Liberia Round 2

Last year I noticed that UL had 0 out of 25000 applicants succeed.

This year was better. Many fewer sat the exam (I don't know whether before or after the anti-ebola school closings): 13,000. But this time 15 passed.

It is possible that the 15 learned how to get early copies of the exams, or that the tests were easier; but let's be hopeful about it and assume that some of the schools started to make changes, and some of the better students were able to take advantage of those changes and learned enough to pass the threshold. It will take a few years before the average students have the proper skill-set. Or it would if ebola wasn't such a large factor right now.

So I consider this story a spot of good news. What isn't such good news is the reaction of some of the teachers...

But a Teacher, Prince Nimely said, the result coming from the university is troubling adding that the government has to properly examine the result the university is releasing. Nimely said: “We have to look at the standard the university is using to fail those students and their motive if they do not want students to attend the university due to overcrowding let them say it and they should not discredit other people effort.”

Blame the messenger. Or perhaps there's a less noble motive--Prince is a teacher at UL and hasn't managed to notice how unprepared the students are?

At any rate, congratulations to the 15, and I hope they can study well and safely.

Heart disease and diabetes

The doc says that hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease are the deadly trifecta. So far I'm not in that league, but stories like this--New Evidence of a Possible Link Between Diabetes and the Hardening of Heart Valves--do tend to catch the eye, as having a little bit of a personal flavor.

The study used shrinking of the gel medium as a proxy for pig heart valve cell growth (the "valvular interstitial cell"), and used varying amounts of glucose in the medium. (And other things, see the abstract. The more the gel shrunk, the livelier the valve cells must have been growing.

The abstract suggests they only used 3 concentrations: 1g/L, 2g/L, and 4.5g/L. The 2g/L was the Goldilocks concentration; the others showed less growth.

And let's see: 1g/L is 100mg/dL--which is considered normal for humans, and 2g/L is 200mg/L which is bad. That made me go google for pig diabetes, and the first thing I found asked Why Don't Pigs Get Diabetes? ("we bred them not" to is the proposed answer). Another site discusses how to manage pig diabetes. "And even in a normal laboratory pig, blood sugar can vary from under 40 to over 100; their control is not as tight as healthy human beings have naturally." Sounds like pigs are OK for a comparison, so what's the difference?

Maybe the levels seen in vivo differ from those in the culture medium; the cells are organized in tissues in real life. In any event, this might be a mechanism for inducing the cascading problems that harass us.

Music notes

Last night we went to hear the Westminster Choir and organ concert. The big music folders had hand straps, but even so they were almost as big as the torso of some of the kids. During an organ interlude to give the singers a break, it seemed as though the organ piece was a little like jazz improvisation--much more complicated, but scripted.

Listen to the difference in aesthetic between the boy choir (w/ a few men) and the mixed choir (or the men's choir) and a praise band and a piece from an Aladura church. (OK, to be fair, I'm not sure you call the Church of the Lord Aladura orthodox, but the genre is typical of more orthodox churches too.)

The Orthodox claim that the liturgy embodies theology, and that conclusions can be drawn from the way things have always been done. Certainly the way we pray shapes the way we believe: though perhaps not to the full extent of "Lex orandi, lex credendi". How do each of these styles guide us in our emotions about God and our relationship to Him? (Our thoughts are another matter--sometimes they follow the emotions and sometimes live in tension with them.)

Graves again

I wrote earlier that graves and markers seemed like a minor detail compared to the death itself, but: Graves matter.

In March, the second Wednesday of the month is National Decoration Day, a public holiday during which people flock to cemeteries to clear brush from the graves of relatives, and scrub and decorate headstones.

Cremations in the capital, and burials of Ebola victims in body bags outside Monrovia without relatives present, means there won't be a place to honor deceased relatives. Decoration days will come with many people not knowing where the remains of their loved ones are, or knowing they were cremated and that their ashes were not recovered.

Many will find it hard to accept that they will never see the graves of those lost to the disease.
.....
Nyenswah said many people are remaining home to die instead of reporting for treatment.

"We understand that there are secret burials taking place in the communities," he said. "Let's stop that and report sick people and get them treated."
.....
A commentary on a website, Sierra Leone News Hunters, suggested that a memorial site be built to honor the dead who do not receive traditional burial rites, and to provide some comfort to their families.

It said: "The erection of a monument bearing the names of all Ebola victims would not take away the sad memories but it would at least pacify the broken heart somewhat."

Models

When you have a physics/edu email address you sometimes get odd messages, above and beyond the usual breast enlargement and import business proposals. Never mind the odd grammar (his English is far better than my 30C homeopathic Hungarian), but instead look at the shoehorning of all phenomena into his model.

If the speed of an elementary object not equal to the speed of light, then the elementary object is atom, which consists of many electromagnetic fields of photons, X-ray-photons and gamma-photons. The real "particles" of this world are the photon, X-ray-photon and gamma-photon particles. Other particles not exist.

and

Known that the several radioactive nucleuses emitt several energy gamma-photons. Speed of all gamma-photons is the speed of light. From this follows that the nucleuses consist of several mass gamma-photons.

Let's follow the logic. It is known that humans emit sweat, urine, and feces, which move at less than the speed of light. From this it follows that humans consist of sweat, urine, and feces.

Despite the claims of political partisans, I suspect this is not so.

Trolls and saints

Last night Middle Daughter and I were talking about trolls and real-life threats.

What did trolls do before the net? With the net they can be heard, and threaten, and stir up trouble to their slimy hearts’ delight. Without it...

I suppose some would have written poison pen letters, but I don’t think those were ever quite as common as trolls are now. You might find some snarlers in the background, but I don’t remember that many, and I suppose the risks of personal confrontation suppressed the urge.

Did that suppression, by the effect of habit, change the attitudes? And does today’s ease of expression, also by habit, ingrain more deeply the bitterness and venom?

If I’m to guess, I think the net both reveals the flaw and makes it grow. With it, what might have been a minor weed of grump blossoms to a titan arum. Anonymity and distance make it consequence-free, and it’s claimed you can tell a man’s character by what he does when he’s alone.

I’m a layman here, but the received wisdom is that the bulk of the trolls will threaten till dawn but never do anything about their threats. But the net lets them link up with really violent types and shape their vision remotely.

New technologies give us new (or expanded) vices.

Maybe some expanded virtues too. What would some of those be, I wonder? Greater scope for charitable giving, yes. At least the potential for greater knowledge and perhaps a trace of effect of the Grand Tour? True, most people head for the bubble gum instead, but then most aren't trolls either. Except maybe on Facebook

It gives the scope to develop plans more quickly and completely--efficiency and perfection are good things, though not quite fitting in the list of classical virtues.

Am I a better person because I use the web? (My family and I are eating because of it, but that's not the point.) In what ways better, in what ways worse?

Marshmallows

I'm on the wrong side of the paywall to read the original, but description of Mischel's experiments with kids and marshmallows was new to me.

By now you've probably heard the summary: At the Stanford University laboratory of a psychologist named Walter Mischel, preschool-age children were left alone in a room after having been told they could get a small treat (a marshmallow or pretzel) by ringing a bell at any time to summon the experimenter. But if they held out until he returned on his own, they could have a bigger treat (two marshmallows or pretzels). The outcome, as it's usually represented, is that the children who were able to wait for an extra treat scored better on measures of cognitive and social skills many years later and had higher SAT scores. Thus, if we teach kids to put off the payoff as long as possible, they'll be more successful.

But that simplistic conclusion misrepresents, in several ways, what the research actually found.

1. What mostly interested Mischel wasn't whether children could wait for a bigger treat—which, by the way, most of them could. It wasn't even whether those who waited fared better in life than those who didn't. Rather, the central question was how children go about trying to wait and which strategies help. It turned out that kids waited longer when they were distracted by a toy. What worked best wasn't (in Mischel's words) "self-denial and grim determination," but doing something enjoyable while waiting so that self-control wasn't needed at all.

If you, like me, got the standard line, go read the rest of the article. Or if you can get by the paywall, read the journal article.

Bucket list

I'm reading a book called Sabbath(*) in which at one point the hypothetical question is asked "What do you most want to be, to do, to know, and to give away in the last third of your life?"

Aside from the unwelcome thought that I've probably less than a third to go if family history is any guide, the question seems not quite right somehow. I know that "If you don't have a dream how you gonna have a dream come true?" but something's missing.

I think part of it is the "you ... want" bit. If you had told me before I walked into the church that I'd be up close and personal with autism spectrum, I'd have dropped the ring and run like a gazelle with its tail on fire. But in the end I don't think I'd trade my life with my kids for anything. (and with my wife, of course)

So what I want isn't always a good estimator of what will turn out to be good.

Without some kind of plan and structure, nothing happens, and that's not good at all (see what happens to the fellow with one talent). But the details of how it turns out aren't in our control, only how we respond to the surprises. So I don't think I should have a bucket list so much as bucket principles--that I will do things virtuously, gratefully and with intelligence, so long as that is given to me.

Although I would like a trip to the space station.

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(*) By Dan B. Allender. So far it reads like he was getting paid by the word, and I'm not sure he understands who his audience is. Most people I know aren't in danger of taking the Sabbath too strictly.

Simple explanations

I read an article about personal space today, that referenced a study about men and women in airplane seats. It found that men hogged the armrests 5 to 1 over women.

Perhaps this is sexist domineering. Or perhaps men have, on the average, wider shoulders than women. Airline seats are not notorious for roominess either at shoulder height or at the seat. I don't sit widely but some of my neighbors have.

Dieting

"Reach for your mate instead of a plate".

Though I don't think you can reliably extrapolate from C. elegans...

Missed the bulls-eye

The comet is going to miss Mars. I still wish it would have, though I grant that it would have made existence difficult for our probes (which will apparently be on the far side of Mars for about 20 minutes when the high-speed comet tail whips through, and thus be relatively shielded from sand-blasting).

I'm not sure if liking explosions is a feature or a bug. I harbored a secret hope that the Scottish vote would be for independence, because of the chaos that would ensue--though if I were voting on the measure myself I'd have picked the less catastrophic option.

Epidemics

I thought one of the great benefits of literacy was that you could learn from the experience of people far away or long dead. You needn't live through a tornado yourself in order to learn how to prepare for one. Of course you can probably ask a friend who has sheltered when one went by--tornadoes are fairly common.

Stock market crashes happen too, but it seemed as though we had a generation of brokers who had not seen one in their working lives, and apparently (one may infer from their advice) believed that such things were now impossible.

The Spanish Flu was about a hundred years ago, and there aren't a lot of people left we can ask about it. But we can read about epidemics and quarantines, and figure out why people did things the way they did in the past.

But if each generation considers itself sui generis, I wonder what the point of writing is.

Graves in Liberia

One of the things that makes ebola hard in Liberia is that the dead cannot be honored. Granted, that seems like a minor detail compared to the death and fear, but people have risked death themselves to honor their dead.

There isn’t a lot we can do about this: those dead of ebola cannot be touched, and would most safely be cremated--not exactly a customary way of honoring the dead. But I wonder if we can do something. If the burial teams have the names (and parents) of the dead, could someone carve the names into a stones to stand by a mass grave? Quite a few would be "woman known only to God."

I don’t know if anybody there could do it, and the lag time in getting something made elsewhere and then shipped there is large, so this probably wouldn’t be much use anyway, but if people knew their family members were being commemorated, it might be a little comfort.

UPDATE: Maybe it would help with the problem of bribing of burial teams.

Astroguesser

My officemate, on hearing that he missed the eclipse this morning, mentioned a “Virtual Planetarium” called Stellarium, which is quite good. It even allows views from other planets. The stock background is rather amusing when the location is the South Pole (he suggested to the authors that they take some images from IceCube): trees and houses. You can pick a date, or do a Time Traveler scene with the months whipping by too.

We decided that a world with only Geoguesser is incomplete. What we need is a 3-D version, using the stars in our local area. If you need help, you can cheat by asking for the constellation lines to be drawn. When Orion looks like scrambled eggs, where in space are you? He suggested the name.

I’m not quite sure how the user picks a location in a sphere, though...

Stuff and Nonsense

Moseying through Wikiquotes after the Supreme's recent “non-decision…”

Nor do the gods appear in warrior's armour clad
To strike them down with sword and spear
Those whom they would destroy
They first make mad.

Bhartṛhari, 7th c. AD; as quoted in John Brough,Poems from the Sanskrit, (1968), p, 67

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If there are certain pages of Mr Bertrand Russell's book, Power, which seem rather empty, that is merely to say that we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

George Orwell, Review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell in The Adelphi (January 1939)

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At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

George Orwell, The Freedom of the Press", unused preface to Animal Farm

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. The highly socialised modern mind, which makes a kind of composite god out of the rich, the government, the police and the larger newspapers, has not been developed — at least not yet.

George Orwell, Review of The Civilization of France by Ernst Robert Curtius; translated by Olive Wyon, in The Adelphi (May 1932):

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If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully.

Confucius, Analects

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To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

George Orwell, "In Front of Your Nose," Tribune (22 March 1946)

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"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism

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And don’t forget Kipling

This isn't just about the latest folly endorsing the contradiction "homosexual marriage"--there are plenty of wads of nonsense we solemnly tip the hat to.

Fermions and Bosons

It occurred to me that I should maybe define some terms, especially when they represent such curious features of the world.

It all goes back to the photoelectric effect. It turns out that light comes in little “chunks” (photons). These have different energies, which correspond to different frequencies. The higher the energy, the higher the frequency; they’re directly proportional. But there’s another little detail about them that emerges: they have angular momentum.

That’s kind of weird at first glance, but electromagnetic fields can have momentum and angular momentum, so we can live with that. It turns out that not just photons have angular momentum but also other elementary particles, including the electron. Since as far as we can measure it doesn’t seem to have any size, it is hard to imagine how an electron could have angular momentum, which is the product of the radius and the component of momentum perpendicular to the radius. Radius=0 means angular momentum is 0, right? Except that it isn’t, here. There’s some intrinsic angular momentum to the electron. And the proton. And the photon.

And that the angular momentum comes in units, it isn’t continuous. Each photon has the same total angular momentum. It can point in different directions, but it is always the same total. So if a particle emits a photon, that particle’s intrinsic angular momentum has to change by one unit.

That unit is, of course h, Planck’s Constant, the pivot of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You might think that this just applied to photons, since that was where it was discovered, but it turns out to be more universal than that: gluons too, and the W/Z of the weak interaction--all have 1 unit of angular momentum.

So if something has an intrinsic angular momentum, what sizes can it be?

You can guess right off the bat: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 ... units of h. If these are elementary particles we call them bosons. If they are composite (like a Helium atom), we generally still call them bosons but with the caveat that they are complicated.

But, there’s another possibility. 1/2 h. If something with that angular momentum emits a photon, you get (1/2-1)=-1/2: the same size, just pointing in the opposite direction. Particles with spins 1/2, 3/2, 5/2 etc. we call fermions.

That different spin might not seem to matter much, but it turns out to be very important. Each electron is exactly like every other electron. If you have two, their joint wave function has to be anti-symmetric. In other words, if you swap their positions, directions and their spins, you get the opposite sign. So what happens if they’re both at the same place with the same spin? When a function is equal to its negative, it has to be 0. So you can’t have two fermions in exactly the same state. Which is fortunate, or else atoms would collapse as all the electrons emitted photons and fell into the nucleus.

So if angular momentum comes in discrete chunks, does that mean that the angular momentum of a spinning wheel is a finite (but large) number of those chunks instead of a continuum? Or that your angular momentum relative to the door knob as you walk down the hall is limited to particular values? Probably. And if you try to wrap your mind head around how that works, you begin to see why some researchers are working with models of spacetime/momentum space that use a grid rather than the old faithful number lines. In everyday life you can't tell the difference between a quadrillion h and a quadrillion and one, so it looks continuous to you. But things look different in the small world when the lumps become obvious.

Capital city problems

Fortunately I can do most of my work remotely. The First Lady is visiting the Overture Center tomorrow morning, which will tie up traffic abominably. The square is pretty sluggish at the best of times, and when security (the center is less than 500 feet away from my office) gets involved there's not much point in trying to come in. The airport is between my home and the square, so to go around I'd be circling half the city.

I just hope she doesn't go after my lunches.

Left off preaching and gone to meddling...

I hadn't noticed before, but the Bible addresses government deficit spending: "The wicked borrows and does not pay back." (Psalm 37:21)

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I noticed that while I was slogging through The Life and Death of Mr Badman, Bunyan's originally planned sequel to The Pilgrim's Progress. He wrote the book as a counterpoint to Pilgrim, but when someone published a fake sequel, Bunyan wrote a real Part II to the Pilgrim's Progress, concerning the adventures of Christiana, his wife. Part II isn't as dramatic a read as the more familiar Part I, since it is more of an allegory of the Christian life in community, but it is well worth reading. And some call The Holy War the second best allegory in English, with Pilgrim's Progress being the best.

Mr Badman, on the other hand, is a dialog between two people who pretty much entirely agree with each other, and consequently it lacks almost all dramatic interest. It includes thumbnails of real people's stories, which of course I've never heard of but were probably of lively interest to his readers. I'm about halfway through, and within an inch of just jumping to the end to see how Mr Badman meets his maker. It does provide an view of what life was like then, with Masters over apprentices rather than students in schools, and informers getting an extra revenue stream by spying on their neighbor's transgressions (especially the neighbors stepping out on their spouses).

I bought an inexpensive tablet to see how the pocket appliance world works, and loaded FBReader and some kindle-style books from Gutenberg on it. Works OK; I can read and listen to music easily enough, though a more expensive model would have better sound and wireless reception. Miserable for anything involving typing, though, and speech recognition is more amusing than useful. Oddly enough the Kindle app doesn't seem very useful.

No, please, read the paper!

"Meet the Majorana fermion", the particle predicted 80 years ago.

Except it isn't an elementary particle at all. If you take the trouble to read just the abstract of the article, it is clear enough that what was observed wasn't a Majorana neutrino, but a collective state in a superconductor. That's cool, and it was quite challenging to create such a composite system that models a Majorana fermion, and it probably satisfies the equations to first order, but it isn't a new particle in the standard sense. Not in the sense that a proton or a tau is a particle (and a fermion).

If neutrinos are Majorana particles, then they are their own anti-particles. Since they're so hard to detect, it hasn't been actually proven that the neutrino and the anti-neutrino are distinct, so Majorana's proposition is still an open question. Despite what Jessica Orwig at Business Insider implies in the rather muddled article.

To be fair, the experimenters probably made the comparison themselves, and expected that other people would know the difference.

The Secret Service

I know the rule: "never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity." But when the disastrous choice is made time after time, with virtually no intervening successes, even the most generous soul starts to wonder if there's malice behind the smiles.

The latest Secret Service fiascoes are reassuring. Despots are typically careful of their safety. Turning off alarms, dialing down the rules of engagement to gentle/delicate, and installing guards on the basis of political correctness rather than competence have predictable consequences—predictable to any but the terminally stupid. Even if someone besides the President is calling the shots, that person would have to be foolish to forget that their access to the throne depends on the safety of the king. So: stupidity.