It's all relative

I added a class on Relativity to my course this semester. I thought it would be fun - trippy science is always fun! - and I thought it nicely filled a gap between thinking about our solar system and thinking about the Big Bang.

I even found two resources I liked, which is unusual. This article talks about the impact of Einstein's work on our daily life, and this page has a nifty little applet illustrating a few of the predictions (and evidence) of relativity theory.

Slam dunk, right?

Well, as usual, I'm learning a few things from my students as I'm grading their homework. I imagine science types will find this a bit more amusing - although maybe we can get some interesting posts.

• Time in space moves more slowly than on Earth.
• You can witness the effects of relativity on a train. [Clearly the trains in Egypt move close to the speed of light!]
  
• People have visited other stars. [I can think of a lot of problems with this one.]
• On the way, I suppose, these same people stopped off at other planets - this was easy because they were riding in airplanes.
  
• No reliable physics was done before Einstein. [I'm not kidding. This is scary.]
• People from Harvard don't get their work repeated. [Also scary. Funny, but scary.]
• The faster the sun moves, the faster time passes. [I think this student has mixed up the anthropormorphic idea of a "day" with some sort of measurable passage of time, like looking at a watch. I think. Could be anything, really.]

To avoid grading, I decided to figure out how long it would take to fly an airplane to our closest star, Alpha Centauri, which is 4 light-years away. A 747 flies at 550 miles per hour, which is 245 meters per second. Pretty fast, right? By my little calculation, it would take almost 5 million years to get to Alpha Centauri from Earth.

I guess, then, a little pitstop at Saturn doesn't seem that unreasonable. All things considered.

The w-word

Amid all the ranting about swine flu, diving, grading, and moving, I seem to have been avoiding blogging about the big event of this summer ...

My impending nuptuals, that is.

I don't actually want to blog about it because the truth is I don't actually spend that much time thinking about it. I'd rather try to figure out how to sneak in another dive trip before leaving here. I'm that awful. If you know me, you know what I'd write anyway. And if you don't know me, then it doesn't really matter too much, does it?

One way to ensure a low-key wedding is to make sure you're 7 time zones away from the venue (and 10 time zones away from the groom) while trying to plan it. There are obvious hazards to this approach, of course. On the whole, I'm looking forward to being married, but I'm not a big fan of planning this type of thing.

I was recently reading a collection of essays and I found this great article called The Lesbian Bride's Handbook. While I (thankfully) don't have to deal with the same issues as the author, I found plenty to relate to. Such as ...

I am not a total idiot. I always had the sense to say no wedding cake, no officiant, no first dance, no here comes the bride, no Times announcement, and absolutely no white dress. Who are we kidding? And why? We just wanted a big, awesome party where everyone could meet and go bananas. It’s a special opportunity, you know: The only other time everyone you love will assemble in one place is at your funeral ... The thing is, though, you have to serve something, and you can’t very well go naked. You can call it a party about love all you want, but you still have to make all the same decisions that every other bride has to make, and you have to make them very carefully unless you want everyone you know to schlep to some crummy party in the middle of nowhere ... If I was going to have a party about love, it was going to be the classiest party about love ever. I did not experience this imperative as relaxing.

Hear, hear.

A million monkeys

With a million typewriters should be able to recreate the works of Shakespeare, right?

I found this great blog of Carl Zimmer's on the Discover magazine website. He's equally outraged about the nonsense associated with the Influenza A outbreak ...

and he's got some lunatics - published lunatics, mind you - clearly in his crosshairs.

I really love the graphic on this page. That's how I feel - some days more than others, of course.

I'm so glad that there are idiots out there who can get their work published, while I'm scrounging around for gainful employment.

I'll end this quote with a favorite of mine:

Robert Wilensky - "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."

This also applies to exams, mind you.

If it looks like a duck ...

And quacks like a duck ...

Then it must be time to slaughter the pigs.

700 down, 349300 to go ... and only a few members of a repressed minority disadvantaged.

My favorite part of this article reads, "The government denies the slaughter has anything to do with Muslim distaste for pork and maintains that new, hygienic pig farms using imported animals will be set up in two years time."

Yeah, right. If the new establishment runs on Egyptian time, we're looking at 30 years minimum - and everyone here knows it.

In other news, the weather here has been terrible. Oven-hot winds have been kicking up so much sand, I could barely see the river from my flat today. The usual rolling vistas of construction visible from my office window were obscured in a flat beige haze.

There's a metaphor here somewhere, and I'm reaching for it.

Pigs don't kill people ...

People kill people!

Thanks to the Egyptian government's ill-advised, irrational pig-slaughter mandate, more lives may be in danger now than from a nonexistant flu strain. Read on for a portion of an email I received today from the US Embassy:

Local media are reporting that there have been demonstrations at several locations in and around Cairo in response to the Egyptian Government’s forcible culling of swine. According to media and other sources, residents and farmers involved in pork farming have assaulted health workers and security officers attempting to carry out the government’s decision to slaughter all pigs, further exacerbated by rumors about compensation for the culled animals. Protests in Giza and Moqattam included violent confrontations and rock-throwing that resulted in a number of injuries and arrests. There are a number of charitable organizations in the Moqattam area.

Gee, who could have possibly predicted that people would protest having their livelihoods taken away - and not for the greater good? While I seriously doubt that the zabaleen understand epidemiology and molecular virology, they're certainly on the right side of the fence on this one. Unlike the government - who, coincidentally, also don't understand the forces at work.

Pig Paranoia

Hey, Egyptian government spybots! Over here!

Swine flu is not spread by pigs - live or dead. The only pigs known to have gotten this flu strain received it from a farmer and recovered without treatment!

That's right! Humans are the danger to pigs!

And, as has finally been pointed out by a media outlet, the word pandemic only refers to the geographical distribution of a disease. Not its severity, not its frequency, not how much money or support a government can squeeze out of a conveniently panicked populace.

Quote:
"But people were infecting each other, and until Saturday, no pigs had been found with the virus — a fact that the pork industry used to bolster its argument that the virus should not even be named for swine. "

Quote:
" “The eating of pork is absolutely not a problem,” Dr. Butler-Jones said."

Quote:
"As of Saturday morning, Mexico had confirmed 473 cases of H1N1, out of the 1,303 suspected cases that had been tested, indicating that the outbreak may be much smaller than it initially seemed. The death toll was raised Saturday night to 19. Mexico had 159 deaths thought to be caused by swine flu. But many had other causes: 66 have now been attributed to other illnesses. Other cases have yet to be tested."

Cairo's pigs bring income to some of Cairo's poorest citizens. The pigs eat our garbage - and by making sure Cairo can't dispose of its garbage, the government is guaranteeing a different public health crisis. I think I might be less cynical if there weren't an outstanding religious issue here, or if non-Muslim-majority nations were calling for massive pig slaughters.

Can we please, please stop the insanity???

Plugged-in to Pandemic

Yesterday I spent both meals with friends from the university. Amazingly, both conversations included discussion on something that's on everyone's mind - swine flu. For once, I have an idea of what's going on in the world!

Please excuse me. I meant Influenza A. Seems to me this virus should have been renamed before the media got their claws into it, but the horse is out of the barn now.

Funnily, the WHO renamed the virus yesterday, and prominently displays the new name on the main virus webpage - but the URL still has "swineflu" in the address. The CDC, on the other hand, has "swine flu" written in enormous letters across its homepage, but the virus-specific URL reads "H1N1." I guess that's funny "strange," not funny "haha."

During lunch, I chatted about how flu presents in humans, and why it's a bit alarming that people who wouldn't usually die from influenza (not very young or very old) seem to be falling victim to this one.

And at dinner, we had a rousing discussion about the economic and social impacts of the disease in a country where Christians - the minority - keep the nation's pigs. In Egypt, pigs are mainly used for garbage disposal in the zabaleen communities, with a very small sideline economy generating pork for ex-pats. I'm sure you can figure out that these are the selfsame pigs. This realization did not make me happy.

So I was pleased this morning to wake up to Cairo-specific New York Times coverage on swine flu. As we predicted, the Egyptian government is reacting in a totally irrational manner that discriminates along religious lines and contributes to the already crushing poverty of Cairo's poorest citizens.

Not to mention that at this point, the disease is passed from human to human; closing the airport would be a far more effective means of flu control than slaughtering a few hundred thousand pigs. Or - dare I name it? - soap and water should do the trick nicely. But if you're a non-moderate Muslim and convinced that not only pigs but Christians are the enemy, clearly God is giving you a chance to do some mopping up - on both fronts.

Par for the course, really.

It's so demoralizing to see this sort of nonsense. I tell myself that this is why I teach Scientific Thinking - to educate Egypt's next generation of leaders away from illogical thinking and irresponsible behavior. And then on bad days I look at the work I receive, and I wonder if things will ever really change here ... or anywhere.

I really, really hope they do.

One last thought - globally there have been 257 cases of Influenza A reported in 11 countries. Nine of those countries have no reported deaths. The United States has had exactly one death out of 190 cases; the other deaths were in Mexico and were likely due to inadequate medical intervention.

Mexico is reporting a hundred confirmed cases and thousands of suspected cases, with only a handful of deaths confirmed to be caused by the virus. Someone walking into a hospital and saying they have the flu is not the same as actually having the flu. I think the numbers will go up in Mexico, but it's still important to think critically.

I also can't help but note that these reported figures don't actually add up. Clearly there's a lot of uncertainty about the extent of the flu, but uncertainty does not warrant panic.

Spanish influenza (also misnamed because it began in Kansas) killed tens of millions of people in 1918 - that's more people than were killed by World War I. That was a cause for fear. In this day and age, with soap, good health, and good hospitals, there's no need to panic over a few hundred cases.

Responsible, yes - hysterical, no. Just wash your hands and stay healthy.

I'm interested to see that Spanish influenza was also subtype H1N1. I'm going to stop this post here, on the off chance that that observation doesn't mean anything to you.

And remember, folks - influenza is caused by a virus. Antibiotics are worthless against viruses, so throw out that antibiotic sanitizer and stop harassing your doctor.