How Not To Blog ?

The Next Pandemic by some guy with too many degrees after his name looks back to the great influenza pandemic of 1918 to see how a similar pandemic could develop as a result of the H5N1 "bird flu" virus strain mutating.

Really, it's about what could happen when too many Asians are all unsanitary at the same time and how many farmers are too stupid (not wanting to lose face) to report dead chickens to the authorities.

You've got kids and adults in SE Asia keeping diseased birds as pets, kitchen "staff" who never wash their hands, rats running around everywhere dropping shit all over the place (and being eaten in some parts of China), and governments who only start to care as a result of international influences.

The real issue isn't the mutation of a virus. The problem is a lack of education and concern in poor countries.

Having a case of the bird flu? Eat some kimchee.

Some chess fuck thinks he knows the best way to talk to aliens. And I thought I had too much time on my hands.

What's the best way to talk to aliens? First, consider them alien. And you, too, will be alien to them. Don't think they'll want a copy of Shakespeare or want to listen in on a Boccherini string quintet or knows anything about primary numbers. Searching for other civilizations assumes that "they" will have a "civilization". They could be so much more understanding about the universe than we without having a civilization. We start out on the wrong foot, and we haven't even left the planet.

What we're actually looking for is something very interesting to us, and much like ourselves. We are, in effect, quite vain. Progress is neither a universal concept nor a technological one. The old version works better.

We could be paying greater mind to the countless alien civilizations right here on this Earth. We've explored just about as much of it as we have our own brain, and we're just as intimate with it.

It would be quite funny if, in a thousand years, after much trial and tribulation trying to explore the universe in a heavy spaceship and expending untold material wealth, we discovered that the only way to communicate with other entities was through the portal of our mind.

That would, indeed, be alien.