| Monday
June 3, 2002
Medical Sense from Dr. Huth on
Smallpox:
Jerry,
re: Smallpox immunity is long gone
I don't know that the article http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992338
isn't alarmist...
I've not read the article cited by the New Scientist
as it is in Maryland Medicine. Maryland Medicine is not abstracted in the
major medical search engines and I can't access the report. However, I'd
hope that if it were a well done trial, I'd expect that it would have made
a more major peer reviewed journal.
Recent discussions in New England Journal were well
done, but don't directly address the question of long term immunity.
A similar statement about the current state of
knowledge about long term immunity comes from JAMA.1999;281:2127-2137:
"In addition, the immune status of those who
were vaccinated more than 27 years ago is not clear. The duration of
immunity, based on the experience of naturally exposed susceptible
persons, has never been satisfactorily measured. Neutralizing antibodies
are reported to reflect levels of protection, although this has not been
validated in the field. These antibodies have been shown to decline
substantially during a 5- to 10-year period. [24] Thus, even those who
received the recommended single-dose vaccination as children do not have
lifelong immunity. However, among a group who had been vaccinated at birth
and at ages 8 and 18 years as part of a study, neutralizing antibody
levels remained stable during a 30-year period. [31] Because comparatively
few persons today have been successfully vaccinated on more than 1
occasion, it must be assumed that the population at large is highly
susceptible to infection."
Note that this doesn't say anything about response
to an actual infection...while you might contract smallpox, you might well
recover nicely from it if you'd been vaccinated even once.
There are other, albeit smaller, studies that are
much more reassuring.
Mark Huth mhuth@coldswim.com
The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's
there to appreciate it. fpj
My own view, which is that of a
generalist with some experience, is that the immunization protection is
likely to vary just as natural immunity varies. Still, it's only reason to
assume that immunization wears off. The Army always thought so, one reason
they gave vaccinations to people who had smallpox vaccination scars or
even proof of vaccination in school (which was nearly universal when I was
in grade school).
There are always a few negative
consequences to vaccination (other than expense). I would want to do the
numbers more carefully than I have, but I suspect that the right course
would be to continue vaccination for at least one more generation, not
only in the US but world wide. But particularly in the US. It's one less
darned thing to worry about. For a data point see
below.
And from Tracy Walters
This is pretty cool, Jerry
-----Original Message----- From: Tim Walters
[mailto:jazzrat2000@hotmail.com] Sent: Friday, May 31, 2002 8:06 PM To:
Tracy Walters Subject: here is a find!
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=875891831
Dr. Tim Walters Department of Music Florida Atlantic
University Jazz Rats Big Band
"please put the trumpet down and back away
slowly..."
Cool indeed.
And Roland says:
Everything old is new again.
http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=34947
On Spam
I've been using ASK on an email server at my office
for the past 3 weeks, and I gotta say, it works great!
I've gone from dozens of spams a day (on that
account) to zero!
Mike Lieman
Thanks!
On Education:
There was an older model of a university education
where you met with a tutor for an hour a week. The goal was to develop the
ability to think critically. The tutor would point you at books and
lectures and assign you essays to write. It didn't work really well for
most students, but for the best it worked very, very well. Since the
second-raters were hired based on their networking, rather than their
ability to think critically, perhaps the weaknesses weren't that
important--everyone was happy.
The modern American system (with lecture courses,
etc.) is intended to have the same outcome, but more reliably. It doesn't
work even as well, because there's now nobody responsible for the student
learning to think critically. Still, for the second-raters, the networking
matters, not the ability to think critically, and enough of the good
people seem to learn to think critically to meet society's needs. The
ability to think critically is the _real_ value for society--especially as
it leads to professionalism and learning.
My point is that the real value of a university
education is learning to think critically, and that should be feasible
whatever your course is. Yes, a good fraction of academic work is trash,
but you have to deal actively with trash mixed in with the good stuff to
learn how to make your own critical judgments.
BTW, the comment about Freud being trash was
unwarranted--as you well know. Those who teach at the university level
need to know the foundations of their field. Freud was important because
he thought critically about the questions of psychology; not because he
was right. Ditto for Marx in classical economics, Boas, etc., in cultural
anthropology, etc. In academic computer science, we see people who have
fallen in love with tools; while forgetting that tools only implement
methods, and the methods are what is important to building good software.
That doesn't mean their work is unimportant, but it does mean that a lot
of what it taught in CS is, again, 'trash'. Useful trash, though. --
--- Harry Erwin, PhD, Senior Lecturer of
Computing, University of Sunderland. Computational neuroscientist modeling
bat bioacoustics and behavior. <http://www.cet.sunderland.ac.uk/~cs0her/index.html>
Freud was worse than trash. He made
up his data, and his conclusions didn't even follow from the data and case
histories he made up. Freud and Hubbard are in much the same league, with
Freud by far the more influential. Te teach Freud as if there were
scientific or even rational basis for believing his nonsense is to do a
compete disservice to the students. As to learning history, one does not
spend much time on phlogiston in studying chemistry. To be aware there was
such a theory is sufficient. We needn't learn the fine points of alchemy.
For a modern education one lecture on Freud and his theories plus one or
more on the consequences of his faddish fraud, would be sufficient.
Marx is a different case: he takes a
bit of scholarly refutation, some of which is best done from inside as
Wittfogel did in Oriental Despotism. Marx and more seriously Leninism had
enormous impacts on the world. The question of historical determinism and
WHAT determines history is still a fairly vital question. Marx, in my
judgment, was wrong, and David McCord Wright The Trouble With Marx has
done a fine job of showing how by taking him seriously. Boas, who again
made up data, and allowed Margaret Mead to make up her data, is another
fraud.
I agree that it is impossible to
separate out all the trash from what is important. It is when everything
is considered of equal importance so that nothing can be trash that we are
in real trouble. Rather like the situation when young women are taught to
ignore the "stigmata" of hideous tattoos on men, and then have
to be rescued from violent mates. Perhaps not every provocatively tattooed
man is likely to be violent, but it's sure the way to bet it, and teaching
girls to ignore those signs is a dangerous thing to do.
In this world there are tigers. Some
are intellectuals.
For Greg Cochran on this subject see
below.
Jerry,
You wrote:
"But where does one go for an education
now? By education I mean a systematic introduction to the essentials of
Western Civilization, what makes it tick, why the West is what it is, and
we are who we are; why the imbecilities that have become political
correctness are exaggerations of Western trends, and when they collapse
from inner absurdity there will be little to inspire a recovery. If one
does [not] know much about the sources of one's moral beliefs, then how to
recover from collapse?"
I was an undergraduate at one of the Ivy League
colleges in the early-to-mid 1980s. My experience there was that it was
possible to take a set of distribution courses on various aspects of
Western civilization (e.g.: the Renaissance; the Enlightenment; the basis
of J.S. Bach's music; the history of science; the history of Russia; a
survey of major novels in English literature; the philosophical basis of
democracy; the art and culture of ancient Rome) while also taking a fairly
interdisciplinary set of hard-science courses (physics; inorganic, organic
and physical chemistry; advanced topics in genetics). But I don't know how
many students at my alma mater, then or now, chose to do take advantage of
the opportunity to take that sort of coursework. The problem wasn't
availability, but that there wasn't any agreed-upon consensus of what was
important, so that the choice to focus on genuinely important ideas was
optional.
About the "value" issue: there's no
question in my mind that there is substantive value to college education,
but I am skeptical about whether it's worth the full costs that private
universities are charging. A solid public university with lower fees
probably makes far more sense for anybody in the middle class, and for
that matter probably has always made more sense. Another caveat is that
college education is only valuable to people who actually have a serious
idea of something they'd like to learn that is actually of lasting worth
outside the academy -- "value" here being a broader term than
income but not contradictory with income. I think it's genuinely valuable
to have (e.g.) taken a course on the Enlightenment, and that it would be
valuable to have done that even if it doesn't raise one's monetary income
in any obvious way; but that value comes from the fact that the
Enlightenment *isn't* a currently fashionable vogue in academia, and *is*
something that shaped the world we live in now. Courses on identity
politics aren't likely to be as beneficial, because they are likely to be
focused on ideas that are heavily self-referential within the academy
alone.
The most fundamental stumbling block, I think, is
that many people on all sides of the political spectrum are subconsciously
afraid of what would happen if most people were encouraged to be fully
educated. Neither the right wing nor the left wing is really happy with
the idea of a public that can't be led around by the nose ring.
Have you read Richard Rodriguez's book, _Hunger of
Memory_? Rodriguez is one of the most wonderfully sane contemporary
writers on this topic that I know of.
Thanks for raising this topic, even though it's a
frustrating one.
--Erich Schwarz
I don't think right and left mean
much now. The left has lost most of its intellectual stuffing and exists
as emotions and little else. The right is no longer a rentier class; there
are few with real property in this world. We are mostly proletarians now,
with no property sufficient to live on: we need our jobs, we need our
government pensions, we need help: we can't stand and say, I opt out, I
will live on my little farm and grow my own food and feed my neighbors. We
don't even own our shops and stores: the government has a protection
racket we have no way to opt out of. It's called regulations to protect
the public. And equal opportunity. And Americans with Disabilities Act.
And a score of others all of which allow us to exist only at government
whim.
Now it is to the advantage of the
bureaucracy that we never think about these things, but is that right or
left? The entrenched bureaucracy are our masters now, and they want
nothing more than to conserve what they have. Is this radical or
conservative? Right or left?
The very memory of a self governing
republic has faded to almost nothing. We can't want what we can't conceive
of.
And Leslie
Fish, songmistress extraordinaire, says about The Unholy Lands
Hmm, a couple of points to consider.
First: the reason the Jews started buying up land
(and getting swindled for it) in the godforsaken desert was because things
were beginning to get hot for them in Europe. Things got hotter still, and
the survivors headed for the Jewish lands in Palestine because they
figured they'd be safe there. Heh-heh! But then, they DID have a point.
There's no country on Earth where Jews can really consider themselves safe
-- not even here in the good ol' tolerant USA. Whenever some bunch of
American political nuts -- of any color -- starts making noise about how
oppressed they are, who do they get around to blaming? The Jews, of
course! Neo-Nazis, Hyper-Christian Fundies or Black Activists who adore
Jesse Jackson -- they ALL go after the Jews. Jews have good reason to
believe they need a bolt-hole.
Second, it wasn't the Jewish settlers who started
this mess. Those settlers were happy to live peaceably beside Arabs, and
didn't want them to move away. During the 1947 fun and games, when the
neighboring Arab armies were running away and a lot of the Palestinian
Arabs ran after them, the Jews drove around in sound-trucks begging their
neighbors to stay put. The neighbors who didn't listen, and ran, wound up
in Palestinian refugee camps in other Arab countries. Did they blame their
Arab neighbors for not taking them in? Nope, they blamed the Jews -- who
had begged them not to leave.
Not that the Palestinian Arabs made such good
neighbors in the first place. Search the old records and you'll find that
several times the Jews offered to share their education, technology,
wealth, freedom and all with the Arabs -- and the Arabs indignantly
refused; they preferred to attack and rob the Jewish settlements instead.
Something in their culture made it an offense against their pride to
accept "charity" from a Jew -- but not to rob him. In fact,
Palestinian Arabs in Israel right now have more rights and better economic
standards than Arabs living in most Arab countries. You'd be surprised how
many of those good Arab countries don't allow their population to vote.
Never mind public schools or health-care or housing or welfare -- and
never MIND how the female half of the population is treated.
So, if Palestinian Arabs have it better than Arabs
in other countries, why are they bitching so much? Spite, pure and simple.
I've studied that culture, and all I can say is -- no matter that
"Allah" means "God", or what the Koran says -- it's a
nasty decadent culture based on spite. It's a culture where people don't
try to just make themselves better off, but to make their neighbors worse
off than themselves. If Arab A has a camel and Arab B doesn't, and Arab B
can't steal his neighbor's camel, he'll poison Arab A's camel just to make
sure his neighbor is no better off than himself. This is why those Jewish
settlers were able to make worthless land bloom, but the Arabs who'd held
it for centuries didn't; the Arabs were too busy poisoning each other's
camels -- and wells, and orchards -- before the Jews came along.
You honestly can't help people with that kind of
attitude. Whatever you give them, they'll want more -- and they'll want
not to make it themselves but to take it from you. Frankly, I think it
would be better to haul all the Palestinian Arabs out of Israel, send them
to live in some good all-Moslem all-Arab country with their brethren --
even give them a couple $K apiece to get started -- and let them go back
to poisoning other Arabs' camels, just as they used to do.
If you're talking about High Moral Ground, then it's
the Arabs who deserve the boot rather than the Jews. Sorry 'bout that.
--Leslie <;)))><
Doubtless this discussion will continue.
On Viruses:
Dear Jerry, This is new to me, but maybe not to
others. Along with the usual junk mail (spam) I received one ostensibly
from AT&T with the subject something like BONUS online billing.
I should know better, but since I do have AT&T
long distance with automatic bill pay, I naively opened (or should say,
tried to open) the message. There was no message but somehow just opening
the message brought up the "dialer" window. Since I do not store
the password in the dial setup, nothing could (I hope) happen. But I had a
heck of a time trying to close the dialer. Heavens knows what might have
happened if I had still been connected!
My real concern is what additional precautions
(other than never opening this junk) should I take? I use Eudora and have
set all the options as recommended for safe computing.
Today I received a message "from"
Technical Support with the subject "Call me". Needless to say, I
didn't open it.
What next?!
Thanks and keep up the great work! Madeline
FIRST you are
probably infected NOW. Run an updated anti-virus scan NOW.
Next, I cannot say too strongly: Do
Not Open Unexpected Mail Attachments. Do not open unexpected mail
attachments. Do not open unexpected mail attachments. What I tell you
three times is true. EVEN IF YOU KNOW THE SENDER, do not open unexpected
mail attachments.
If you get a mail attachment that
you think you should look at, email the sender. Be sure there IS a sender,
and that the sender is real and you have that sender's address and that
the sender did in fact intend to send you a mail attachment, and that this
was in fact the attachment sent. Note that many viruses will find someone
who has you in their mail list, fake the message as from your friend, send
a message to you with an infected attachment, and hope you bite because
the next one will be to someone in your mail list
Now clearly you may have some
situations in which you normally mail and receive attachments, and people
you know are unlikely to be infected, but even then, BE CAREFUL. In my
case Norton scans all mail attachments before I ever see them; even those
from my friends and collaborators. I suggest you set yours to do the same.
Jerry,
I hope Rex Stout would be pleased with the way the
A&E Network is treating his books. Maury Chaykin is simply brilliant.
Last season I thought Tim Hutton's "Archie" a bit off-putting
but then I reread some of the books and now give him credit for playing
the character as written and doing a creditable job in the process.
I have a question for the people using ASK
(Automatic SPAM Killer)...how does it avoid a race condition between two
users if neither is on the others "white list?"
At first glance, it seems that such a circumstance
would result in an infinite loop...each machine asking the other to
validate itself before sending the message on to the intended
recipient...but clearly something is done to prevent that from happening.
As for the rest of it, those of us on Windows (ASK
appears to be a Linux product) can do pretty much the same thing in
Outlook through Robert Thompson's trickery of having message rules delete
all incoming mail and then undeleting messages that meet specified
criteria. That alone has brought down the amount of SPAM I see to a
manageable level...for now.
Thanks again and regards to all
Ron Morse
Archie is exactly as written, I
think, and Rex Stout would be pleased. Wolfe is a bit more acerbic than I
picture him from the books, but close enough. Cramer is exactly right as
is Stebbins. All told it's masterful.
I can't delete everything not
addressed to me because some press releases and some subscribers get
things just a little wrong...
I believe that I have special insight into the true
thoughts of that engineer/philosopher. The biggest, usually neglected
point is that admission to college sorts by ability, and higher
achievement among college graduates must to some extent be a product of
this sorting, rather than anything that actually happens in college. In
the same way, ex-NBA players are taller than average, not because the NBA
put them on the rack, but because they were taller than average in the
first place - had to be, just to get into the NBA. The small version of
this question is whether some colleges are better than others. Graduates
of MIT are, on average, probably smarter than graduates of the University
of Illinois. Is it because MIT is a better school, or because MIT was
pickier in the first place? Looking at GRE scores versus pre-college SAT
scores, it appears that all colleges are the same: the one you go to does
not influence your GRE score. What about making money? Don't Harvard grads
make more than the average college graduate? Yes they do, but apparently
only because they were smarter in the first place, not because of anything
that happened at Harvard. Harvard networking seems to be no more valuable
than State U. networking. The big version of the question is whether
college versus non-college makes much difference, after adjusting for this
sorting effect. If there is any economic return, it is much smaller than
generally claimed. Certainly one would not expect any economic return from
the many courses of study that have zero real content; what can a psych
major do, really? And most courses of study have no content: I looked at
the distribution of majors, and about 80% looked totally useless, to my
jaundiced eye. Another important fact is that most people don't seem to
remember very much of what they are taught in school. This must always
have been the case.
In no way did I imply that these trends are getting
worse. Saying that things are bad is not the same as saying that things
are getting worse. I think that a college education has always had much
lower economic return than generally believed. Nor do I have any reason to
think that there is any significant decay in science and engineering
courses. On the other hand, it is certainly the case that colleges
promulgate a general view of society, and some of those general views are
worse than others. Only a general tendency seems to stick, since most
people have lousy memories - but that still influences the whole tenor of
society. Has this gotten worse? Probably, but it's been ungood for a human
lifetime. This seldom has much to do with individual economic payoff. You
can be a Commie or an Albigensian and still make money in this country.
Gregory Cochran
Cochran and I have a running
argument on this. I am certain that education is deteriorating: as
evidence I can only bring up things like my experiences in Capleville
school, (rural Tennessee) where we were 2 grades to a classroom and over
30 to a grade. There were only 4 teachers in that school for grades 1-8,
and the 7-8 grade teacher was the principal.
We learned Abou ben Adam by heart.
We read Scott's Lady of the Lake. We read Evangeline, and the Wonderful
One Horse Shay, and Hiawatha, and a bunch of literature, and we had both
US and Tennessee history. The pupils weren't selected they were the
local farmer kids. I contend that the best city schools don't today get
the education we got then.
Cochran asks for systematic studies
to prove my conjecture and I don't have any. Neither does Charles Murray.
This is a bit surprising, but I continue to believe as I do.
And there is http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/education/02REGE.html
And I think things are getting
worse. In part, I think, because prior to selection by IQ and such,
students were selected in part by social class: this had the effect of
giving a fairly good education to the future leadership which was chosen
by many factors other than pure intelligence, while some bright people got
mixed in with the elites through scholarships and the like.
What we have today is "equal
opportunity" which in effect means throwing out all admission and
graduation standards and going for accumulation of credentials.
It is an old argument. What I wanted
to get under discussion is not so much whether things have got worse --
although I think they have, and for good reasons -- but whether it's worth
spending the time and money to go to college at all: do you get anything
other than networking out of it?
On vaccines, a
data point:
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
My late father, born 1910, had smallpox as a boy.
About 1930 he went to Mexico to seek his fortune. He came across a Mexican
family suffering from smallpox. No one in the area would even go close to
the house so father, having suffered the disease, stayed and treated them.
He caught smallpox a second time. Fortunately, the family recovered and
was able to nurse him. I have heard graphic descriptions of his illness.
It was not pretty or pleasant. He was required to take many smallpox
vaccinations during WWII, when he built submarines and made torpedo tubes.
His reaction to every vaccination was severe, and he was under no illusion
about being immune.
My own case is different. I was born in 1937 and
have a smallpox vaccination scar from preschool days. Since then, the
needle for the smallpox vaccination has caused more reaction than the
medicine. Other shots are similar, with the first shot for any disease
causing a sometimes severe reaction, and future shots being a minor
nuisance. There is one exception. I caught the flu variation that killed
so many people in 1918 when I was fourteen. All flu shots cause a strong
reaction. I have had flu of a few sorts for one to three days, and
suffered. I will not willingly expose myself to the 1918 flu to see if I
am immune.
This is one set of circumstances involving two
family members. Draw conclusions at your own risk.
regards,
William L. Jones wljones@dallas.net
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