I loathed that band for a long time, because its fans seemed to shower it in mindless praise and/or listen only to it whilst ignoring any other music. Kinda like jazz hipsters/fanatics, but with more bearable attitude. That said, I gave it an honest try after however many years, and it's been judged unfairly. Definitely not as cult as KULT's cult says, but there's a lot to appreciate.

An avian flu panzootic — a pandemic among animals — has struck some 320 bird and mammal species, including elephant seals.

(Illustration by Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty; iStock)

It felt like watching one of those blockbusters about the end of the world. Like witnessing an apocalypse, but in real life. Which, in a way, it was.

The beaches of Valdes Peninsula in Argentina, normally so packed with elephant seals that time of year it is impossible to stroll along the shore, were desolate except for hundreds of dark, rotting carcasses — nearly a whole season of seal pups dead, with gulls pecking at the remains.

Instead of the usual cacophony of guttural honks that drowns out the waves during breeding season, the eerie silence was only broken by the sound of a few remaining elephant seals shaking their heads, snot running down their protruding, namesake noses.

“You felt like a bomb had exploded,” said Martín Méndez, recalling the scene he witnessed in October during an annual survey of southern elephant seals in that stretch of coastal Patagonia.

“It is catastrophic,” added the marine biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, a New York-based nonprofit group. “This is the largest die-off for the species, period.”

Altogether, an estimated 17,000 elephant seal pups seals died there last year from avian influenza, victims of an unprecedented panzootic — a pandemic among animals — that has struck around 320 types of birds and mammals.

Over the past few years, a potent strain of H5N1 avian influenza has jumped between species and raged through domestic and wild animal populations on every continent except Australia and Antarctica, crisscrossing the world along birds’ migratory routes.

So far, cases of humans getting seriously sick from this strain of flu are rare. But the possibility of the quickly evolving influenza virus gaining the ability to be transmitted between from one mammal to another — and eventually, to humans — has scientists concerned about the pathogen turning into another pandemic. “Every year that this doesn’t happen,” Méndez said, “we’re being lucky.”

For poultry farmers, the outbreak has already come at a significant economic cost, striking tens of millions of birds in the United States. For wildlife, it threatens to disrupt ecosystems and push endangered animals closer to the brink of extinction.

“We’ve never seen such a massive spread of virus in wild birds, and we’ve never seen such massive infections of wild mammals,” said Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

The trajectory of the virus, unprecedented both in its global spread and in the number of species infected, shows how dependent and connected humanity is to the natural world — and how farming practices that facilitate the flu can disrupt it.

‘I was not prepared’

Scientists first spotted the precursor to this flu strain in commercial geese in southern China in 1996. Over the next several years, it spread to poultry farms in the region, popping up occasionally in wild birds within flight range of infected farms.

Then, in 2005, some 1,500 wild geese and gulls dropped dead in a protected nature reserve in northwestern China, far from any poultry coops. The virus had found its way into the wild bird population.

From there, the virus rapidly spread across Asia, Africa and Europe, popping up in seasonal outbreaks. But it was only after a genetic change that allowed the pathogen to spread in migrating birds around 2021 that the numbers of outbreaks exploded and the virus went global, establishing itself in North America that year and in South America the following.

Since then, the death toll has been staggering.

About 5,200 common cranes in Israel. More than 2,200 Dalmatian pelicans in Greece, about 40 percent of the species in southeastern Europe, and roughly 20,000 Sandwich terns in Europe, 17 percent of the northwest European breeding population. More than 18,000 dead barnacle geese in Scotland. And tens of thousands of gannets in Canada.

Last year, ornithologists found about 12,000 dead black-legged kittiwakes in Norway. By July, more than 500,000 birds died in South America, including about 41 percent of all Peruvian pelicans.

Flu symptoms depend on the bird, according to Jonas Waldenström, a disease ecology professor at Linnaeus University in Sweden. Telltale signs include tilting heads, struggling to stand and tumbling when trying to take flight — all signs the virus has hit the nervous system.

“In some species, it’s pretty ugly,” he said.

The virus is literally reaching the ends of the Earth, killing brown skuas on islands near Antarctica and, for the first time just this winter, a polar bear in Alaska. Scientists worry it is only a matter of time before it reaches penguins and other vulnerable populations on Antarctica itself.

“The Antarctic situation is at a precipice,” said Michelle Wille, a virus ecologist at the University of Melbourne. “Many of the animal species that live there are found no where else in the world, and many are already facing substantial pressures due to things like fisheries and climate change.”

Scientists say the disease can jump between species when a wild animal eats a dead or dying bird, or when bird poop plops into a farm animal’s feed. So far, bird flu has infected coyotes, lions, tigers, grizzlies, raccoons, red foxes and other terrestrial mammals, but only sporadically. And it has also struck farms for mink and fox fur in Spain and Finland.

But a series of mass die-offs of marine mammals that congregate on beaches has biologists worried about the possibility of the virus evolving to spread directly from one mammal to another.

Last year, more than 5,000 sea lions were found dead in Peru. And more than 17,000 elephant seal pups succumbed to the virus in Argentina, representing at least 96 percent of the juvenile population. Nursing seal pups likely would not have caught the flu by eating birds. They instead may have gotten it from contaminated milk, water, aerosol or feces, Fouchier said.

Valeria Falabella, a Wildlife Conservation Society marine biologist who has studied Argentina’s elephant seals for decades, had only ever seen a dead adult once before this flu outbreak. Seeing beaches of dozens dead was “absolutely devastating.”

“I was not prepared to see that,” Falabella said.

The risk to people

If a bird flu virus evolves to spread between seals, it is more likely to spread within other mammal populations, such as humans. “It’s quite a distance from a gannet to human,” Waldenström said. “But from a seal to a human, we’re pretty much alike.”

Tracing how viruses hop between species is hard. In the past, humans have caught disease from animals after working on farms (the 1918 flu pandemic likely started in Kansas farm country) or after encroaching into wilderness (HIV likely jumped from chimpanzees when a hunter killed one for meat).

In the case of the latest flu strain, it is “very difficult to prove mammal-to-mammal transmission,” Fouchier said, adding that a genetic analysis of the virus found in the dead seals could provide clues about transmission.

So far, what we know about this strain of avian flu suggests an outbreak among humans is not imminent. The adaptation that the virus made to replicate in migratory birds — and thus spread across the globe — seems to have inhibited its ability to infect humans, Fouchier said.

“It is slightly less concerning to human health at present,” he said, compared to past flu viruses. But given the unprecedented nature of the ongoing outbreak it’s hard to predict how it will evolve. “A typical bird flu virus never makes it into mammals at this scale,” he added.

The longer the virus persists in the environment, the more opportunities it has to fuel a new pandemic. Influenza viruses evolve much faster than the coronavirus behind the covid pandemic and other pathogens.

Right now, there is little to do to stop the spread of this flu virus among wildlife. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for instance, is working with zoos to vaccinate critically endangered California condors.

“It’s hard to contain a virus that’s now on more or less all the continents,” Waldenström said. “There’s no putting the lid on that. It will run its course.”

But there are steps the poultry industry can take — monitoring for viruses at farms, disinfecting equipment, having workers wear protective gear — to reduce the risk of future outbreaks, according to Jonathan Sleeman, a science adviser for wildlife health at the U.S. Geological Survey. “One recognizes that this is a lot of effort,” he said.

For the surviving elephant seal population in Argentina, it may take years to come back. “They may never recover to the same level of population as they were before,” Sleeman said. Biologists are working to understand how many adult seals died.

Méndez, the biologist who likened the seal die-off to a disaster movie, worries how the recent outbreak may undo decades of conservation work.

Now, the virus has transformed their work. It’s about more than just aiding faraway animals — it’s about protecting people, too.

“We’re really trying to protect the very functioning of our planet,” Méndez said. “We’re looking at this disruption through the lens of wildlife, but this is obviously very serious for humans as well.

This article is part of Animalia, a column exploring the strange and fascinating world of animals and the ways in which we appreciate, imperil and depend on them.

Adding my own two cents:

Fifteen Hours by Mitchel Scanlon - a story of a guardsman on his first deployment. It's 40k, so you know it's a tale of merrymaking and sunshine. I was afraid people oversold this book, but it turned out to be pretty dang good. TL;DR: a Vietnam war movie with an arc from FNGs to body bags, but with laser guns and space-orcs.

Chivalry and Courtesy: Medieval Manners for a Modern World by Danièle Cybulskie - it's the same author who wrote How to Live Like a Monk -- mentioned in the last thread -- who this time takes on manners, grooming, and upbringing of children. It's... hm. I didn't find it to be as good, but probably because I didn't learn all that much new stuff from it? Wholeheartedly recommend it, the substance is there, it was just a tad too introductory to someone who read some of the sources beforehand.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. You know what? It's the same problem as with Chivalry and Courtesy: I'd love this book 10-ish years ago, but now it felt like marathoning 12 straight hours of something like SciShow on youtube (neither a channel recommendation nor lifestyle idea). There's a lot of trivia on history of science that I'll probably struggle to recall in three months, and a more than a couple things that are no longer correct, but I don't regret picking it up or recommending if that's your jam or didn't do well in the science classes.

De Generibus Dicendi (On the types/kinds of speeches) by 'Iacobus Gorski' (Jakub Górski, or Jacob Mountain-like if you're into silly translations) - It's one of the first Loeb-inspired (Latin text on the left, Polish on the right) books published here, and a real treat. It's an overview of ancient and contemporary (XVI century) rhetoric, and a bit of a instructor's handbook on the topic.

I've also tried to go through Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, but it's been a fucking slog even in audiobook form.

Feels kinda gauche to comment under my own thread, but fuck it. I'm tired as hell and didn't get much sleep in three days, so let's roll.

Despite being shit with recognising faces, I caught an 'outsider' cheating on a mid-term for one of my students. It gotta suck to (probably? hopefully?) get expelled from a school whose motto may as well be "Cs get degrees[0]," but it ain't exactly my problem.

My ex-interns came back to work on that paper. They also had me invited/requested on a student project making a radiotelescope array with stuff like old sat-TV antennae. Not gonna lie; it's weird to wrangle scrap that'll ultimately be synchronised with a signal from our new atomic clock, but what the hell. It's super, and it's neat to construct something that's largely outside my scope. Like, I get the underlying principles, but my day-job puts me dangerously close to failed-phil dumbasses who ''''''prove'''''' how multiverses must exist because meta-predicate logics are constructable, so it's necessary to recalibrate and touch grass now and again. The whole thing reminds me of hackathons before recruiters and dickheads displaced real people. Also, labs/experiments are about a billion times more enjoyable when you know you won't have burn a weekend to write a 30+-page report afterwards.

I've been asked to come along to a military recruiter as an all-purpose witness/assurance/nit-picker, and (for me) it was fun in an unintentional way. Almost feel bad for the guy 'cause between minute-long waffles to 'answer' yes-no questions and getting thrown off his game amusingly easy, I may have had my haircut longer than he's been in service. Still, my mission was accomplished. We also got some of the least informative literature since my last encounter with the Jehovah's Witnesses, but that was to be expected.

Despite this experience giving my friend a pause, he remains interested, so I'm gonna do what we probably should have started with, i.e. contact soldiers I met through paintball. I know, there are many bullshitters there, but those get off on LARPing as special forces, not say they "mostly do admin" or "fight the entropy in the motor pool."

[0] - I think Ut mediocris fuerunt, ita vicerint tracks.

Broke up over the weekend. Between slowly realising I'm not the manic-neurotic one in this relationship and a partner whose libido had Iodine-131's half-life, it's kinda surprising we lasted almost six months. Still, I haven't felt this bummed by a break-up in a while.

My teaching-thing is going OK, but I'm beginning to see why there wasn't much competition for the post. So, every other weekend, I basically go to the school and do the same material eight times, four on each day. Not that I didn't expect it from the job description, but dang, super-duper kudos to primary/secondary teachers for enduring this daily.

Since my brain wasn't exactly up to anything serious this week, I ended up reading the first seven volumes Gotrek and Felix whenever not trying to kick my steaming pile of math forward at work. They're in that ambigious zone between not-bad-for-fantasy and straight-up guilty pleasure, but fun for what they are.

Yey.

After reading all of this, knowing y'all won't have a tenth of my trouble... I'm so pants-shatteringly fucking glad I don't have to worry about finding work for the next, dunno, 6-ish years. Still, c_hawk, veen, whoever else: you'll do fine.

14 out of 20 potatoes finally grew out of the ground. I was beginning to worry they're too deep or something. Definitely trying to be as hand-off about it as possible, since it's all too easy for me to obsess over shit.

A couple weeks ago I began having a pretty shitty realization at therapy, putting certain family events in different order suddenly made a lot more sense. In the "my parents started treating me like shit a long before I realised it and for other reasons" category. Dunno how to go about it, though, since I doubt extended family or their friends would tell even if they knew the details, and my brother was always treated differently (though not necessarily better) enough to have it skewed.

Have you read any of those Dark Imperium books post-Guilliman's awakening? HH grew lukewarm for me, but those new developments turned my head a bit. I don't care about spoilers, but only know the broad strokes so far.

Bram Stoker's Dracula, because it's embarrassing I didn't yet. So far, even though it's a very uneven burn, I like it more than any of the adaptations.

Danielle Cybulskie's How to Live Like a Monk, which, despite the title, is more about how monastics dealt with their life of deprivation, what they did for mental health, how they mitigated burnout, and more. Even though the author is a medievalist historian, it's a very light and approachable read. It's respectable to monks, but secular in lessons learned if that's your worry.

I've been trying to left-side read a couple Loebs', but my vocab isn't there yet. Damn you, Cicero, and your septuple-level puns!

I've focused on chess recently and hadn't been fitter. Done well enough in last four tournaments to seriously aspire to the rank of candidate master, but it's not exactly a priority. Being realistic here, it would be months of hard work to get a new badge and briefly see my name in the rankings before I lose interest and drop out of the ass end of Poland's top 500.

Kinda dread going to work again, but I need some kind of metronome in life to not go into a near-autistic spiral on some topic. Work from home will be possible, but I probably shouldn't indulge that for a while. It's a shared office in a sense that a room you could play badminton at is divided into five desk areas and a shared printer. I'll be requisitioning a chalkboard instead of a greaseboard the moment I can, though. Apart from therapy, there were too few constants, and even though I require fewer meds now, fixing biochemistry isn't the same as unscrewing my head.

I found folks to play Delta Green with. We're thinking of porting it to Poland, because our knowledge of the US federal systems is... elective. Enough to wing it, but we know more about UB/SB alone than all your three-letter agencies combined.

The foot now only hurts while running, so that's good.

Swear to god, if, after three years of managing to avoid it, I caught covid the same week I finally stopped walking like Forrest Gump in those leg braces... Still waiting to be tested, but the loss of smell is supposedly still the telltale sign.

At least all the Christmas stuff is already out of the way, so that's fine. I also managed to go out with someone who was smart, chill, fun, and decidedly out of my league despite my walking like aforementioned Gump, so it almost makes up for other bullshit.

I guesstimated something up to 400Kt and presumed US gargantuan military spending would prevent going completely Neuroshima.

I recall reading that you want to go upwind quick because it takes 30min or so for the radioactive dust to start falling heavily.

This assumes a weapon weak enough to not lift particulates near or above tropopause (around 9-10km, EDIT actually closer to 11-12 km for New York).

So I guess with sub 1Mt yield, high humidity, and near-constant direction of coastal winds, it's correct.

Still, we can throw scenarios around, but I'd probably stay put. AFAIK, NY is horrid to traverse even without incipient cataclysm, so getting far enough for it to matter doesn't seem likely.

Oh no! A trolley is heading towards two infinite tracks of people. If you do nothing the trolley will stay on track where it'll kill people lying in an infinite sequence of equidistant ones (1 1 1 1 1 1 .... 1 ....), but if you pull the leaver it will go to the other infinite track killing people laying in equidistant piles corresponding to ordinal (1 2 3 4 5 .... (n) ...). What to do?

Pull the lever -- you'll only kill -1/12 people instead of infinity.

About a dozen recruiters reached out with teaching jobs, and I'm on the fence. We're in a drought for teachers, to the point where many schools fill spots with part-timing students (as in '3rd/4th-year undergrads' desperate), so despite it being a generally shitty line of work for guys and my aim set a tad higher, I still want to help. On the other hand, I have no idea if I can handle it regardless of meds working like magic. It's not the kind of stress I think I ever got fully accustomed to, and my worst breakdowns were accompanied by horrible students.

Otherwise, read up a lot on garden planning/maintaining, obliterated gazebo, done on chemistry and soon will be with physics.

First time since my surgery when I completed training that was near-routine five or six years ago. Dunno, feels great, but realising that all this time I've been getting back up is a bit of a kick in the mental sack.

We're planning on planting a couple fruit trees/shrubs in the yard, and it's looking dope. It's a tad late and we don't have anything ready, so the idea is to get some potted saplings and sprout seeds at home (some just to test, since I doubt kiwi or pomegranat can thrive/fruit in Poland), so we'll be ready for the next year. I also started tearing down my mother's shitty gazebo-like waste of space to have planks and free ground for kind of a herb and legume corner. Plus lots of stuff we can just put on the balconies in pots, none of us really had the time for it.

I've been enlisted in helping with the forthcoming entrance exams and, for those who pass, an orientation. It's weird to see it change. Ours was a little more than a semi-formal tour concluding in a semi-sober barbacue, but we also didn't know about intranet accounts until three weeks in, so I'm all for tradition yielding to efficiency. We can still make something afterwards.

There's a storm warning, and I'm royally pissed off with our NOAA counterpart because they removed detailed storm commentaries from the website. Why?! Why the fuck would you bother, at the beginning of a season at that? I know those people, and not only half of them can produce one in 15 minutes, they circulate this stuff in-house.

To be fair here, your comment looked to me like this:

Finland offers conscription like that, with a choice between armed/military service and civil service.

EDIT: Or just make people do stuff on zooniverse for 6 hours a day.

If we could take the "we're all here to kill people" and replace it with "we're all here to help people"?

Come on, man, don't be insulting.

Don't take an enemy lightly just because you believe yourself out of their punching range.

I did one more run and a couple of shorter ones to Lublin and Cracov over the weekend. Both car and I need a break. Might try to do it over weekends from now on. Though, really, judging by the sounds it keeps making, I'd better have someone competent look at it for a change.

Having an almost entirely passive understanding of Ukrainian (and, in the case of our guests, Polish) is an ongoing problem. We're using English with the younger ones and German-English with the aunt, which is odd as hell at times. We're doing what we can to make them feel welcomed, but they're still in shock and not entirely settled. And absolutely understandably so, just hope we're not pushing anyone.

After some consideration, I applied to a few IT-sec organizations but don't expect much to come out of it.

Today I had to take Uber to work because I completely blanked on a workshop presentation and did the slides on the back seat. It's actually a fun, largely-informal exercise, and the topic can be pretty much whatever 30-minute problem you think would interest a room full of physics post-grads and above. In my case, it was a couple of constructions following from Euclid Elements' book I, V, and VI, like hyperreals, angle algebras, and complex numbers. It's funny that it took until XIX century for mathematicians to stop using explicit infinities, only to discover it results in much more elementary, albeit epsilon-delta driven, maths. The step from Euclid to modern maths can be smaller than from Euclid to Euler, but only with the benefit of hindsight.

My reading list finally moved to the much-awaited "Beyond a Pale Horse" and other stuff by the conspiracy nutjob Milton William Cooper. The contents are by large not new to me, between games, books, X-Files/Lone Gunmen, and digging into similar stuff on the internet when I'm bored, but it's a concentrated infodump. Not a guilty pleasure by far; I love this nonsense.

The last week's chess puzzle seemed to prod people to respond both here and in private, so here's another one.

Same as before: checkmate in two, White begins. Think what Black's response should be before your second move.

Solution to last week's puzzle..

Dunno if I can make it into a regular thing, but why not try?

Wow, I guess the best way to really learn euphemisms is to commit them blindly and unwaveringly. The former, my thesis was accepted for the committee review last week.

We'll use Tosser to accelerate carbon and make our own nanotubes, dammit! I even know how to get all the carbon we'd need for free: adopt legions of christian children, convince them to act naughty, collect the coal from their stockings. Use said legions as minions.

We may be past Bond, but I can still turn it into Johnny English.

Like I'm happy about it. You're snarking wrong people for wrong reasons on wrong platform.

Yeah, it's probably a bit like listening to someone who read one book, surprised they only turn heads of those who read none.

Max Max should be the title of a remake with '80s dialed up to Kung Fury levels. Oddly, URL has it correctly but not the title.

I still think that trying to convince people isn't a lost cause.

???

Despite all reasons to the contrary, from falling literacy to rampant provincialism, I have hopes the answer isn't ethnic clensing, fall of empires and dark ages.

The book is news to me, but apart from visual/MathML problems (tables, a few formulae) I liked all I saw. Seems like a great book to complement Polya's "How to Solve It?" as it, in a similar style and manner, tried to hammer home general ways of sidesteping the need for calculus. Definitely will give a more thorough look and mine for ideas/examples, you can never have too many of those.

We have a similar one, Rachunek Różniczkowy i Całkowy by Franciszek Leja, but its aim is about aiding students with clarification or making sense of calc 1-3 lectures with a heap of varied examples and a dash of easy problems to-solve. Think something like a core textbook spliced with Cliff's Notes.

I'd wager you can average your current workload with one you had this time last year and feel like you're ahead of that 30/week quota. It's well-earned if you ask me.

So, the good thing is that I'm non-trivially wrong. Essentially, I wanted to see what would happen with the spacetime curvature around tachyon-containing bubble of elecromagnetic field. My messup is very mathy, but traces to a discontinuity at the spacetime point at which tachyon originates.

Oh well. My bad, learned something, it was fun. I still think there's a lot of potential here, though.

Make Uncertainty Sexy Again, when appropriate.

Too bad that position almost always pits us against pretty much the entire establishment and the idiots shouting the loudest.

It helps to not see it as "us vs the idiots." Part of the problem is scientists using hermetic lingo like "reasonably supported" or "within measurement error" to describe results with certainties over 4 sigmas. There's an instinctual need to precisely qualify this shit and won't even say our shoes are tied without checking each foot twice, but expecting anyone to be on the same wavelength here is a game lost at a start. That's like a lawyer being exasperated with 'the stupids' who need word salads like "appeal to reject motion was positively passed with a negative result" explained. Any random event defying a four sigma-strong hypothesis is about as likely as getting a straight flush, but nobody says it like that.

For what it's worth, I'm mostly lost enough to just belive what b_b or c_hawk say on the topic, but I'd be way more sceptical if I didn't know (trust?) they know their shit.

Can't access Nature from home until after the weekend (maintenance), but donuts to oranges, the same data is all over here. Never forget: researchers like to re-publish their crap as many times as they can get away with it. Some of it might be in free access.

Spiritus quidem promptus est, caro autem infirma. -- The booze is indeed quick, but the meat is sick.

I'll plan better for it this time, though I do have a lot of work vis-a-vis decrepit house.