ldragoon

Pilot Hi-Tec pens - great for sketching, not good for inking.  Doesn't go over the pencils properly -- the inks skips (I'm using the 05).

Am I doing something wrong?

Update:

Thanks to Kelly Gammons.  I'm too used to my felt-tips, and I just needed to have both a lighter touch, and some realistic expectations of what this pen can do.

In other news...dear goddess...I've got to stop looking at these PENS!!!

And they sold out of these.  Wah!  I was drooling on those!  Maybe they'll get them back in stock?

makinglight

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010375.html

I first noticed McCain's comment spam solicitation page on his campaign website some weeks ago. The program, called Spread the Word, offers his supporters "McCain points" for posting his campaign's talking points du jour on a list of target weblogs. It attracted a fair amount of criticism when it went up. I didn't write about it at the time because I was sure McCain's campaign strategists would immediately see what a terrible idea it was, and take it down.

Silly me. As Markos Moulitsas said in The GOP's Sockpuppets:

“John McCain is aware of the Internet.”

This dubious assurance--an instant Internet classic--was offered by John McCain aide Mark Soohoo at a recent technology conference, where he had the unenviable task of defending his boss’s previous confession of computer ignorance (“I’m an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get.”). Unsurprisingly, Soohoo’s argument that “you don’t actually have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country” did not convince the assembled digerati.

The self-confessed tech ignorance from the head of the GOP pervades the party from top to bottom, as Republicans have failed miserably this decade to keep up with critical technological advances and the societal changes they have spawned. While Democrats build on the innovations pioneered by Howard Dean’s campaign in 2003, Republicans at all levels are being left far behind in today’s socially networked world.

Rather than adapt and innovate, as Democrats have done, frustrated Republicans are resorting to clumsy guerrilla action--attempting to sabotage their opponents’ online efforts by creating “sockpuppets,” or fake online personas.

To my amazement, the Spread the Word page is still on McCain's official campaign site, and is still linked from the front page. I have to think the comment spam project itself is a washout, because if it were working, we'd have noticed by now. That failure doesn't excuse the attempt. I'm still offended that they even tried it. The hell do these people understand the internet.

Some notes on the implementation:

Spread The Word

Help spread the word about John McCain on news and blog sites. Your efforts to help get the message out about John McCain's policies and plan for the future is one of the most valuable things you can do for this campaign. You know why John McCain should be the next President of the United States and we need you to tell others why.

Select from the numerous web, blog and news sites listed here,

go there, and make your opinions supporting John McCain known.

Once you’ve commented on a post, video or news story, report the details of your comment by clicking the button below.

This means that if the campaign had succeeded in aiming their stream of naive users at other sites' comment threads, they'd have made a complete hash of the conversations. You've seen newbies in action. They'd have turned up on targeted weblogs, posted semi-random comments in random locations (current threads, guestbooks, administrator alert forms, user profile pages, old archived threads), and then left and never come back. If this program is a measure of the McCain campaign's respect for the online political discourse, they've got no respect for it at all. If it's a measure of their internet savvy, they flunk.

After your comments are verified, you will be awarded points through the McCain Online Action Center.

Today's Talking Points

The Issue: Time for Solutions
John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship, he will work with anyone who sincerely wants to get this country moving again. If John McCain is elected President, the era of the permanent campaign will end. The era of problem solving will begin. Read More...

The Issue: Partisanship
There are serious issues at stake in this election, and serious differences between the candidates. And we will argue about them, as we should. But it should remain an argument among friends; each of us struggling to hear our conscience, and heed its demands; each of us, despite our differences, united in our great cause, and respectful of the goodness in each other. Read More...

Both of those "read more" links go to the same place: a transcript of the McCain speech from which they were excerpted. That is: they aren't real talking points. They're placeholders. This is an unfinished web page, and it's been live on McCain's official website for weeks. That's amateurish to a startling degree. If the program wasn't ready to go, McCain's people shouldn't have gone live with it. If they're having second thoughts about the idea, they should have taken down the link from the front page.

It makes me want to explain the online world to McCain when there's a camera running: "I'm the moderator of a weblog called Boing Boing. Don't worry if you've never heard of it; almost no one reads it. This guy Flickr is one of our regular commenters. He's got a really impressive photography website. He's also a contributor to The Live Journal, which is an open-content project like Wikipedia, except instead of an encyclopedia they compile a monthly general-interest magazine. You can buy a printed copy of it through Fark.com. Both The Live Journal and Flickr's photo site are Web 2.0, which means their code is finished and has no bugs in it..." And all the while McCain would be smiling, and nodding sagely, as if to say, "Yes, of course--I was already aware of that. After all, it's the internet."

makinglight

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010277.html

The epidemic, of course, is the cholera outbreak around Golden Square in Soho, 28 August-- 6 September 1854. We're talking about 700 dead in a five-block area over about a week's time. Famously, this is the case where the parish council removed the handle from the Broad Street Pump.

What makes that a turning point is that this is the first time an official body gave credence to the germ theory of disease. The accepted theory of disease at the time was miasma -- that bad air caused disease, and the form in which the disease appeared depended on the moral quality and inner constitution of the victim.

The person who made the connection was a doctor named John Snow, one of the pioneers of early anesthesia, who lived in the neighborhood. He had been following cholera for some time, and had formulated an idea that it had something to do with the water rather than the air.

This is a discursive book. It starts with a description of the toshers, mud-larks, rag pickers, bone pickers, sewer hunters, pure finders, and nightsoil men who made up the garbage collection and recycling system of Victorian London. From there we go to a history of Soho, then the biology of cholera (a bacterium that in its normal course feeds on algae in the Ganges). We have touching and horrid scenes in this book: a man eating a cup of pudding and washing it down with a glass of water. Children dying alone in dark rooms beside the corpses of their parents. The streets blocked with hearses.

Cholera is a nasty disease. It's roughly 50% fatal if untreated. The incubation period ranges from one to five days. Then the cholera patient can die in as little as two hours after the onset of symptoms, as up to 30% of the patient's body mass is evacuated in the form of watery diarrhea. It's transmitted by the fecal/oral route: you have to ingest an infected person's shit, and London in the 1850s seemed to have been designed to get as much shit into as many mouths as possible.

The cure for cholera was within the reach of Victorian medicine, and had been described in a journal as early as 1832. But that cure had been drowned out by the claims of the patent medicines and the advice of theorists recommending anything from castor oil to opium to bleeding.

The cure for cholera is simply rehydration. The patient needs to drink water in sufficient quantity to stay alive long enough for his body's immune system to get up to speed. Oral rehydration salts are good (the field-expedient mix is one teaspoon of salt plus eight teaspoons of sugar in one quart of water), but failing that, plain water works fine.

Back to the book: We meet eminent Victorians like William Farr who published the Weekly Returns, a list by parish and cause of all the deaths in London. Farr (like all other scientific men) was a miasmatist -- he recorded atmospheric conditions and smells district by district)-- but he provided the raw material for a statistical study of what was killing people and where. Statistics as a science had finally reached the point where it could reveal hidden truths.

Another eminent Victorian: Edwin Chadwick--

It is nearly impossible to overstate the impact that Edwin Chadwick's life had on the modern conception of government's proper role. From 1832, when he was first appointed to the Poor Law Commission, through his landmark 1842 study of sanitation among the laboring classes, through his tenure as commissioner of the sewers in the late 1840s, to his final run at the helm of the General Board of Health, Chadwick helped solidify, if not outright invent, and ensemble of categories that we now take for granted: that the state should directly engage in protecting the health and well-being of its citizens, particularly the poorest among them; that a centralized bureaucracy of experts can solve societal problems that free markets either exacerbate or ignore; that public-health issues often require massive state investment in infrastructure or prevention. For better or worse, Chadwick's career can be seen as the very point of origin for the whole concept of "big government" as we know it today.

Alas, Chadwick was an ardent miasmatist (as were all learned men); he went to his grave (in 1890) still believing in miasma. And what he did to alleviate bad smells involved dumping London's human waste upstream of London's water supply.

When the Board of Health investigated the Golden Square cholera outbreak they examined in astounding detail:

Atmospheric pressure
Temperature of the Air
Temperature of the Thames Water
Humidity of the Air
Direction of the Wind
Force of the Wind
Velocity of the Air
Electricity
Ozone
Rain
Clouds
Comparison of the Meteorology of London, Worcester, Liverpool, Dunino, and Arbroath
Wind
Ozone [again]
Progress of the Cholera in the Metropolitan Districts in the Year 1853
Atmospheric Phenomena of the Year 1853
Atmospheric Phenomena in relation to Cholera in the Metropolitan Districts in the Year 1854

The data was all genuine, the math of the analysis was exhaustive and correct, and the results were utterly useless.

Snow presented his conclusions, that an unseen quality of the water from a single source caused the disease, and was dismissed. The earlier removal of the pump handle was the desperate act of a group that had run out of options -- and indeed, had no effect. The number of new infections was already declining before the handle was removed, and the curve didn't change afterward.

The Ghost Map of the title was a street map of the area around Golden Square that Snow created, showing where the deaths occurred, and bounded by a line showing where the Broad Street pump was closer by walking time than other pumps. The deaths occurred inside of that line, with odd lacunae, like the Lion Brewery (only a few yards from the pump) but with no deaths at all. The men of the Lion Brewery, however, were partly paid in beer and no one could recall ever seeing any of them drink water.

Which is pretty much where things might have stayed, if not for Henry Whitehead, a young curate in St. Luke's parish, where the outbreak had taken place. He set out to examine and disprove all of the theories on what caused cholera. One that he tried to disprove was Snow's waterborne theory. On its face it seemed ridiculous: the water from the Broad Street pump was well-known locally to be good; cold and sweet-tasting. Whitehead himself had drunk water from the pump during the height of the outbreak. And he was aware of people who had survived the disease who had drunk literally gallons of Broad Street water in the course of their recovery.

(Johnson hypothesizes that the reason this worked was because the bacteria had already vanished from the water -- cholera doesn't last long in cold pure water lacking algae to feed on. I think that it doesn't matter whether the cholera bacteria were present or not--what was going to happen to those folks? They'd catch cholera?)

Try as Whitehead will, he cannot disprove the waterborne hypothesis. He disproves the others, one by one, until he has nothing else. And when you have eliminated the impossible, as Sherlock Holmes would later say, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. He champions the waterborne theory, and lives to see it become the accepted wisdom.

But that was long after Snow's death. Four years after the outbreak at Golden Square the waterborne theory of cholera transmission still had not been accepted. Then, all at once, it was. And London got new sewers, and a new system of running water, and ... there's never again an outbreak of cholera in London.

Robert Koch would eventually find the cholera bacterium (thirty years later).

The last fifty pages of the book is an extrapolation to the Cities of the Future, and the earth as a world of cities. He points out that the richest people on earth, who have the means to live anywhere they want, choose to live in cities. He points out that cities use less energy per capita than rural living, so in a future of limited energy, cities make sense. (For example, if New York City became a state, it would rank twelfth in population, but fifty-first in energy consumption.)

I'm not convinced by the conclusions in the last fifty pages, but the trip up to that point (jumping from microbiology to chemistry to city planning, all illustrated with quotes from Victorian novels) is great fun.

Okay, to finish this post up (aside from saying, go read this book, folks):

If you're in an area where you aren't sure of the water, boil your water (one minute at a rolling boil minimum) before you drink it. Either that or stick to booze, tea, and coffee. Wash your hands (in known good water) after using the toilet and before preparing food. Avoid shellfish. Stick to food that is completely cooked and served hot, or things that come in thick rinds.

And if you do get cholera (the symptoms are unmistakable), drink a lot of water.

Signs and symptoms of cholera (from the Mayo Clinic website):

• Severe, watery diarrhea. The incubation time for cholera is brief — usually one to five days after infection. Diarrhea comes on suddenly. Cholera diarrhea often is voluminous, flecked with mucus and dead cells, and has a pale, milky appearance that resembles water in which rice has been rinsed (rice-water stool). What makes cholera diarrhea so deadly is the loss of large amounts of fluids in a short time — as much as a quart an hour.
• Nausea and vomiting. Occurring in both the early and later stages of cholera, vomiting may persist for hours at a time.
• Muscle cramps. These result from the rapid loss of salts such as sodium, chloride and potassium.
• Dehydration. This can develop within hours after the onset of cholera symptoms — far more quickly than in other diarrheal diseases. Depending on how much body fluids have been lost, dehydration can range from mild to severe. A loss of 10 percent or more of total body weight indicates severe dehydration. Signs and symptoms of cholera dehydration include irritability, lethargy, sunken eyes, a dry mouth, extreme thirst, dry, shriveled skin that's slow to bounce back when pinched into a fold, little or no urine output, low blood pressure, and an irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia).
• Shock. Hypovolemic shock is one of the most serious complications of cholera dehydration. It occurs when low blood volume causes a drop in blood pressure and a corresponding reduction in the amount of oxygen reaching your tissues. If untreated, severe hypovolemic shock can cause death in a matter of minutes.