Ticked off for no good reason

As it turns out, Lyme disease was not created as a biological weapon on Plum Island and did not accidentally escape into an unsuspecting population.

Who said it did? For one, Jesse "The Body" Ventura, former Navy underwater demolitions expert, governor of Wisconsin and professional wrestler, real name, James George Janos.

He's quoted on the Web as contending that Lyme disease resulted from biological warfare research on Plum Island, a mysterious little island off the coast of Connecticut.  The actual institution there is the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.  During the Cold War the site was allegedly used to create bio-weapons against domestic animals, like sheep and cattle.

The bacterium that causes Lyme disease

Yes, it's a bit creepy, and having to change out of your clothes and into a special disposable suit, and being required to shower before exiting, adds to the spooky atmosphere.

But, getting back to Lyme disease. 

DNA from the bacterium that causes Lyme disease was recently identified in a sample taken from "Otzi," the remarkably preserved frozen fellow found in the Otzi Valley, in the Alps, a few years ago. 

Otzi is about 4,000 years old. That is, way, way  before Europeans landed on this continent and thousands of years before the construction of the lab on Plum Island. 

However, even if Otzi had never been found, the idea of Lyme disease as a biological weapon is ludicrous. It typically causes flu-like symptoms, a rash, painful joints, and is almost always cured by a week of antibiotics. There is no record of any otherwise healthy person ever dying from Lyme disease.

This is not what you want in a weapon. It's too mild and too easily treated. Treatment calls for nothing more exotic than amoxicillin, a standard, cheap antibiotic. Smallpox, plague,  and anthrax are the kinds of terrifying pathogens that some countries have weaponized.

The Lyme disease pathogen, Borrelia burgdorferi, just wants to live in ticks. The ticks are not affected. The parasite just uses mice, deer, shrews, voles and us, as way stations.

 Nothing personal.  Just passing through, like they've been doing for a long, long time. 

Higgs boson, anyone?

what a Higgs boson might "look like"

The Higgs field works like this

Granted, I don't know anything about anything, but the Higgs field seems fishy to me.

The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland may have detected a Higgs boson, the theoretical particle that transmits the "force" of the Higgs field to all matter.  You are probably familiar with the boson for electromagnetism, the photon.

The Higgs idea, over-simplified, is that the universe is occupied by the Higgs field. Some things can pass through the field easily, hardly bothering with Higgs bosons.

 Other things are like Higgs boson magnets. They have to wade through clouds of Higgs bosons. In this way the Higgs field confers mass.  That is, we perceive more interaction with the Higgs field as mass.

Or, an elegant way to account for mass.

But a universal field smacks of the aether,  a Medieval invention that in centuries hence was employed to explain how light waves could travel through a vacuum. Physicists reasoned that water and air are necessary for sound waves, so the same mechanism must hold for light.

Michelson and Morley, two American physicists, set out in 1887 to measure the aether, or ether. To make a long story short, they did not find any evidence of ether. The theory of special relativity did not depend on ether either. Today the idea of luminferous ether seems naive. 

Mathematically, we are told, the Higgs field and boson solve the "where does mass come from?" question economically and convincingly.  

But it does sound a lot like ether, which turned out to be unnecessary and nonexistent, doesn't it?

cold, wind, and temperature

Since it seems as if winter temperatures will finally arrive, a word about wind chill.

Wind chill was developed to describe how wind velocity changes the way temperature feels to exposed skin.

We hear about wind chill so often that many people have become confused. Only warm blooded animals with bare skin, humans basically, are affected. If the temperature is 35 but the wind chill is 16, a container of water placed outside will not freeze.

Wind might make the water freeze more rapidly at an ambient temperature of 32 degrees by carrying away heat. Entropy always increases, after all.

So fear not. Your car will die equally well at 16 degrees or minus 10 with the wind chill.

Is Everybody Happy?

Speaking of ridiculous nonsense -- and why not? -- we have Harvard scientists concluding that  happiness depends on the contentment of friends of friends, or neighbors you may not even know.

This may apply to some people, but it is demonstrably false for the vast majority. If it were true, after all, as long as one person on Earth is happy, so should everybody. The happy fellow is friends with another, who is friends with another, and so on, ad absurdum.

Besides, how can you possibly characterize someone as happy or unhappy? Some people are unhappy most of the time, and others are in as good mood most of the time, but no one is joyful at all times. 

Part of adulthood is learning how to keep these emotions private. If you found a $100 dollar bill, would you walk around with a broad smile and tell everyone you pass on the sidewalk? Would you call up your friends?

Perhaps $100 isn't sufficient to cause elation. Suppose instead that you won $50 million in a lottery. You're ecstatic. Is this going to make all of your friends jolly?

Some of them, sure. Most of the others will curse their luck, feel sorry for themselves, and/or ask you for money, since you now have an endless supply. Decline any of these requests and you've made an enemy for a long time.

Moreover, most people don't appear to be happy. At best they're able to maintain a guarded equilibrium. Next time you're at a store look around. See many smiling faces? No. 

And finally, what kind of society aspires to be happy all of the time? 

Only one in which people are losing their jobs left and right, banks are collapsing, businesses are failing, auto companies are on the brink of bankruptcy, newspaper chains are going under,  and people are afraid to spend money.

Good times. Happy people. 

dog bites man again and again

Either the dog or the leg are artificial. Maybe both.

Are aggressive pit bulls and other breeds of dogs inherently violent, or are they made so by their owners?

It is both nature and nurture, of course. 

However, let's consider different species. How many people are bitten by rabbits? By goats? By guinea pigs? Probably not too many, nor too seriously. Could you provoke a rabbit to bite you? Yes, but it would take persistence. 

The point is that animals exist on a continuum, from shy to scary. Sharks, rattlesnakes, and alligators are considered dangerous. Some sharks are more mellow than others, but all in all, they're at the dangerous end of the spectrum. 

Clearly, so are dogs. Humans started out with wolves and domesticated them into dogs. In fact, the modern canine is largely a human invention. Dogs were bred to guard, attack, hunt, and bite. Certain species were intentionally bred to have strong jaws and the capacity to maul. 

There are many types of dogs now, but as a group they're closer to the shark end of the line than the bunny end.  Face it. Snails, turtles, bats, woodchucks, beavers, or otters are highly unlikely to bite you. 

Most dogs will not bite you.  A lot of them will. 

 According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "about 4.5 million people are bitten by dogs each year. Almost one in five of those who are bitten;  (and) a total of 885,000: require medical attention for dog bite-related injuries. In 2006, more than 31,000 people underwent reconstructive surgery as a result of being bitten by dogs."

The  "dog bite denial" folks point out that there is no way to determine which breeds are more likely to bite you. True. But obviously, pit bulls put more people in the hospital than beagles. There is a reason that German shepherds are the dogs of choice for protection and paramilitary work. 

For mysterious reasons, people these days tend to be more concerned about animal,  rather than human, welfare. (It's possible to care about both). This society sends people who hurt dogs to prison. 

What we don't do is hold hold owners accountable for their dogs.  Only in the most serious  mauling cases are the dogs themselves killed, or are people charged with a crime.  

Dogs can be a gentle, loyal,  lovable part of a family. They can provide nonjudgmental companionship. But owners need to control their dogs as if each pet is a potential killer.

 Especially people who insist on owning pit bulls. 

I made a mistake because I made a mistake

We all make mistakes, that is, those of us who are human.

But have you ever been asked to explain a mistake? Ultimately, the only way to explain a mistake is to circularly say "I made a mistake," which is not really an explanation.

Can you explain why you accidentally knocked over a glass of milk? Clumsy? Clumsy is just another word for "prone to making mistakes." 

Forget an appointment? "I got mixed up." In other words, I got mixed up because I got mixed up.

So, what is a mistake? Something you did that you did not mean to do? That suggests that the left side of the brain doesn't know what the right side is doing. A circuitry problem.

And there are those who contend that there are no mistakes; that actions are a response to unconscious urges. Calling Dr. Freud. 

Mistakes are a key aspect of atonement, as in the day of atonement, or Yom Kippur, which is observed by Jews next month. In this context anything done in violation of God's law must be atoned for. 

Life would be easier without mistakes.

 But, a large majority of us are human.

Brother can you spare a cylinder of acetylene

Barack Obama does not confer with me about jobs programs, but there is something I'd like to say to him.

Say there are about 14 million people in the U.S. who are unemployed. Construction workers constitute about 1.7 million of that number. That's 12 percent.

Yet when the President talks about creating jobs, he almost always refers to "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects such as bridges and highways. 

Since the bridges and highways in the U.S. are not adequately maintained, they are crumbling and rusting into oblivion, so rebuilding all of those decaying pieces of infrastructure makes sense. 

But where does that leave the other 12.3 million unemployed Americans? The experienced and older white-color unemployed? Those cast off by corporations so that young, inexperienced people can take their places for much less money? 

The newspaper business comes to mind. As the New York Times recently reported,  many news organizations are using people with no professional experience to cover the ongoing presidential election cycle. 

If you can replace someone working for $50,000, who has 30 years of experience, with someone working  for $30,000, who has no experience, that saves a lot of money. Or, so it seems. The public is less informed, but who cares?

This dynamic is apparently happening across the board. 

White collar jobs at hospitals, software companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, consulting firms, etc. are going to young people. If you are 50ish, good luck. 

I wouldn't mind learning how to weld, or lay concrete, or drive rivets, or whatever. But who is going to hire a 60ish welder with no experience? 

As everyone who knows anything knows, the country needs New Deal-type boost, so that people who are otherwise unemployable can get jobs and spend money. No one I know wants to get hand outs. 

"Over my dead body," quoth the Republican majority in the House, a la Eric Cantor.

Not exactly. Over my dead body.