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The Great Influenza by John Barry covers more than just the 1918 flu. It details a scientific revolution in this country that started with the founding of Johns Hopkins University. This story alone, before the flu even started, just took my breath away.

Medicine in this country before 1900 was likely to do more harm than good to the patient. Primary reasons for this were that doctors were not well trained or regulated and that what training they did get was not based on science.

A small group of superheroes led by William Welch helped start changing this. The medical schools, owned and controlled by local doctors, made more money if they let in anyone who wanted, so there were no academic standards for getting into medical school. Training was based on thinking that hadn’t changed much in the 2200 years since Hippocrates. The belief that you could decide what was true just by deduction and creating a consistent model and not by scientific method, still ruled the day.

The superheroes got together and formed the medical equivalent of the Justice League of America. Many of them were trained in Germany. They created Johns Hopkins University. This would be an institution devoted to medical research based only on science. Other institutes including the Rockefeller Institute and Columbia University started soon after with similar missions.

A striking story from the book was the progress made by these superheroes using pre-antibiotic steampunk medicine against bacterial infections. I always thought that people were helpless against bacteria before antibiotics, but there was much progress in creating anti-toxins, anti-serums, and vaccines. In fact, the survival rate for bacterial meningitis was higher after a serum treatment was found (1910) than it is today with all of our ass-kicking antibiotics.

We say today that the flu comes from people living in close proximity to pigs and birds in China. The 1918 flu probably broke out in Kansas, causing a deadly epidemic in Haskell county where people were also living in close proximity to pigs. It spread from there as a mild illness, and mutated back into something deadly. It was only called Spanish Flu because all other western press suppressed stories of the illness so as not to hurt morale or cause panic during wartime. The Spanish press reported it truthfully so it appeared to the world that it came from Spain.

The superheroes spent most of the book hunting for a bacteria they believed caused the flu. I found myself wishing that Barry had explained the science better. For example, he states that a scientist was trying to figure out why pneumococcus bacteria sometimes had a carbohydrate shell and sometimes did not and how a bacteria could change between those two forms. It states ” he ruled out each substance one by one until he found that it was DNA. ” Well, great. How did he do that? Barry takes pages and pages to describe these guys slaving away in the labs, washing glassware, working the autoclave and growing cultures, but skips the potentially dramatic story of actual discovery. The climax of the book, when a Teen Titan name Richard Shope proved that an outbreak of flu in pigs was caused by a “filterable” virus. He just states this. “And then Detective Magruder went out to lunch and looked at the evidence again and solved the crime.”

Finally, the book spent a lot of time describing the devastating effects the virus had on civilian life. Philadelphia, like every other crowded city, was ripped apart by the flu in 1918. The government pretty much ceased to function and a group of civic minded people formed a parallel government and began running the city’s response to the crisis.

Blackgold is a small google code application that apparently ran amock.

It turns out that the reason for some of the bizarre health issues at our house of late is due to fifth’s disease rather than a real or imagined curse. Four weeks ago, Maureen came down with a bizarre rash that seemed to be triggered by the sun. So, we figured she was allergic to the sun. Now Frank has a similar rash,also triggered by the sun, but this time the doctor immediately recognized fifth’s disease. It is a common, benign viral infection that leaves a rash (which is aggravated by the sun!) at the end of the illness (past the time when it is transmissible). It all fits!

If you’ve seen us in the past month or so, and your kids have a rash… maybe it is fifths (You’re welcome). We were concerned because the literature says that complications could develop if you get this virus while you are pregnant and we did expose a pregnant woman, but it seems that it is only the early stages of pregnancy that this is a concern. The baby was born last night is healthy.

It is called fifths because it is the fifth of the classic childhood skin rashes after measles, rubella, scarlet fever, and the mysterious fourth’s disease.

This morning, I rode by a big dumpster on Como that contained an old roof. About 20 nails had been spilled all over the bike lane so I stopped to pick them up. Just when I was done, a car load of workers, the contractors… kids, really, drove up and said “Hey thanks man, thanks! want a dollar?”

I had just moments before made a vow not to verbally abuse any motorists, so I just rode away without saying anything.

I attended Wednesday’s SpringSource Tomcat Seminar. Spring Source has a product based on Tomcat (Spring tc server). As a way of promoting this, they put on a brilliant seminar featuring Filip Hanik about deployment, performance and troubleshooting of Tomcat. The promotion of TC Server took about 20 minutes of a 4 hour seminar. The format was well thought out: “Here are are some really interesting ways Tomcat can be used, here are the command line tools to do it by hand, and finally, here is our product that helps automate and organize some of these things.”

Information came at such a rapid pace that I barely had time to write down keywords. He did NOT simply read from the slides like a dolt. Here are the slides.

• setenv isn’t documented, but when Tomcat starts, it looks for a file called setenv.sh|bat for instructions about which jvm to use and which Tomcat version to use. A default Tomcat install has no setenv.sh|bat and so defaults are used. For example the default JAVA_HOME is the java home in your system environment variables. Well, shit. All these years I’ve been changing my system’s JAVA_HOME when I could have been fixing setenv.
• supports variables like {port} in configuration files. This means you can have one server.xml file with a variable parameter for port, and the port is defined by which Tomcat instance you feel like starting that day. This is a huge advantage in staging and testing environments as you could be testing with multiple Tomcat versions and java versions.
• Hanik voiced skepticism about the wisdom of hot redeployment in production: failure to explode war files fast enough, memory problems, and problems with serialized sessions were all offered as reasons for this.
• Performance
  1. Logging Affects performance. Logging too much can eat up memory. For production environments, one should disable duplicate loggers.
  2. maxThreads. If CPU useage is low, Tomcat is not taking advantage of hardware and you should increase thread count. By the same argument, if CPU usage is high, lower maxThreads.
  3. maxKeepAlives. KeepAlives are simply keeping TCP connections alive so the handshake does not have to happen again. This setting governs how many requests are allowed from one TCP session. This is especially important if using SSL since handshakes are more costly there.
  4. ConnectionTimeout. How long without activity before a connection is terminated.
  5. AcceptCount: This is a setting that in a way caches a bunch of TCP/IP handshakes. There is also an Operating system level setting for this same activity.
  6. For the most part, tuning Tomcat itself is limited. Tweaking Tomcat won’t do much good if your application is not tuned. The JVM and Operating System need some attention too.
  7. Send and Recv buffers, set at Operating System level, are key to performance tuning.
  8. Garbage Collection affects performance. Heh. That sentence hides the existence of the field of Garbage Collection-ology. He sped through ways to debug garbage collection
• Troubleshooting
  1. We already know that the errors that end up in Catalina.out are those that are not caught by our applications. But, we can configure the way that errors are reported by Tomcat. For example, outOfMemoryException could be any one of 15 errors, but by default Tomcat will just report outOfMemoryException. With a simple command in the startup options for Tomcat, we can tell Tomcat to sift through the error types and take different actions depending on the errors. For example, make a heap dump when
  2. Heap Dumps and other info can be had with Java’s VM arguments such as XX:-HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError. Many more are here: http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/hotspot/vmoptions.jsp
  3. Thread Dumps are very informative. They can show deadlocks. Use kill -3 or Jstack. Java 1.6 has jstack built in.
  4. Profilers: The act of observation changes the thing you’re observing. Profilers will affect your code execution. To minimize the change in outcomes while you do detective work, it is advised to wait until you narrow down the problem before bringing profilers in.

I picked up a volume of the writings of William Saroyan on a free shelf here at work. I read the first story at lunch, “Tracy’s Tiger” and it was vaguely disruptive. Perhaps I’ve been looking for an excuse to veer way out of bounds, but I feel like I got permission to do so from this story. The writing and the characters and the plot are all completely whimsical and skeletal, kind of like this new genre of quirky and deliberately under-produced pop that has sprung up recently.

Time had always fascinated him. he knew he didn’t understand it, but he also knew that anything you ever got- anything that ever mattered - any thought - any truth-you got instantly. You could wait forever if you wanted to, and let it go at that, or you could get moving-moving into time and with time-working at the thought to be received and then suddenly, from having moved into time and with time, and from having worked at the thought, get it, get it whole, get it clean, get it instantly.

I have three products I’m unhappy with:

Trudeau “Centauri” Travel Mug. I bought this mug at Dunn bros so I could stop using a paper cup every day. I’ve been miserable ever since. This mug is hard to clean and very top heavy. I wouldn’t take it on board any vehicle because it tends to fly around the compartment and spill. Also, it doesn’t fit under the spout at most coffee shops, so they have to fill up a paper cup and pour the coffee from it into my poorly designed sucker mug.

Velo Gel Saddle. This came with the Surly Long Haul Trucker. Bike seats are pretty personal. Just because it doesn’t work for me doesn’t mean it is a bad seat. Yet, I’ve never had such an uncomfortable bike seat. It has made my life into a long, slow prostatectomy. Fortunately, I do still have fingers and therefore I can switch the seat out for something more comfortable, like maybe a steak knife jammed into my seat post.

CatEye HL EL-510:
why would anyone put a “dim” setting on a bike light? So that you can say on the package that this light has a mode that gives 60 hours of battery life? The light doesn’t flash, and has a base attachment that screws up into the quick release mechanism, so you can’t just unsnap the thing when you take it somewhere. On the plus side, it isn’t about to come off and spill batteries and plastic all over the street. It is dependable, it’s just kind of a dud. I have a newer CatEye product that I love (Compact Opticube = Hl-el410.). It *Blinks*, it is versatile and has probably already saved my life.

This family celebrated the 100th anniversary of the theory of relativity by driving into the mountains with a van full of cesium clocks and batteries to measure time dilation.

via J-walk blog