Monthly Archives: September 2014

About that disease outbreak in the US #Enterovirus #EV-D68

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This is the time of year parents start scanning their facebook feeds and other sources of information for what to expect our children to get sick with, how badly, and when. For a couple of years in a row, a few years ago, we were getting hit with a norovirus, causing diarrhea, vomiting, and a lot of lost daycare or school days. This year we are seeing reports of an outbreak of the scary-sounding “Enterovirus EV-D68.” Hundreds of kids are sick enough to get treatment in several states, currently Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky. (By the time you read this more will probably be added to that list.)

This virus is part of a large family of viruses that includes a lot of diseases, some pretty benign and some more serious. But the best common name for this particular virus, the one that includes this type of virus as well as several others, is the dreaded “Common Cold.”

This is probably a bit worse than the regular common cold for some people, indicated by the number of hospitalizations, some of which include pretty serious cases. The peak season for this type of virus is September, though it is sometimes called a “summer cold” because it starts to spread earlier in they year. It also seems like this particular virus is spreading quickly and hitting communities with large percentages. But, it is not clear how different than usual this is. CNN quotes Dr. Mary Jackson, an infectious disease expert, “It’s worse in terms of scope of critically ill children who require intensive care. I would call it unprecedented. I’ve practiced for 30 years in pediatrics, and I’ve never seen anything quite like this.” She is based at a hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, where about 15% of the patients who came in have been placed in intensive care, of about 475 treated as of a couple of days ago.

So there are two things you need to know. First, this is probably a normal cold spreading more widely and quickly than other years. Second, there is probably a higher incidence of more serious infections with this cold, so be more vigilant and go ahead and set your parental trigger for calling in your child’s sickness to a more sensitive level.

Image above from here.

And, there are a few things you need to do. First, update your kid’s “cover your mouth when you cough” training. Second, update your kid’s “wash your hands a lot” training. Third, keep your kid home when sick to the extent that you can.

Just to be clear. EV-D68 is not common. When I say it is a version of the “common cold” I mean that it is one of many viruses, a diverse group, that are on the list of things that cause what we call “a cold.” The specific enterovirus EV-D68 might be pretty rare, which may be why reactions to it can be worse. There is a very small number, up until now, of confirmed cases of it world wide, but only a tiny percentage of instances of the common cold are ever tested to see what the exact cause is.

This is the time of year kids (and teachers) go back to school to learn new things and exchange pathogens. Expect a lot more of this over coming weeks.

Personally, I think everyone in the whole world should stock up of food and water and quarantine themselves form all other humans for 14 days. Inside, with a good mosquito net. Imagine how many human-reservoir or insect-human reservoir disease would go extinct!?!? Of course, then no one would have a well developed immune system after a while and we would all die but for a while it would be great!

That asteroid did kinda hit the Earth after all! Maybe.

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Remember that asteroid that was supposed to pass harmlessly by the Earth on Sunday? Well, things didn’t go exactly as planned…

Apparently, a meteor hit Nicaragua late Saturday night, forming a 12 meter wide crater. This would be a small chunk to make a crater that little. It has not been confirmed yet, but there is a strong possibility that this meteor was associated with 2014 RC. NPR quotes AP which quotes a Nicaraguan government official as saying the meteor “appears to have come off an asteroid that was passing close to Earth.” NPR also quotes the BBC which quotes another astronomer: “Astronomer Humberto Saballos said the meteorite could have broken off from the 2014RC asteroid which passed Earth at the same time.”

The event was caught on a security cam*:

I await further analysis and consideration. It could be a coincidence. Or perhaps this somewhat larger asteroid, 2014 RC, was traveling in a pack. They are known to do that. If so, “coming off” 2014 RC may be too vague a statement. Perhaps it came off a gazillion years ago. Or perhaps a handful of chunks were traveling together because the were mutually attracted in antiquity (via gravity).

*If you go to that link you will learn that the Earth is doomed because we are about to be rained down upon by a large number of asteroids. But be careful, take it with a grain of salt. Phil Plait at Slate wrote a post that discusses this: No, We’re Not Facing an Onslaught of Asteroid Impacts. This rumor comes from the same source that told us that the “supermoon” was going to kill everyone (it did not).

There is an asteroid out there known as 2014 NZ64 that is at the root of that story. It was just discovered. The asteroid is expected to pass by the earth 399 times between 2017 and 2113, however, the asteroid’s exact track and location is unclear because it was observed for too short of time. The best estimate at the time, though, is that 2014 NZ64 has a very low probability of hitting the earth ever, and pretty much no chance in the nearish future. The 399 measured future passes sum to an impact probability of 0.0000021. Just out of curiosity I’d like to know the estimated probability of something else happening to this asteroid, like it hitting the moon or another asteroid or something. Probably also low.

The Consensus on Climate Change From 97 Experts!!!

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This is a big thing. Starting just now, 97 different top experts on climate change, starting with Michael Mann (author of this book), one per hour, will have a say about the consensus. This is being run by Skeptical Science.

From Dana Nuccitelli’s post at The Guardian,

Research has shown that when people are aware of the expert consensus, they’re more likely to accept the fact that humans are causing global warming, and also more likely to support taking action to address the problem. Hence the consensus gap is a significant roadblock preventing us from tackling global warming.

To help close this gap, the website Skeptical Science has launched a 97-hour social media event starting today, 9/7. Each hour, the site will publish a relevant quote from a climate scientist, along with a playful caricature drawn by Skeptical Science founder and University of Queensland researcher John Cook. Each caricature lists the scientists’ name, title, expertise, and academic institution.

You can see the event unfold in an interactive 3D animation HERE. (Just pin the scientist down with your mouse cursor and make them talk!)

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Polar Vortex Begets Baby Boom?

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Nine months after the Polar Vortex covered a good part of American with freezing cold, there appears to be a baby boom, according to one unverified news story:

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – It’s been nine months since our bitter cold winter ended.
Now, delivery rooms are bracing themselves for a Polar Vortex baby boom.
All 39 maternity rooms and the NICU are full this weekend at a Des Moines hospital.
Doctors believe the baby bonanza is a result of the polar vortex last December and January.
In case you forgot, it was one of the snowiest and coldest winters on record.
August and September are usually the busiest months for maternity wards, draw your own conclusions why.

I’m holding out for more data.

Twitter Analytics? Inspect your Twitter feed for impact

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You can now see what happens when you tweet something. Twitter has a web page that tells you how many “impressions” a tweet has, how many “Engagements” (any kind of click on your tweet) and, for convenience, the percentage of tweets with which your tweeps engaged. There are also summary graphs for engagement rate, link clicks, and retweets. There is also a graph that shows your daily frequency of impressions from your entire twitter feed and a few helpful summary statements such as your current day’s impressions in relation to your 28 day average.

If you click on a tweet, you get a graph showing activity every several hours across the days since the tweet was born, with details of the kinds of engagements that happened.

Now you can obsessively track your tweets instead of just tweeting them.

This service was previously available only to verified users and advertisers Now it is available to anybody.

Click here to visit the page.

It turns out that coffee is special

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But you knew that already.

The Coffea canephora Genome has been sequenced. This is probably more important than the Human Genome project because humans are completely useless first thing in the morning, but coffee is very important first thing in the morning.

Some important plant evolution involves wholesale duplication of large parts of the genome. This does not appear to be the case with coffee. Rather, diversification of single genes characterizes the genome, so, according to the paper reporting these results in Science, “…the genome includes several species-specific gene family expansions, among them N-methyltransferases (NMTs) involved in caffeine production, defense-related genes, and alkaloid and flavonoid enzymes involved in secondary compound synthesis.”

Also of great interest is the apparent fact that caffeine related genes either evolved separately from, or engaged in the important work of making caffeine separately from similarly functioning sets of genes in tea and cacao (chocolate). I had always suspected tea was … different.

So, not at all unexpectedly, the most important molecule on earth evolved more than once!

Elizabeth Pennisi also has a writeup here.

Titanic Fearless Dinosaur Unearthed

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I’m sure you’ve heard. The most complete skeleton of a titanosaur, a newly named species, Dreadnoughtus schrani, is being reported from Argentina.

It is not a bird. I mention that because we’ve been talking about how birds are dinosaurs lately (see:”Honey, I shrunk the dinosaurs” and “Flying Dinosaurs: A new book on the dinosaur bird link.”).

Dreadnoughtus schrani is a sauropod. Brontosaurus, if it existed, would be a sauropod. These are the dinosaurs with the little heads, long necks, and long tails. In cartoons they are sometimes called “long-necks.” Dreadnoughtus schrani is, as mentioned, a titanosaur, a particularly large long neck.

How does this relate to the other dinosaurs? The dinosaurs are part of a really big group of organisms that includes crocodiles, pterosaurs (those flying things) and so on. Within this group are the proper dinosaurs which you can think of as being divided into three groups. One group is the Ornithischia, named from the greek for “birdlike.” These are not birds either, but their hips somewhat resemble bird hips. (Birds are “lizard hipped” dinosaurs, which completes the paleoirony.) The Ornithischia are separate from the other two groups which are the Sauropods and the Theropods. The Theropods include Tyrannosaurus rex and pigeons. The Sauropods includes the Brontosaurus-like dinosaurs, though of course, there is no such thing as Brontosaurus. Because people who name dinosaurs are, essentially, sadistic.

Anyway, Dreadnoughtus schrani is estimated to have been about 26 meters (85 feet) long. So if you live in a typical city lot it could eat the bushes on your front lawn while knocking over your garage out back with its tail. It would have weighted about 59 metric tons. That’s about 65 regular tons. Nobody really knows what a ton is unless you are in certain professions, so that’s about 33 cars, or about 70 head of cattle. So, the average American could replace the usual meat in their diet with meat from one well fed Dreadnoughtus schrani for about two centuries. Give or take. This is all based on the one specimen found in Argentina. But, that individual was not full grown. So, wow. I’m not sure if Dreadnoughtus schrani is the biggest sauropod, as there are others in this size range.

The specimen is about 45% complete as a skeleton, but about 70% of the bones in the body are represented. Unfortunately the head is missing. But really, where could it be? I’m sure they’ll find it if they keep looking!

Titanosaurs were the major large dinos during the Mesozoic (252 – 66 mya) in the southern continents. This particular find dates to the Upper Cretaceous, the latest part of the Mesozoic.

From the paper:
srep06196-f2

(A) Reconstructed skeleton and body silhouette in left lateral view with preserved elements in white. (B) Left scapula and coracoid in lateral view. (C) Sternal plates in ventral view. (D) Left forelimb (metacarpus reconstructed) in anterior view. (E) Left pelvis (ilium partially reconstructed) in lateral view. (F) Left hind limb in anterior view (metatarsus and pes partially reconstructed and reversed from right). (G) Transverse ground thin section of humeral shaft, showing heavy secondary remodelling (arrow indicates extent of dense osteon formation), a thick layer of well-vascularized fibrolamellar bone, and a lack of lines of arrested growth or an external fundamental system. Abbreviations: acet, acetabulum; acf, acromial fossa; acp, acromial process; acr, acromial ridge; ast, astragalus; cc, cnemial crest; cof, coracoid foramen; cor, coracoid; dpc, deltopectoral crest; fem, femur; fhd, femoral head; fib, fibula; flb, fibrolamellar bone; gl, glenoid; hum, humerus; il, ilium; ilp, iliac peduncle; isc, ischium; isp, ischial peduncle; lt, lateral trochanter; mtI, metatarsal I; mtII, metatarsal II; of, obturator foramen; pop, postacetabular process; prp, preacetabular process; pu, pedal ungual; pub, pubis; pup, pubic peduncle; rac, radial condyle; rad, radius; sc, scapula; scb, scapular blade; sr, secondary remodelling; tib, tibia; tpp, tuberosity on preacetabular process; ul, ulna; ulc, ulnar condyle. Scale bars equal 1?m in (A) to (F) and 1?mm in (G). (Skeletal reconstruction by L. Wright, with G. Schultz.)

The name means “Fearless-creature guy-who-funded-expedition.” According to the authors, this is specifically where the genus name comes from:

Dreadnought (Old English), fearing nothing; genus name alludes to the gigantic body size of the taxon (which presumably rendered healthy adult individuals nearly impervious to attack) and the predominant battleships of the early 20th century (two of which, ARA [Armada de la República Argentina] Rivadavia and ARA Moreno, were part of the Argentinean navy). Species name honours the American entrepreneur Adam Schran for his support of this research.

For more information:

The Scientific Report article (which appears to be Open Access): A Gigantic, Exceptionally Complete Titanosaurian Sauropod Dinosaur from Southern Patagonia, Argentina

An open access paper on how this type of dinosaur even walked: March of the Titans: The Locomotor Capabilities of Sauropod Dinosaurs.

Michael Balter with Science Mag: Giant dinosaur unearthed in Argentina

Mr. Dinosaur Brian Switek: Enormous New Dinosaur as Formidable as Its Namesake Battleship

Ian Sample at The Guardian, including a video: Battleship beast: colossal dinosaur skeleton found in southern Patagonia

Francie Diep at Scientific American: New “Dreadnought” Dinosaur Most Complete Specimen of a Giant

Near Earth Object Will Be Near Earth

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Phil Plait says “Don’t Panic!” and he should know because he is the Death from the Skies!: The Science Behind the End of the World which is about things hitting the earth. The object is called 2014 RC and it was discovered on September 2nd. It will arrive on Sunday.

The object is about 20 meter across, and Phil told me on twitter yesterday that this is roughly the same size as the Chelyabinsk asteroid that made a pass over Russia last year.

Remember. Random events occur in clusters. Otherwise they would be called “regular events.” So there is probably no meaning to two similar objects coming near Earth in the same geological instant.

2014 RC will come to nearly within the zone that our higher satellites orbit, a fraction of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Even though you can see some of those satellites, this object is not shiny so you’ll need a pretty good telescope to spot it.

In 2008 a 4.1 meter diameter asteroid named 2008 TC3 entered the atmosphere and exploded 37,000 kilometers above Sudan, creating 600 or so meteorites (that were recovered) weighting a total of 10.5 kilos. That was the first time astronomers spotted an object in outer(ish) space and predicted its impact. In 2014, 2014 AA, between 21 and 4 meters in diameter, was spotted by astronomers and 21 hours later hit the planet’s atmosphere. It probably hit the Atlantic Ocean near West Africa. The similar sized Chelyabinsk asteroid, the one that exploded over Russia, caused uncounted injuries (but several, probably over 1000) mainly from people running to their windows to see what the bright light was, and getting hit with glass when their windows blew apart; the bill for repairing damaged property came to about $33,000,000.

So the three comparative examples we have don’t help much if you want to know the answer to the question “what if an object this size hits the earth.” One went into the sea, one totally exploded leaving many fragments to fall on Sudan, and one blew up at a glancing angle. Chances are, if 2014 RC was aimed directly at the planet in a perpendicular angle, it would either blow to bits or become much smaller on the way down. Meteor Crater, in Arizona, is over one kilometer across and was probably caused by an object about 50 meters across (when it hit). A similar sized object created Tswaing crater, in South Africa. While these and similar impacts would have had very serious effects near the site, such as disintegrating nearby living things, the impacts were not sufficient to have left a record in the paleontology or archaeology of the regions. Or we’re not looking hard enough. It is safe to surmise that if a few-meters-wide object made impact with the Earth in a populated area, it would be a major disaster, but if it did so in the ocean it would probably not have large effects.

The interesting thing about 2014 RC is, of course, that it was only just discovered. So much for the idea of building a Destroyinator in time to stop an object this size that happens to be aimed at us from striking its target. That approach, apparently, is for larger objects. But still, as Phil Plait says, the science of keeping track of near Earth objects is underfunded.

…at the very least, we need bigger ‘scopes for asteroid searches. We’re doing pretty well in that department, with Pan-STARRS, and the LSST (which is still some years away from operating). But even then they can’t cover the whole sky, which is why I support the efforts of both the B612 Foundation and NASA’s NEOCam. A lot of science will come from these missions at the very least, and who knows? If they do spot a rock with our name on it, at least we’ll get the chance to do something about.

Do you want to see 2014 RC? No problem. Just follow the instructions from Universe Today:

Seeing it will take careful planning. Unlike a star or planet, this space rock will be faint and barreling across the sky at a high rate of speed. Discovered at magnitude +19, 2014 RC will brighten to magnitude +14 during the early morning hours of September 7th. Even experienced amateurs with beefy telescopes will find it a challenging object in southern Aquarius both because of low altitude and the unwelcome presence of a nearly full moon.

Closest approach happens in daylight for North and South America , but southern hemisphere observers might spot it with a 6-inch scope as a magnitude +11.5 “star” zipping across the constellations Pictor and Puppis. 2014 RC fades rapidly after its swing by Earth and will quickly become impossible to see in all amateur telescopes, though time exposure photography will keep the interloper in view for a few additional hours.

And remember, Amateur astronomers: pics or it didn’t happen!

The graphic above is from NASA, where you will find additional information.

Important new meta-study of sea level rise in the US.

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This is not a peer reviewed meta-study, but a meta-study nonetheless. Reuters has engaged in a major journalistic effort to examine sea level rise and has released the first part (two parts, actually). It is pretty good; I only found one paragraph to object to, and I’ll ignore that right now.

There are two reasons this report is important. First, it documents something about sea level rise that I’ve been trying to impress on people all along. The effects of sea level rise do not end at one’s perceived position of a new shoreline. Here’s what I mean.

Suppose you are standing on a barrier island, and your feet are on a grassy sandy knoll 10 feet above high tide. You are standing next to a climatologist who says “some projections say that the sea level will rise by one foot more than it already has by 2100. You breath a sigh of relief because you are standing 10 feet above high tide, and you realize that one foot of seal level rise is easily accommodated by the sea you see in front of you.

But you would be a fool to not be worried for several reasons. First, you are standing on a 10 foot high sea cliff. The sea cliff represents erosion that happened since the last bout of sea level rise (and is actually an ongoing process). When the sea rises by one foot that sea cliff will erode away. The land many hundreds of yards behind you may be fine, but the place you are standing will be gone. It is hard to predict how much land will horizontally erode with a given rise in sea level, but it is generally a positive number, rarely zero (there are places where it effectively can be zero but not along the sandy shores). Second, as you stand there looking at the sea, the restaurants and businesses along the road behind you and the residential and commercial properties all across the nearby hinterland are busy lowering the ground water by taking water out for their own use as if it didn’t matter. So, while the sea may rise up one foot by 2011, it may also drop a foot because of the groundwater removal. Third, if the sea rises only a little across certain kinds of sediments, the weight of the sea may further suppress the land. Fourth, if this bit of land you are standing on is along the US Atlantic coast, you probably get more than one foot of sea level rise if the global sea level goes up by one foot. This has to do with the shape of the oceans, wind and water currents, etc. Fifth, one foot of sea level rise means many feet of extra storm surge when that rare tropical storm comes along. The chance of a hurricane hitting a given beach along the Atlantic is low. But we’re talking about the year 2011. Between now and then a hurricane with enhanced storm surge will come along and remove the land you are standing on. Sixth, the climatologist you are standing next to is an optimist. He is referring to “some estimates.” The funny thing about sea level rise estimates, as well as polar ice sheet melt estimates, is that they keep changing over time, always in one direction. Ten years ago the estimate was one foot by 2200. Now, it’s 4 feet, and some estimates suggest 6.6 feet. Also, looking at the paleo record, the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were at their present level plus what we expect to put in the air over the next few decades for good measure, sea levels were so high we used meters instead of feet! Figure 25 feet, maybe 40. The town behind you will eventually be gone, buried deeply in the sea, a nice fishing ground. That probably won’t be by 2100, but is it really your job to throw every human that exists after 2100 under the climate change bus because it is a nice round number? No. No, it isn’t.

The Reuters report deals with most of those issues (though in a different way), chronicling numerous cases of actual current and ongoing encroachment of the sea on the land. And this brings us to the second key thing about this report. Reuters documents that the humans are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Local business leaders who want to preserve their short term profits are controlling supposedly long-term-thinking state and federal agencies so nothing gets done. Big Science (in the form of NASA) is busy studying glacial melt and sea level rise from rocket-launching bases that are being washed away by the rising ocean, and acting as though they can somehow stop that. Congress. It does nothing. And so on.

This is the first in a series of reports, it is excellent, and I look forward to the rest of them. You can read it here. By the way, a lot of what is documented by Reuters was covered earlier in this book: Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, worth a look!

(The graphic above is from the National Climate Assessment report of 2014.)

Welcome to the Police State

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I was going to put this on my facebook page, but it seemed worthy of a higher status. As it were.

We live in a police state, here in America, in the same way one gives oneself a particular religion or non-religious label. Unless you are a priest, a habitually repentant sinner, or like me, a habitually annoyed atheist, you usually aren’t anything. Someone can’t look at you and pick out your belief system. It is in the background lurking around doing nothing, ignored and all but forgotten most of the time. But when needed out comes the book (The Bible, The Origin, whatever). Our police state, like most people’s religion, can be turned on or off as needed by most people with privilege, or at least, someone is turing it on and off so it can spend a lot of time in the background doing nothing, ignored and all but forgotten most of the time. The other day a fugitive who apparently lives in the wooded swampy areas that permeate the part of Minnesota I live in (ever since he executed his lover at a gas station, then ran him over with his BMW, a couple of weeks ago) was spotted, possibly, at the nearby small airport. I saw pictures of the police response. It looked like Ferguson, with the armored vehicles, cops wearing storm trooper gear, and all that. Yes, the police state is always available and that is what the police state looks like to the privileged.

If only that was all the police state was.

Police searching for fugitive near my house. They may be overdressed for the occasion. But maybe not.
Police searching for fugitive near my house. They may be overdressed for the occasion. But maybe not.
You see, the Ferguson Event, where the police showed up in the Storm Trooper gear, is not really the thing to worry about. If that’s all they did, we’d be fine. So what if the police need to show up every now and then in the large black van, back door opening, one, then another, then another, storm trooper attired cop hopping out and going into squat-move-stalk stance and loping off weaving back and forth among themselves and holding their guns to their noses like the priest holds the crucifix at that one point during mass, “hut, hut, hut” serpentining into the danger zone. That would only be now and then, when “needed” because of the fugitives living in the heavily wooded swamps.

What really happens in Ferguson is not that. The real problem, in Ferguson and everywhere our nation’s African American’s and often Hispanics are mostly sequestered, is a totally different thing.

If you want to know what happens, you need to do this. First, get black. Once you are black it is much easier. If you are not naturally black I’m not sure how you do this. Anyway, get black and then go stand on a street corner. If you are of the right age white people will pull over and try to buy drugs from you. If you are the right sex people will assume you are a prostitute. Eventually the police will stop by and they’ll throw you in jail for no good reason. But it will go on your record. Eventually, you’ll get thrown in jail for no good reason a certain number of times, and then you won’t get out. For no good reason.

Prefer to drive? You can do that. Same effect. A white person I know works mainly with white people in a white town in a white part of the Twin Cities. There are a few black people there, of course, but in her unit only one African American colleague. Regular guy. Drives slow. He is stopped by the cops on the way to work about twice a month. No one else who works there has ever been stopped by the cops. Driving while black was big thing, on the news and all, a while ago. Still a big thing. Just not so much on the news. You still cant’ drive while black in many communities.

How about Beverly Hills? The police in Beverly Hills, during the year 2013, issued 3,250 traffic tickets and over 1,000 citations for non-traffic violations. That might not sound like a lot to you, but I’m not talking about Beverly Hills, California. I’m talking about Beverly Hills, Missouri, down by Ferguson.

Beverly Hills, Missouri has 571 people living in it.

Beverly Hills, Missouri is 92.7% black. Of the remainder, about half are white.

(I know you are wondering: As far as I know a lot of the cops in that town are non-white.)

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the police state. It is not Storm Troopers on armored vehicles. Unless necessary. It is not black helicopters. Well, now and then with the helicopters. It is not drones. Usually. Mainly it is day to day police work that pays for itself because every few minutes somebody gets a fine for being black and living in one of those places where the African Americans in our country are generally sequestered.

So this all started out me wanting to tweet an article I read in Slate, then elevated to a Facebook posting with comments, and I ended up taking it a little farther than I thought I would and now I have to get on to other things. Go read the article for yourself. And the Washington Post article it is based on. Be careful though, the WaPo piece is a thinly disguised Libertarian argument.

Twitter's New Filtered Feed Policy

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Twitter is about to ruin itself.

I’m convinced that the people who made and run both Facebook and Twitter don’t have a clue as to what Facebook and Twitter are for. And by “for” I mean how the users use them. I know, I know, if you are not paying for the product than you are the product. I get it. But it is also true that for a service to be successful it should meet a need or two, and knowing what those needs are is ultimately linked to success or failure. It seems like on line services like Facebook and Twitter are too big to go away or fail. And that is exactly how we humans tend to view established institutions right up until the day the go away or fail.

Twitter’s CFO has said that Twitter will start to filter your twitter feed in a manner like Facebook does. This probably means that your feed will contain a subset of tweets that you normally would see depending on who you follow, or what list of tweeters you are looking at. There may be a technological way around this, but any fix provided by an updated API will not be helpful because Twitter has a reputation for changing the API (the way programmers use to interface with it) in such a way as to stifle development of applications that actually use twitter. Any larger scale or longer term investment in Twitter requires using the simplest interface, with few bells and whistled, or the rug may be pulled from underneath your project.

One of the great uses of Twitter is shared conversations (like this one) or shared not taking at conferences. Other uses include data collection and communication of ongoing processes. People have used twitter to record the catch by fisherfolk in marine conservation projects, for example. If Twitter Facebook-i-fies the Twitter feed, none of that will be possible because those projects and others like them require reliability of the flow of tweets.

Mathew Ingram of Gigaom notes:

An unfiltered stream is a core feature: This might seem like a small thing, similar to Twitter’s move to insert tweets that other people have favorited into a user’s stream if there aren’t any recent tweets to show them. But as the controversy over that feature shows, the Twitter chronological-order model is at the core of what the service offers for many users — and a number of them have specifically said it is the thing they like most about Twitter when compared to Facebook.

Unlike.

Flying Dinosaurs: A New Book on the Dinosaur Bird Link

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Flying Dinosaurs: How Fearsome Reptiles Became Birds by science writer John Pickrell is coming out in December. As you know I’ve written a lot about the bird-dinosaur thing (most recently, this: “Honey I Shrunk the Dinosaurs“) so of course this sounded very interesting to me. In a way, Pickrell’s book is a missing link, in that he writes a lot about the history of paleontology associated with the discovery, undiscovery, and rediscovery of the early bird record and the dinosaur link.

Birds have rewritten dinosaurs. Not all dinosaurs are directly related to birds, but a large number of them are, and the features we reconstruct for them were once based on lizards, because it was thought dinosaurs were big scary lizards. Now we know many dinosaurs were big scary birds. Feathers are today a bird thing, but back in olden times — very olden times — they were probably just the normal covering for this entire category of dinosaurs (though they may have been very different). Dinosaurs were once thought of as greyish lumbering terrifying beasts. We now see them as highly active, aerobically efficient, socially dynamic, sexy (as in they had a lot of secondary sexual characteristics such as bright colors) terrifying beasts.

Pickrell covers the history of changing thought on dinosaurs and the bird-dinosaur link. In a way , this book is about dinosaurs, focusing primarily on the bird kind. Or, it is a book about birds, focusing on their dinosaur-osity. Pickrell also goes into detail on the behavioral biology of dinosaurs reinterpreted in the context of birds.

Pickrell’s book is well written and accessible, and thus is an excellent companion to the more scholarly literature that I know you all follow.

John Pickrell is an award-winning science writer and the editor of Australian Geographic magazine. He has written for New Scientist, Science, Science News, and Cosmos, and won man awards.

#Ebola in West Africa: Update

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WHO has put out very few updates in the last several days. The most current update is August 28th, and it pertains to information from August 26th and before. Based on that update, the total number of cases (confirmed, suspected, etc.) is ow 3069 with 1552 deaths. The number of new cases per day may be increasing, may be decreasing; hard to say at this point. Here’s the new cases per day since the second week of July:

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Senegal now has one case, a person who traveled there from Guinea. He had contact with a lot of people including health workers and family before it was figured he may have Ebola. There is no word from the Congo since I last wrote about it, at least from WHO.

I’m sure Murphy’s Law will apply and WHO will issue new information soon after this post goes up, so expect an update very soon.