Lucille is Getting a Makeover

I've had my truck for about two and a half months now. I'm currently home for the holidays back in Rhode Island and have to take leave of both my truck and my dog... absence really does make the heart grow fonder. In the two months that I've had my FJ60, nicknamed Lucille (after the most diabolical Bluth), I've grown to love the old girl, but haven't quite had the time or money to give her everything she truly deserves. There is, of course, a laundry list of wants and needs, some of which include:

• New air, oil, and fuel filters; new plugs, cap, rotor, and wire; flushing the radiator and cleaning the carb - I'm about halfway through this routine maintenance list.
• While overall her body is in wonderful shape, there are a few minor spots of rust that must be dealt with. I also plan to strip most of the chrome trim since its crap and just traps dirt and moisture, leading to more rust.
• 33x10.5x15 BFG All-Terrain tires. A step up from my current 31" tires. 
• Eventually the wish list includes new front and rear bumpers with bull bars, a Tuffy security console, and tinting the rear windows... for someday in the distant future when I actually have money.

For now I'm gutting the rear cargo area interior of the carpet and side panels. I'm planning on getting new plastic side panels cut, allowing access to the interior of the rear quarters for some fluid/straps/cables storage and building an 8" box that will sit flush with the top of the wheel wells that will house storage drawers and include a fold-down sleeper panel to keep the level flush when the rear seat is folded down. Here are a couple pictures of my destruction process...

When I get back to California I'll be getting the side panels cut and installed, mounting the rear speakers into them, and begin the box-building process.

Career Opportunity: Zombie Subject Matter Expert

I'm fairly certain that we'll face an apocalyptic scenario in the near future, as evidenced by my recent (is a few months ago recent?) post about the Google-induced Terminator-style apocalypse. This scenario really scares the crap out of me, because how do you fight machines? They 'think' hundreds of thousands of times faster than us, our bullets will bounce off their invincible metal bodies, and you really can't make an emotional plea for mercy with them.

No, if we're going to have an apocalypse, I'd at least prefer that it take the form of something a bit more manageable for those of us who would like to pour some effort into surviving. Personally, I feel quite well-equipped for the impending zombie outbreak and would prefer that it occur in time to cripple our society's ability to unleash our own mechanical inventions upon ourselves.

With a background in emergency preparedness and infectious disease, I feel that I could very adequately fill the role of 'Zombie SME' for CDC, DHS, or other interested parties to whom preparation for such an event should fall. My extensive research into the field via film and television only bolsters my credentials and I can, of course, provide references from both large, gun-toting, zombie-fearing warriors as well as prominent infectious disease researchers. I also own a baseball bat.

Where is this Zombie threat going to emerge from? Perhaps the most likely route of infection would be via prions, but I certainly can't rule out a mutated variant of the rabies virus. In either case, it would seem that the actual re-animation of a corpse is much less biologically plausible than the destruction and alteration of a victim's normal brain function, essentially turning them into something no longer human. The 'rage' virus depicted in 28 Days Later is a prime example.

Since I already posted about rabies in China, I'll expand on the biological underpinnings of the prion hypothesis...

A Plan Comes Together...

Don't let it ever be said that I don't follow through on a plan.

Ok, let it be said, but not today. Probably not this week. Because today I completed my six-month 'quarter-life' crisis plan, exactly on schedule. You can reference this old post to see that I did indeed set this plan in motion intentionally.

What was the plan? In short, (1) turn 25, (2) get a dog, (3) get a truck, (4) feel blissful. Check, check, check, and check. In addition to that I have a sweet place to live and have even begun formulating a realistic plan as to what I'm going to do with myself after graduation in May.

Anyways, since the dog has yet to make an appearance on this blog, here's Heidi, the slightly-too-timid, 1 year-old German Shepherd/Border Collie mix. She's the best:



And how my newest acquisition, as of this afternoon, a 1984 Toyota FJ60 Land Cruiser. Straight six, 4 speed manual, 200k miles, and an almost-brand-new clutch. She topped out around 75 on the highway back from San Jose. I love her.

Such Lazy Blogging (with Rabies!)

I continually have fleeting visions of actually writing something substantive about public health in this blog, but even those visions are subject to my highly-restricted attention span. However, I have found some public-health worthy news to share with you today. It does not, however, really approach the criteria for substantive.

I subscribe to a ludicrous number of public health-related emails, among them the CDC's MMWR Weekly Report, DHS' Daily Infectious Disease Report, NIH press releases, Kaiser Health News, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Public Health News Digest, and of course, Pro-Med. Most mornings I wake up to all of them in my email inbox, and promptly delete them in my pre-shower haze that is comprised of 65% lethargy and 30% contempt for anything producing noise, and 5% ill-will towards my dog for being so happy that I'm awake. I used to read, or at least quickly browse, almost all of these publications. I suppose without John Swartzberg's prodding to share current events in my Principles of Infectious Disease course, they take a backseat to more pressing matters, like making coffee, walking my dog, and whatever came from Netflix that week. Sometimes I even study.

But I digress... I had the opportunity to check one of my Pro-Med emails during a particularly dry lecture today and found this noteworthy headline, "RABIES - CHINA: (GUANGXI) COUNTERFEIT HUMAN VACCINE". Apparently, 8 people have been arrested in China's Guangxi Zhuang region for selling over 1,200 fake rabies shots, which caused the death of one child, and were administered to over 1,000 others. No other harmful effects have been reported by those who received the shots. Pro-Med linked to this article for reference.

China has a notoriously high rate of rabies infections, second only to India. Rabies vaccine is typically adminstered as post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), which means it's given after a suspected infection. Why doesn't everyone get it beforehand? Well, because you have to get 4 shots, and they hurt something fierce. It's the sort of thing you really only want to experience if absolutely have to. China will likely do the vaccine counterfeiters one better and simply execute them, since that's their preferred approach dealing with any crimes remotely serious.



If, like me, you're from the east coast, you generally think of raccoons a primary reservoir for rabies. Stumbling about in the daytime, refusing to not tear through your trash, and even refusing to yield when you throw logs at them when you're camping. Well, on the west coast, the primary reservoir are bats. What's even better is that many people get infected without knowing it because a bite from a bat can be so minuscule that you don't even notice it. The incubation period for rabies can be well over a month, depending how long it takes for the infection to travel to your central nervous system. However, once it arrives there and severe symptoms occur, you're about 99% likely to die, after progressing through fever, malaise, depression, violent movements, hydrophobia, hallucinations, and eventually coma. I think hydrophobia would be the worst part, I really love swimming.

So, those vaccine swindlers in China are likely to die, or least fester in a prison camp in a remote sector of the Tibetan Plateau for quite some time. But I still have unanswered questions: (1) what on earth was in the fake vaccine? (2) What sort of cold-hearted bastard picks rabies as the vaccine to counterfeit? Why not go for something a little less 'life-or-death', like a flu shot? Or maybe some fake Viagra? (3) And finally, and perhaps most importantly, this story makes no sense! People only get rabies vaccines if they have a suspected exposure to it, usually an animal bite, likely a dog in the case of China. If over 1,000 people got this FAKE vaccine, and still didn't die of rabies, and 99% of untreated cases die... then what gives?

I have a few of plausible hypotheses:

1. People in China are getting bit by dogs all the time, but none of them actually have rabies.
   
2. This fake vaccine wasn't as fake people think it is.
   
3. The folks in China are just a hardy bunch, apparently they've got the anti-rabies gene.
   
4. China doles out pre-exposure rabies vaccine for some reason.
   

If I find out, I'll report back....

The People's Republic of California

Since moving here last year I've been trying to get a handle on the circus that is California politics. Even for someone such as myself, well-versed in the political arena thanks to my mediocre undergraduate public education, trying to get a handle on all the issues is akin to trying to grapple a greased pig on a trampoline. Here is a brief rundown on the latest trainwreck that's occurring between the executive and judicial branch...

In November 2008 Californians narrowly approved (51%) a ballot measure to ban gay marriage in the state, thanks in large part to the insidious influence and financial backing of the Mormon church and other conservative religious groups. Prop 8 effectively overturned a California Supreme Court ruling that said same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.

On August 4th 2010 Judge Vaughn Walker overturned Proposition 8 after concluding that the law lacked any rational justification and denied equal rights to same-sex couples. Protect Marriage, a conservative religious coalition that defended Prop 8 before Judge Walker has appealed to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. This is where things get interesting...

Walker has questioned whether Protect Marriage has the legal standing to appeal the ruling, citing that usually only elected officials have the authority to defend state laws in court. This may result in Prop 8's supporters being barred from appealing Walker's ruling to the 9th Circuit. Both California's Attorney General, Jerry Brown, and Governor Terminator have repeatedly stated that they will decline to defend Proposition 8 in court.

That's karma, bitches.

But conservatives are a persistent bunch, and accordingly the Pacific Justice Institute filed suit on behalf of a Los Angeles-based minister seeking to compel the State to defend Prop 8 in court. The Third District Court of Appeals in Sacramento dismissed the suit without comment on Monday. PJI said they would file an immediate appeal the state Supreme Court in hopes of obtaining a reversal on the ruling before the September 11th deadline for action on the Proposition 8 case.

Did you get all that? A constitutional provision that overturned a state Supreme Court ruling, was itself overturned by a District Court; appealing that decision may prove impossible due to supporters being barred from appealing, and the state refusing to do, but the state may yet be forced to defend Prop 8 if an appeal to force them to do so is successful, after initially being dismissed by a Court of Appeals. I've created a diagram to help you understand...

Asking the Question is Half the Right Answer

If you start talking to me about the future, you'll quickly realize that John Connor, despite being fictitious, is one of my personal heroes. Of course, anyone who saves humanity from an offending outside force, be it machine, alien, demon, or zombie, should be universally well-respected. As human beings, we're happy to destroy one another, but theoretically take great offense to some other form of being trying to fill that role. We really are one big family.

Why John Connor? Well, as much as I appreciate all the other fictional heroes out there that have saved humanity, I'm quite certain that the Terminator doomsday scenario comes closest to reality, and may in fact be far too prophetically accurate for comfort. Thus, we can learn more from John Connor and repeated viewings of the Terminator franchise than from just about any other medium that portrays humanity's struggle for survival. Update your Netflix queue accordingly.

My trepidations about the coalescence of developing artificial intelligence and the ubiquity of the internet aside (i.e. a technological singularity), as a global society we have been hurtling into the future with technology developing at a truly exponential rate, as Ray Kurzwell demonstrates aptly in a recent TED presentation. One of the more glaring results of the ongoing technological progress in which we find ourselves immersed is the overabundance of information that anyone with an internet connection should be well aware of. With a few strokes of a keypad we're able to find the answer to almost any routine question we could conjure. It sure beats going to the library to pour through the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

This information overload has spawned the new field of data visualization. Faced with enormous amounts of data that cannot realistically be read and understood in the traditional sense, there has been an increasing effort to convert this data into charts, graphs, interactive displays, and supergraphics that will allow users to comprehend the significance of the information being synthesized, compressed, and displayed. As we continue to amass more and more information, the manner in which we convey this data will continually evolve in such a way that considers technological capability, human psychology, and artistic appeal.

The implications for our society's growing data obsession are innumerable and unpredictable. It may one day bring world peace or may instead convert humanity into an enslaved race of human-machine hybrids, much like the Borg, who's to know? Nevertheless, it is obvious that this trend has and will continue to shape how we think. The traditional process of discovery where one asks a question and then must engage in the work of finding the answer has been turned on its head.

Collectively, we have the data to answer an overwhelming amount of questions, and while our methods of harvesting this data are in their infancy, they will no doubt progress at the typical exponential pace of technology. Where we are sorely lacking is in our ability to ask the right questions.

Without asking the right questions we cannot put our plethora of information to work. Information for the sake of information is not only useless, its obnoxious. In the context of public health, something I think about from time to time, disease rates, lab results, and health outcomes are meaningless until that data is put to use improving population health. Questions provide the framework for making information work for us. Without asking the right questions we might as well be building a brick house on quicksand.

So the question remains: is "what are the right questions?" the right question to ask?

The Broad Street Pump: Now Serving Beer!

Yes, that's right, the Broad Street Pump is back in action for the first time since 1854... only this time rather than serving up cholera-tainted water, it will be spewing forth amateur brew concocted in west Berkeley. With the help of my esteemed colleagues, brewmasters Rob and Paul, I am formally announcing the informal creation of not one, but two, lines of homebrew - straight from our over-sized storage closet.... Red Star Brewing and Constitution Beer Works



Why create two different brands of beer simultaneously? Because we're clever businessmen, that's why. With the political climate in this country being what it is, there's no better to way to make a profit than by blatantly marketing to the ardent supporters of the liberal left and the conservative right. No self-respecting tea-partier wants to be caught dead drinking the same brew as some deadbeat, Muslim-sympathizing socialist; and why should the educated elite have to suffer the same swill as those creationist simpletons?

No, if this country is going to be properly divided the lines must be drawn. The time for common ground and putting our differences aside is over. We can no longer share the same simple pleasures; they must be branded and marketed in a diametrically opposed fashion. We here at Red Star Brewing and Constitution Beer Works are happy to provide this long-overdue service to a nation of individuals that have too often been forced to commiserate with their polar opposites over the same delicious adult beverage. Enough is enough.

So tape off your half of the room you share with that yokel freshman, show your neighbor how easily his Prius can be destroyed by an F-350, and crack open a fresh beer far, far away from anyone who disagrees with you about anything.