Terry Jones

Image: ABC Tasmania

For the last seven years, I’ve kept a web page full of people’s email about street scams they’ve been involved in (as victims) in Barcelona.

In the beginning I just wrote down brief descriptions of things that I saw or was involved in soon after moving to Spain. I’d seen hardly any street crime in my (then) 33 years and I found it fascinating to watch for. It certainly wasn’t hard to find. Often it came right to my door or to the street under my balcony. Before long I began to receive email from others who had visited or lived in Barcelona, each with their own story to tell. I put the stories onto the web page and they soon outnumbered my own. I continue to receive a few emails a month from people who’ve read the web page (generally after being robbed, though sometimes before leaving on a trip). I don’t often reply to these emails, apart from a line or two to say thanks when I put their messages on the web page, often months after they mail me.

For whatever reason, I’ve never been very interested to meet these people, though I’ve had plenty of chances to. In general I don’t seem to have much interest in meeting new people – it’s quite rare that I do. I should probably be more sociable (or something) because once in a while the consequences are immediately extraordinary.

Among my email, I get occasional contacts from people in the tourism industry. Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, people writing books or running travel services or web sites. Mainly they want to know if they can link to the web page, or to use some of the content in their own guides. I always agree without condition. After all, the main (but not the only) point is to help people be more aware, and besides, the majority of the content was written by other people who clearly share the same advisory aim. With this attention from various professionals who are trying to pass on the information, I began to wonder how many such people there were. Maybe there were other people with web sites devoted to street crime. So once in a while I’d do a web search on “street scams”, or something similar, just to see what came up. It’s usually interesting.

On July 30th 2001, I went looking around for similar web sites and ran across Bob Arno. I took a quick look around and fired off an email to say hello, and offered to buy him a beer the next time he was in Barcelona:

    Hi Bob

    I was just having a wander around the web when I ran into your
    pages about pickpockets. They look good, very useful.

    You might be interested to see a page of my own: http://jon.es/barna/scams.html

    All about things that have happened to people in Barcelona. It's
    not too well organized, but there's a lots of it. Most of it falls
    into well known classes of petty crime. Things are getting worse
    here, with the most recent tactics being strangulation from behind
    and squirting a flammable liquid onto people's backs and then, you
    guessed it, setting them on fire.

    Let me know next time you're in Barcelona and I'll buy you a
    beer. I'm also in Manhattan very often.

    Regards,
    Terry Jones.

Bob looked very interesting, and we seemed to have the same point of view on street crime. He’s a seasoned professional, a Vegas showman, and is constantly traveling the world studying many forms of crime and passing on his knowledge. Check out his website.

I sent mail to Derek, passing on Bob Arno’s URL. I said a little of how funny and random it seemed to me, of how over all the years of doing different things and meeting any number of famous and high-powered academics and intellectuals etc., and not really having much interest in any of them, that I’m sending email to this Bob Arno guy suggesting we meet up.

The next day I read more about Bob’s exploits and interests and I guessed that we would probably get on really well. I sent off a longer email with some more of my observations about Barcelona:

    Hi again.

    I sent off that first email without having looked at more than a
    page or two of your web site.

    It's very interesting to read more. I spend far too much time
    thinking about and watching for petty thieves in Barcelona. I've
    thought about many of the issues touched on in the interview with
    you by your own TSJ. The whole thing is very intriguing and lately
    I've begun to wonder increasingly what I can do about it, and if I
    want to do anything about it. I have tended to act to try to stop
    pickpockets, but I've also seen things many times from a distance
    or a height, read many things, seen freshly robbed people weeping,
    talked to many people who have been robbed, thought of this as an
    art (I'm interviewed in a Barcelona newspaper under the headline
    "Some crimes are a work of art" - I'm not sure if they understood
    what I meant), etc. I've never tried filming these people. But I
    know how they look at you when they know they have been spotted,
    how their faces look when the wallet hits the floor, how they prey
    on Western or "rich" psychology, and so many other things.  My
    focus has been Barcelona, after coming to live here 5 years ago
    and (at that time) having an apartment 1 floor up about 100 meters
    from Plaza Real. If I had had a net I could have caught people
    several times a day.

    I recently got a video camera and was thinking of interviewing the
    woman on my web site who was strangled here earlier this month. By
    the way, the papers reported up to 9 cases of such stranglings in a
    single day. I wasn't quite sure what to do with the tape. It hadn't
    occurred to me to film the thieves, but it would be so easy.  In
    Barcelona it's trivial to spot these people, and also feels very
    safe since many of them have been arrested literally hundreds of
    times.  There is basically no deterrent. There are undoubtedly more
    sophisticated pickpockets here too, but there is little in the way
    of evolutionary pressure to make them improve their methods. The
    tourists are too many and too unaware, the police are too few, and
    the laws are too slack. Why would you even bother to improve or
    think?

    I also know the boredom that comes with professional acts. I used to
    do a lot of juggling and unicycling, practicing 6 hours a day for a
    long time. But I could never stand to have a canned show that I did
    time after time - it was just too routine to have a routine. So I
    refused and eventually drifted into other things.

    How can I get a copy of your book? It doesn't seem to say on the web
    site. Also, the menu of links at the top left of your pages looks
    extremely garbled under my browser (Opera).

    Terry

As it turned out, my timing was perfect. I got a mail back the next day from Bob’s wife Bambi (yes, really). She said they’d be in Barcelona in just 5 days time and that they’d love to meet up.

And meet up we did!

They came to our apartment and we all hit it off immediately. As I’d thought, we did have a lot in common, both in terms of what we had done and in outlook. They told me they also get lots of email through their web site and hardly ever reply. Ana and I took them out for food. We sat outside at the nearby Textile Museum. Later, Ana went home to look after Sofia, and I stayed with Bob and Bambi. In the end I was with them about five hours and I had a really good time. We arranged to meet the next day to go hunting for thieves on the Ramblas. In one sense, “hunting” isn’t at all the right word: the thieves are typically very obvious to anyone who’s actually paying attention. But there’s a lot of subtlety in tracking and filming them, so it really is something like a hunt. I’ve since spent many hours, on several occasions, in action with Bob and Bambi in Barcelona. But that’s another story.

After getting home that first night, I went back to Bob’s web site and read more of his pages. He’s had a pretty colorful life. Actually, it’s extraordinarily colorful by almost any measure. “Who is this Bob Arno?” I wondered. Fortunately, Bob has a “Who is Bob Arno?” page, which I finally got around to reading.

Halfway down… unbelievable… I want to cry.

    Born in Sweden, Bob Arno is a great-grandson of Dr. Axel Munthe,
    who is most famous for his novel The Story of San Michele.

Patricia Volterra was my great aunt.

I spent 4 wonderful years (92-96) at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. During that time there was a very funny underground SFI newsletter “The New Can” (a play on the name of the NM newspaper The New Mexican) that poked merciless fun at various Institute activities and researchers. The author, a brilliant friend, must unfortunately remain anonymous. I still have half a dozen copies, and I imagine I must be one of the few people on earth who does. I ran across them tonight. Below is a graph that appeared in the September 14, 1992 edition entitled “Mutation Rocks Halls of SFI”. I’ve always loved it.

From terry Thu Jun 7 01:26:35 +0200 2001
To: dsmith@cs.unm.edu, high@hci.ucsd.edu

today i saw a bag snatching
happened about 20/30 yards in front of me
2 guys on a motorbike
the back guy leans sideways
smooth as can be
takes the handle of a bag from an old well dressed woman

they head off down the side of the church
right next to where i live

the people yell out to the people at the end of the street
looking away from me

i am in motion

sprinting.

i zoom past the robbed
going absolutely flat out
heading to the end of the street
thinking i had no chance at all

but, around the corner
not more than 5 yards
i see the guys on the motorbike
caught behind some walking other people
(there is construction there
which makes it narrower
harder to pass)

this is right on the corner of paseo del borne (our street)
and montcada

and…………………..

i fucking tackled them
yeah
over the top
arms spread to get them both at once
guys to the ground
motorbike to the ground
me falling stepping over the top
grazed shin, no more

i wasn’t thinking really
just knew i had to stop them
couldn’t do it as good as it could have been
and as it was the bike crashed down almost
into some people beside it
who had no clue what the fuck was going on

the guys jumped up
yelled
ripped off their helmets and flung them away
one smacking hard into the wall
and sprinted off
leaving one shoe behind

i was pretty surprised
didn’t occur to me that the bike was stolen too

the cops turned up in about a minute flat
there were 30 or 40 people gathered around
talking like crazy
no-one knew what had happened
the robbed people just came around the corner to find a mess
one guy saw it and one woman
the woman acted like my PR agent
telling the entire crowd
over and over that i was a hero

it was great
so funny
i smiled and bowed to them all
like an idiot
hamming it up

the robbed people thrust a 2000 ptas reward into my hands
absolutely insisted that i take it
(we ate it in pizza later)

the cops shrugged it off
called in the stolen bike

it was pretty cool
i could get into being a vigilante

i should have tried to have held one of the guys
but i thought hitting them hard sideways
and knocking their bike over would do it

but, it wasn’t their bike

i was smiling afterwards
the most exercise i’ve had
since beating derek to the office on skates a few weeks back

Earlier this week I gave a talk titled Deferred Gratification (slides) at EuroPython in Birmingham. The title was supposed to hint at how much I love Twisted‘s Deferred class, and that it took me some time to really appreciate it.

While thinking about Deferreds in the days before the talk, I think I put my finger on one of the reasons I find Deferreds so attractive and elegant. The thought can be neatly summarized: Deferreds let you replace synchronous data structures with elegant asynchronous ones.

There are various ways that people get exposed to thinking about programming in an asynchronous style. The great majority do so via building user interfaces, usually with widget libraries wherein one specifies widgets and layouts, sets up event handlers, and then surrenders control to a main loop that thereafter routes events to handlers. Exposure to asynchronous programming via building UIs is becoming much more common as Javascript programmers build client-side web apps that operate asynchronously with web servers (and the “A” in AJAX of course stands for asynchronous). Others become aware of asynchronous programming via writing network code (perhaps using Twisted). Relatively few become aware of asynchronous programming via doing async filesystem I/O.

Because Twisted’s Deferreds don’t have anything to do with UIs or networking or filesystems, you can use them to implement other asynchronous things, like an asynchronous data structure. To show you what I mean, here’s a slightly simplified version of Twisted’s DeferredQueue class, taken from twisted/internet/defer.py:

class DeferredQueue(object):

    def __init__(self):
        # It would be better if these both used collections.deque (see comments section below).
        self.waiting = [] # Deferreds that are expecting an object
        self.pending = [] # Objects queued to go out via get.

    def put(self, obj):
        if self.waiting:
            self.waiting.pop(0).callback(obj)
        else:
            self.pending.append(obj)

    def get(self):
        if self.pending:
            return succeed(self.pending.pop(0))
        else:
            d = Deferred()
            self.waiting.append(d)
            return d

I find this extremely elegant, and I’m going to explain why.

But first, think about code for a regular synchronous queue. What happens if you call get on a regular queue that’s empty? Almost certainly one of two things: you’ll get some kind of QueueEmpty error, or else your code will block until some other code puts something into the queue. I.e., you either get a synchronous error or you get a synchronous non-empty response.

If you look at the get method in the code above, you’ll see that if the queue is empty (i.e., the pending list is empty), a new Deferred is made, added to self.waiting, and is immediately returned to the caller. So code calling get on an empty queue doesn’t get an error and doesn’t block, it always gets a result back essentially immediately. How can you get a result from an empty queue? Easy: the result is a Deferred. And because we’re in the asynchronous world, you just attach callbacks (like event handlers in the UI world) to the Deferred, and go on your merry way.

If you can follow that thinking, the rest of the code in the class above should be easy to grok. In put, if there are any outstanding Deferreds (i.e., earlier callers who hit an empty queue and got a Deferred back), the incoming object is given to the first of these by passing it to the callback function of the Deferred (and popping it out of the waiting list). If there are no outstanding Deferreds expecting a result, the incoming object is simply appended to self.pending. On the get side, if the queue (i.e., self.pending) is non-empty, the code creates a Deferred that has already been fired (using the succeed helper function) and returns it.

By now, this kind of code seems routine and straightforward to me. But it certainly wasn’t always that way. So if the above seems cryptic or abstract, I encourage you to think it over, maybe write some code, ask questions below, etc. To my mind, these kinds of constructs – simple, elegant, robust, practical, obviously(?) bug-free, single-threaded, etc. – are extremely instructive. You too can solve potentially gnarly (at least in the threaded world) networking coding challenges in very simple ways just by building code out of simple Twisted Deferreds (there’s nothing special about the DeferredQueue class, it’s just built using primitive Deferreds).

For extra points, think about the concept of asynchronous data structures. I find that concept very attractive, and putting my finger on it helped me to see part of the reason why I think Deferreds are so great. (In fact, as you can see from the use of succeed, Deferreds are not specifically asynchronous or synchronous: they’re so simple they don’t even care, and as a consumer of Deferreds, your code doesn’t have to either). That’s all remarkably elegant.

I sometimes hope O’Reilly will publish a second volume of Beautiful Code and ask me to write a chapter. I know exactly what I’d write about :-)

Back in December 2006 I wrote about finishing Proust and made a rough argument about how often anyone on earth finishes the whole thing. The argument was a bit subtle. I was never 100% convinced it was sound, but no-one I showed it to found a hole in it. I still think about the question from time to time. The other day I mentioned the original post to Tim O’Reilly. Later that day, I realized there’s a much simpler way to get an estimate, with far fewer assumptions.

The new approach is simply to divide the number of hours that have passed since In Search of Lost Time was published by the number of people who’ve ever finished it. That average is a crude measure, but it may be nevertheless quite accurate and it’s irresistibly interesting to me to see how it compares to my original 2006 estimate of 2.19 hours.

So, assume 2B people were alive in 1927 when the final volume was published, and 6.4B alive at the end of 2006 (source).

Assume that no-one alive in 1927 was still alive in 2006 (obviously not the case, but not unreasonable and not a significant error). I.e., there were 4.4B births in those 79 years. Note: This is ignoring a significant number of people who were born after 1927 and who died before 2006. But it is including everyone born from 1990 onwards, essentially zero of whom would have read Proust by 2006.

In my original post I estimated that one person in 10K actually finishes the whole book. So that’s 4.4B/10K = 440K people who read the book during the 79 years.

79 years is 28,835 days, or 692,040 hours. Doing the division, 692,040 / 440,000 = 1.57 hours.

I.e., by the above rough reasoning, someone, somewhere on earth, finishes Proust every 1.57 hours, on average.

I find the closeness of the two estimates quite remarkable. There’s only one shared assumption (1 in 10,000 finishes). Both estimates are quite crude, yet there’s only about a 30% difference in the answers. I was expecting them to be much more divergent.

Today I met an extraordinary Iranian man in the Geneva airport. He’s written a 1000 page book in Arabic about (at least in part) his experiences in Cyprus. He approached me, asked if my English was really really good, sat next to me, and started pulling out several pages of hand-wrtten uppercase English. He had me go over them, improve them, write some new text as he read his Arabic in halting English, told me exactly how he wanted it to sound, pressed me to find shorter ways to say things, and finally got me to write out (for his next helper, no doubt) a clean copy of all my work. He had me go look up a recent paper dating the evolutionary split between humans & chimpanzees and to confirm that it didn’t contradict his text (another fragment thrust importunately into my hands). He was about 75. We spent 90 mins together, smiling and congratulating each other over a few sentences that turned out particularly well. Told me he’s going to have it published by Oxford – that’s his aim anyway.

I thought to myself that we each have our own mountain to climb – or at least those who have a taste for years-long patient endeavors, but how different his from mine. We parted and he went off to approach another stranger. He’ll get the whole book done a few pages a day in the Geneva airport, I’ve no doubt. “It’s the perfect place” he told me. Amazing, extraordinary, humbling, etc…

In case you missed it, FluidDB has (finally) launched. I wont be blogging here about FluidDB or Fluidinfo, though will continue to post personal things and of course random bits of code that seem interesting (and small) enough to warrant mention. I have yet another Twisted snippet coming up, though I’m not sure when I’ll get there.

We’re all exhausted and thrilled to have FluidDB out the door. I wont try to describe the feelings, except to say that it’s all incredibly exciting, and that I haven’t been getting much sleep recently. The reaction in the programmer community has been astounding: there are 9 client-side libraries already written (with more on the way), there are tools, there’s a FluidDB Explorer, and little apps are now starting to pop up. We couldn’t be happier. You can see a list of those things here.

To find out more about FluidDB, here are your best choices:

• The FluidDB blog. Recent posts describing FluidDB are:
  • Truly social data.
  • Cloud storage: the real opportunity.
  • Kaleidoscope: 10 takes on FluidDB.
• The FluidDB high-level overview goes into the information model of FluidDB, its permissions system, and the query language.
• The FluidDB-discuss mailing list is a great place to ask questions, and has already seen some detailed discussion on spam and the FluidDB about tag.
• If you’re a programmer looking to learn about FluidDB, the #1 thing you should do is join the #fluidDB IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. There are many people there learning about FluidDB, exchanging tips, and writing new libraries, tools, and apps. You can also read the API documentation.

Thanks for reading along! The real journey is probably only just beginning…

My bank account hits rock bottom, at 2 cents, while building Fluidinfo.

Here are the slides from my talk on May 22, 2009 at the Postgres Conference (PGCon) in Ottawa. The video will be available soon.

Here’s just a quick note to mention that I’m talking at the annual Postgres Conference aka PGCon. The talk is titled The design, architecture, and tradeoffs of FluidDB, and is at 3pm on May 22nd. So if you happen to be in Ottawa this week…

I could have added the subtitle “How someone who knows nothing about databases wound up in a project to build a database.”

Here are some more thoughts on the (now official) influenza pandemic.

I would like again to emphasize that I’m not an authority and I’m not trying to pass myself off as one.

I’ve already been accused of deliberate fear-mongering. That’s the opposite of my purpose. On the contrary, it’s important to stay calm and there are good reasons for doing so. If you don’t want to know a bit of history and to have some sense of things that have happened in previous pandemics, then you don’t have to read what follows. There’s no harm in staying calm via not knowing. On the other hand, there is harm in being gripped by fear due to ignorance.

If you do read, try to keep in mind that the main point here is that you shouldn’t be overwhelmed by fear or begin to panic. There’s no reason to. Plus it will only make things worse.

On the subject of being an authority and fear-mongering, after I wrote up the first set of thoughts I was invited to be a guest commentator on a radio show. I declined. It feels very irresponsible to say anything about influenza given that I am not an expert and don’t even work in the field anymore, but OTOH it feels irresponsible to remain totally silent given that I know at least some historical things fairly well.

To illustrate the conflict: On April 26 it seemed crystal clear to me that the virus was going worldwide. You only had to have seen the Google map that I twittered about the day before to see that it was going to be all over the place in days. But I didn’t want to point that out, and when I was asked I told the asker to be his own judge. I linked to a map showing Mexico and the US earlier and said “hopefully we wont have to zoom out” – trying to get people to consider that we would probably soon have to zoom out.

So I think I’ve been quite restrained. This post is also restrained. As I said above, there are good reasons not to sensationalize things or to create the impression that people should panic.

So here we go again, a few more thoughts as they come to mind. These are things that I find interesting, with a few scattered opinions (all of which are just guesses). There’s no real structure to this post.

The WHO have announced today that we’re officially in a pandemic. That doesn’t really mean much, but it’s good to have a candid and early declaration – part of the problem historically has been slowness to even admit there’s a problem. The WHO didn’t even exist in 1918.

In case you don’t know, there’s pretty good evidence that humans have been fighting influenza for thousands of years.

The most interesting thing to me in reading about the 1918 pandemic is the social impact of the disease.

One thing to make clear is that the current pandemic is not the 1918 pandemic. I tend to agree with those who say that a pandemic of that nature could not take place today – but note that people, perhaps especially scientists – would have said that at all times prior to and after 1918. We often under-estimate the forces of nature and over-estimate our own knowledge and level of control.

BTW, something like 75% of people who died during World War 1 did so because of the flu pandemic, which didn’t really take off until November of 1918. Amazing.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, under normal circumstances (even in a pandemic), flu doesn’t kill you. It leaves you susceptible to opportunistic follow-on disease. The good news is that we are vastly more informed now than we were in 1918 about the nature of infectious diseases. For example, we know a lot about pneumonia, which we did not in 1918. See the moving story of the amazing Oswald Avery, who dedicated his life to the disease and along the way fingered DNA as the vehicle of genetic inheritance – and never won a Nobel prize.

So the care of people who have been struck down by flu is going to be much more informed this time around. And it will probably be better in practice too. I put it that way because odd societal things happen in a pandemic. I hesitate to go into detail, because some people will assume that things that happened way back when will necessarily happen again this time around.

One of those things is that medical systems get overrun by the sick. Plus, doctors and nurses understandably decide that their jobs have become too dangerous and they stop showing up for work. So there can be a sharp drop-off in the availability of medical help.

So much so that there were reports of doctors and nurses being held hostage in houses in 1918. I.e., if you could get a doctor to visit to attend to your family, the situation was so dire you might consider pulling a gun on him/her and suggesting they make themselves comfortable for the duration.

The problem is not so much that many people are dying, it’s that a much larger number are simultaneously extremely ill and that panic grips them and everyone else. Roughly 30% of all people caught the 1918 flu. I have another post I may write up on that. Normal (epidemic) flu catches 10-15% of people in any give year.

Many of our systems are engineered to provide just-in-time resources, to cut the fat in order to maximize profitability, etc. That means that we’re closer to collapse that would seem apparent. How many days of fresh food are there on hand in a major city?

None of this is meant to be alarmist. But the reality is that alarming things have happened in the past.

Most interesting and revealing to me is that our cherished notions of politeness, of our generosity, our goodwill towards our neighbors, etc., can all go out the window pretty quickly. I’ve long held that all those things are the merest veneer on our underlying biological / evolutionary reality. We’re very fond of the ideas that we’re somehow no longer primates, that we’re not really the product of billions of years of evolutionary history, that somehow the last centuries of vaunted rationality have put paid to all those primitive lower impulses. I think that’s completely wrong. Behavior during a full-scale pandemic is one of the things that makes that very clear.

In a pandemic, if things get ugly, you can expect to see all manner of anti-social behavior. If you read John Barry’s book The Great Influenza or Crosby’s America’s Forgotten Pandemic you’ll get some graphic illustrations.

If I had a supply of tamiflu (which I don’t), I wouldn’t tell anyone. That’s deliberately anti-social. Ask yourself: What would you do if you had kids who were still healthy and your neighbor called you in desperation to tell you that his/her kids seemed to have come down with influenza? Get out your family’s tamiflu supply and hand it over? Lie? What if they knew you had it and you refused to give it or share? What if your neighbor’s kid died and yours never even got the flu? What kind of relationship would be left after the pandemic had passed?

This may all seem a bit extreme and deliberately provocative of me, and yet those sorts of dilemmas (sans tamiflu, naturally) were commonplace in 1918. As you might expect, they don’t always get resolved in ways that accord well with our preferred beliefs about our own natures in easier times. Crosby speculates that the reason the pandemic of 1918 is “forgotten” is due largely to the fact that it coincided with the war, and that people were generally exhausted and dispirited and wanting to move on. I’d speculate further that people en masse frequently behaved in ways that they weren’t proud of, and wanted to forget about it and act as if it hadn’t happened ASAP. That’s just a guess, of course.

In any case, if there’s a full-blown pandemic, societal structures that we take for granted are going to be hugely transformed. Medical services, emergency services, food supply, child care and education, job absenteeism, large numbers of the people who would normally be in charge of things coming down sick and being unable to do their normal jobs, etc. All sorts of things are impacted and lots of them are interconnected. The system breaks down in many unanticipated ways as all sorts of things that “could never happen” are all happening at once.

You might think I’m fear-mongering here, but I’m not. In fact I’m refraining from going into detail. Go read John Barry’s book, or any of the others, and see for yourself.

The important thing to remember in all this is that we are no longer in 1918. BTW, there were also influenza pandemics in 1957 (killing just a couple of million people) and 1968 (killing a mere million).

Apart from the fact that we’ve advanced hugely in medical terms, we are also much better connected. I can sit in the safety of my apartment in Barcelona and broadcast calming information like this blog post to thousands of people. We are better informed. We know that panic and fear greatly compound the impact of a pandemic. They feed on one another and prolong the systemic societal collapse. Because we can communicate so easily via the internet – provided our ISPs stay online – we can help keep each other calm. That’s an important advantage.

So my guess is that this wave isn’t going to be so bad, certainly not in terms of mortality. One thing to keep in mind though is that the virus isn’t going away. It will likely enjoy the Southern hemisphere winter, and we’ll see it again next Northern hemisphere winter. And yes, those are guesses. Because influenza is a single-stranded RNA virus it mutates rapidly (you don’t get the copy protection of a double strand). So this is the beginning, not the end, even if the pandemic fizzles out in the short term. It will be back – probably in less virulent form – but by then we’ll also have a good leg up on potential vaccines, and we’ll also know it’s coming.

OK, I’ll stop there for now. I have tons of other things I could write now that I’m warmed up. You can follow me on Twitter if you like, though I doubt I’ll be saying much about influenza.

If you truly believe I’m fear mongering, please send me an email or leave your email address in the comments. I’ll send you mail with some truly shocking and frightening stuff, or maybe fax you a few pages from some books. Believe me, it gets a lot nastier than anything I’ve described. Things are not that bad, certainly not yet. We’re not in 1918 anymore

So, stay calm, and do the simple things to keep yourself relatively safe. If everyone follows instructions like those, the virus wont have a chance to spread the way it could otherwise. That may sound like pat concluding advice, but there’s actually a lot to it – the epidemiology of infectious disease – in part the mathematics of infection – can be hugely altered depending on the behavior the typical individual. Following basic hygiene and getting your kids to too will make a big difference. There’s no denying that this is going to get worse before it gets better, but we can each do our part to minimize its opportunities.

Here are some thoughts on the current swine influenza outbreak. These are just off the top of my head – I will undoubtedly think of more to say and add it in the comments or another posting. I apologize for the lack of links. I may come back and put some in.

I am both unqualified and qualified to make a few comments. I’m unqualified because I no longer work on influenza virus, because I’m not a virologist, because I have no inside information at all about the current outbreak. OTOH, I have some claim to know what I’m talking about. I worked on influenza virus as part of the Antigenic Cartography team at the University of Cambridge for a few years. We helped the WHO choose the H3N2 strain for the human vaccine. I’ve met the heads of the 4 international flu centers and even been in the WHO Situation Room in Geneva – a self-contained underground fortress. I spent a lot of time hanging out and talking to influenza virologists, many from the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam. I was even an author on a Science paper on the global spread of epidemic influenza. Plus I’ve read all the books on the 1918 pandemic, which gives some (largely retrospective) insight into what happened back then, and perhaps some insight into what could be about to happen.

I also feel it’s good for someone like me to comment because I’m outside the flu world and the people inside it will be unlikely to say much. Flu is a highly political issue, to put it mildly. People working in the flu research community will be reluctant to speak up. So I should make it very clear that the comments below are just my opinions, and don’t represent anyone else’s thoughts.

I’ll try to just make a few points that I think are fairly sober – neither alarmist, nor dismissive – and to keep speculation out of it.

Apart from the details of the actual virus, the social side of a potential pandemic is extraordinarily interesting. Very few people will have really concrete information, and those that do will still only be making their best guesses.

In a pandemic, or something that looks like it might be one, wild rumors sweep through the population. That will happen on an unprecedented scale this time round.

The virus has, as far as we know, not spent much time in humans yet. Once it does, it will begin to adapt itself in unpredictable ways. It may become more virulent, or less virulent. It may develop resistance to the antivirals that are currently effective. Antiviral resistance has been a topic of great concern for at least a couple of years. The current virus is already known to be resistant to both amantadine and rimantadine, though oseltamivir is still effective.

If you ask virologists what the probability is that there will be another pandemic, they’ll tell you it’s 1.0. It’s just a matter of time until it happens. it’s like a non-zero probability state in a Markov process. When it does happen, what you do in the first phase is critically important. In the case of the avian influenza they would try to immediately cull all potentially infected birds, to stop the virus spreading and mutating and becoming more likely to enter the human population. When it did get into the human population, there would be swift action to isolate it, again to reduce the spread and the time the virus has to adapt. In the case of the avian influenzas in humans, there has been very little airborne transmission, and we’re lucky for that. But the current virus seems to already have that property, which is of great concern.

It would be a miracle if the current epidemic vaccine provided any protection against this virus. The human vaccine does contain a strain against H1N1, but that’s a strain picked based on sampled human viruses from many months ago. The epidemic vaccine is aimed at thwarting what’s known as antigenic drift – the relatively slow accumulation of point mutations in the virus. Pandemic strains arise through antigenic shift in which large chunks of viral genetic material, sometimes whole genes, are mixed between influenza viruses from different species. In a pandemic strain some of the genetic material and the proteins it expresses will very likely never have been seen by a human immune system.

The current WHO standard influenza test kit is not very useful in identifying this strain. They have issued instructions warning against false negatives.

Some aspects of the current outbreak are, to my mind, cause for great concern.

The acting-director of the CDC has already said: “There are things that we see that suggest that containment is not very likely.” That is a remarkably candid statement. I think it’s very clear that the cat is out of the bag. The question is how bad is it going to be. That’s impossible to tell right now, because we do not know what the virus will look like in the future, after it has had time to mutate and adapt inside humans.

In normal circumstances it takes about 6 months to make the world’s supply of epidemic vaccine. It’s a long and difficult process requiring tons of virus to be grown in chicken eggs. A canidate vaccine strain has to be identified, it has to be one that grows well in the chicken egg (including not killing the chick). Even under the high pressure of a potential pandemic, making a new vaccine is going to take months. By then the virus may have moved on (via mutation) and the vaccine’s efficacy may be less. Note that the 1918 virus killed tens of millions of people over a period much shorter than this.

Diverting the world’s influenza resources to covering a pandemic threat necessarily diverts them from work on epidemic vaccines. Epidemic flu kills roughly 0.5M people a year as it is. Not being able to pay due attention to the epidemic strains is also a bad thing.

The new virus has been popping up in various places in the US in the last days. I expect it will go global in the next couple of days, maximum. What’s to stop it? The virus has been isolated in several diverse areas and in many cases is genetically identical. The 1918 virus also popped up, in many cases inexplicably, across the US. The book America’s Forgotten Pandemic is worth a read.

There were 3 waves of the 1918/19 pandemic. The first was in summer of 1918 – very unusual, as influenza normally falls to extremely low rates during summer. Note that the current outbreak is also highly unseasonal.

The 1918 pandemic killed with a very unusual age pattern. Instead of peaks in just the very young and the very old, there was a W shape, with a huge number of young and healthy people who would not normally die from influenza. There are various conjectures as to the cause of this. The current virus is also killing young and healthy adults.

The social breakdown in a pandemic is extraordinary. If you read The Great Pandemic by John Barry, you’ll get some sense of it. America’s Forgotten Pandemic also helps give some idea of what it must have been like.

No-one knows just how many people died as a result of the 1918 pandemic. Estimates generally range between 40M and 100M, and have trended upwards over the years. Influenza is not the easiest to diagnose (hence the category ILI – influenza-like illnesses). It also strips the throat of protective epithelial cells, leaving you susceptible to opportunistic follow-on infections, such as pneumonia, which often do the killing.

No-one knows how bad another pandemic might be in terms of mortality. Low estimates are in the single digit millions. Someone from the WHO suggested a significantly higher number about 4 years ago in the context of avian influenza and that number was quickly retracted. Jeff Taubenberger, who was responsible for resurrecting and sequencing the 1918 virus (an extraordinary story, related in a couple of books) has published work saying 100M might be possible. No-one knows, and it depends on many factors, including the characteristics of the virus, how early it is detected, how easily it spreads, how virulent it is (obviously), the social measures taken to combat it, antiviral resistance, and many other factors.

I don’t think anyone knows how the balance between vastly increased medical knowledge and vastly increased national and international travel will play out. If this virus is not popping up all over the world within a week’s time, I’ll be surprised. Airports are already screening people arriving from Mexico, but I imagine it’s too late and it’s certainly not being done globally.

History dictates that you should probably not believe anything any politician says about pandemic influenza. There has been a strong tendency to downplay risks. All sorts of factors are at work in communicating with the public. You can be sure that everything officially said by the WHO or CDC has been very carefully vetted and considered. There’s no particular reason to believe anything else you hear, either :-)

Facemasks have an interesting history, and have made it into law several times. In 1918 we didn’t even know what a virus was, let alone how tiny they are, so the gauze on the masks was likely totally ineffective.

In conclusion, I’d say that the thing is largely out of our hands for the time being. We’re going to have to wait and see what happens, and make our best guesses along the way.

The influenza people at the CDC and the other international labs are an amazing team of experts. They’ve been at this game for a very long time and they work extremely hard and generally get a bad rap. It’s no wonder flu is such a political issue, the responsibility is high and the tendency towards opaqueness is understandable. Despite all the expertise though, at bottom you have an extremely complex virus – much of whose behavior is unknown, especially in the case of antigenic shift, especially when it is so young, and especially when you don’t know what nearby mutational opportunities may exist for it in antigenic space – spreading in a vastly more complex environment (our bodies), and with us moving and interacting in odd ways in a complex and extremely interconnected world. It’s a wonder we know as much as we do, but in many ways we don’t know much at all.

Coding is what you do when you tire of dealing with other humans. You get to interact with a literal-minded idiot who slavishly follows your every wish. Unfortunately you have to specify *everything* down to the very last detail in order to get anything done. But at least it does what it’s told, which is comforting in a world where everyone selfishly insists on doing what *they* want. You should try it sometime, it’s very relaxing, and nice to be totally in control.

Once in a while I run across a piece of writing that has little or nothing to do with being an entrepreneur, but which reads as though it did. I posted an example in 2007: Orwell writing about and quoting T.S.Eliot: “Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating“.

Below is one I encountered a few days ago. Can you place it? You can find the answer on Google in a flash.

The glamour of youth enveloped his parti-coloured rags, his destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wanderings. For months — for years — his life hadn’t been worth a day’s purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearances indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and of his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like admiration — like envy. Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with a maximum of privation. If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this be-patched youth. I almost envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame. It seemed to have consumed all thought of self so completely, that even while he was talking to you, you forgot that it was he— the man before your eyes— who had gone through these things.

My great grand uncle was Frederick Septimus Kelly (aka Cleg or Sep):

On 22 April [1915] Kelly became aware that Rupert Brooke was dangerously ill. The following day Brooke died and was buried on Skyros by his close circle, the officers known as the Latin Club – the critic and composer, W. Denis Browne; Arthur (Ock) Asquith (later Brigadier-General Arthur Asquith); the scholar and son of Lord Ribblesdale, Charles Lister; Patrick H. Shaw-Stewart, scholar and, at the age of 25, a director of Barings Bank; Bernard Freyberg (later General Lord Freyberg VC and Governor-General of New Zealand); and ‘Cleg’ Kelly. Kelly’s measured description of both the death and burial of the poet have been extensively quoted in the Brooke literature. It was W. Denis Browne and Kelly who sorted Brooke’s belongings as their ship left Skyros for the Gallipoli peninsula, and it was Kelly, methodical as ever, who copied the contents of the poet’s notebook against its loss in transit to his family. After the Hood Battalion left England, the friendship between Kelly and Brooke had deepened. There are frequent references to their being together on group outings on leave, nights spent together at the dinner table, of W. Denis Browne and Kelly entertaining their fellow officers with Brooke to the fore and, towards the end, accounts of Brooke coming alone to Kelly’s cabin to read his poems and to discuss literature. Brooke’s death was a personal loss. Kelly is said to have begun composing his Elegy dedicated to Brooke as the poet lay dying nearby.

Taken from page 36 of “Race Against Time: the Diaries of F.S. Kelly”, selected, edited and introduced by Therese Radic. Published in 2004 by the National Library of Australia.

I have an MP3 of Kelly’s Elegy to Rupert Brooke in case anyone wants it.

Today I referred to myself as a loose cannon to Esteve. Tonight I recalled describing a former boss that way in an email (company name obscured with xxxxx). Here it is:

i thought
hey, hold on
where the hell is quality control?
and i knew i was it
but still it’s so tiring to try to stop her
and almost impossible to make her listen
and understand
and my energy for that is limited
plus it’s just amusing to watch her rocketing along
read this, read this, read this
passing you papers printed at semi-random
from the web

  
to me
the phrase ‘loose cannon’
can be perfectly applied to her
she’s rolling around on the xxxxx deck
(wheel in deep sea fishing analogy here)
our most powerful weapon
at once capable of taking out a whole fleet of enemy ships
but also equally capable of shooting down the mast
blasting the crew
taking out the sail
firing on the powder room
and just generally causing any number
of unpredictable and inevitably high-impact results

 i know
we have to be the leather belts
that strap her to the deck
as much fun as it is to see her rolling about,
the recoil from one explosion
spinning her randomly to point at her next target
all further confused by the rolling waves
and her small metal wheels

 confused and terrified sailors
in blue-striped togs
run scrambling over the sea-slapped decks
holding their heads their ears
the ship’s wheel
half shot away by a stray ball
spins wildly
as we broach another peak

  
all hands on deck!

Tonight Lucas was crying about having to have dinner instead of being able to use the laptop. I asked him if he even remembered what life was like before he had a laptop to play with: “Yes. Before the laptop we had the Wii. Before that was the Nintendo DS. Before the DS was the Micro. And before that I was just little and crazy.”

Andrew Hensel was an extraordinary human being.

We were graduate students together at The University of Waterloo in Canada in 1986-88. I met him on my first day there and we spent many hours together on a daily basis over the next 2.5 years. I don’t want to try to say too much about him now. It occurred to me a few days ago that I might post a few stories here. We did lots of crazy things. At one point I had wanted to write something titled “100 things to a Hensel” and I made a bunch of notes, but it went no further.

I wrote about him in my Ph.D. acknowledgments in 1995:

Andrew Hensel, with whom I shared so much of my two and a half years at Waterloo, was the most original and creative person I have ever known well. Together, we dismantled the world and rebuilt it on our own crazy terms. We lived life at a million miles an hour and there was nothing like it. Five years ago, Andrew killed himself. There have been few days since then that I have not thought of him and the time we spent together.

I still think about him frequently. Today I was remembering one of his many, many oddball projects (most of which went unfinished), which he called “10,000 things”. It was to be a list of 10,000 things that he thought of. By the time he started sending them to me we had both dropped out of Waterloo. He was back in Australia and I was in Munich.

He only sent me 300 of the to-be 10,000. Of course I still have them. They’re all very short. At the risk of being thought macabre I’ve decided to bring Andrew back a very little and post them to Twitter, chosen at random, one a day. You can follow adhensel to get just a glimpse of his mind. The first tweet, people being planted into earth, is already up.

There are at least half a dozen twitterers who knew Andrew, including one who knew him probably better than anybody. Once in a while I get email from someone who finds my online mentions of him. Invariably they also found him extraordinary.

What would Andrew have made of Twitter? I have no doubt at all that he’d have immediately dismissed it as “weak”. That was one of his favorite adjectives. Almost everything was weak. It’s a small miracle to me to partly bring him back to life 18 years after he died, by posting just some of his 10,000 things to Twitter.

And… my apologies to anyone who knew Andrew and who finds this upsetting.

On Monday Tim O’Reilly posted a Twitter tweet suggesting to Robert Scoble that he contact me while in Barcelona.

First off, Tim is very generous in doing this. He’s ultra connected and he spends a significant amount of his time in Twitter pointing things out, connecting people, and re-tweeting stuff he finds interesting. Re-tweeting is really important because when you tweet you only reach the people who are already following you. But when someone re-tweets you, you reach new people who likely have no idea of your existence. And when Tim does the re-tweeting there can be a big impact. 24 hours after his message to Robert I had 50 new followers. Tim explicitly tries to help people doing things he finds interesting, but who have just a small number of Twitter followers. He filters and amplifies information, broadcasting it out to his 16,000+ followers. Robert was in a hotel about 10 minutes’ walk from my place and I had no idea. A mutual friend in California noticed and took a minute to connect us. That’s really something, and it perfectly illustrates some of the value of Twitter.

I met Robert yesterday afternoon and we spent 6 hours together. It was great. You can see at once why he’s been so successful: he’s smart, he’s thoughtful, he’s sympathetic, and he’s a careful listener. I had no idea what to expect, and seeing as what we’re building can take some time to sink in, I wondered what sort of an audience he’d be.

After we’d climbed around up in the Sagrada Familia (official site, wikipedia), Robert came back to my place to see a demo of the things I’d been describing. We sat down and he pulled out his cell phone and asked if he could film me. I didn’t really think about it and said of course. It didn’t dawn on me that we were doing an informal interview, and I was totally unprepared – which is probably a good thing.

In the end we filmed 4 segments: parts one, two, three, and four. There’s also been some discussion here on Robert’s FriendFeed page.

So if you’ve been wondering what we’re building in here, go watch the videos.

I had no idea all this was about to come down. The Fluidinfo web site (a generous word) was a single page with no contact information, no nuthin’. We simply haven’t needed a web site of any description yet. I went and added a box so you can sign up to receive news of the alpha launch.

And then there was this, posted on Twitter, and which I have absolutely no shame in reproducing (this is a blog, after all):

Wow, what @terrycojones showed me last night (a new kind of database that he’s been workng on for 11 years) blew me away. Uploading vids now

Now I have to put my head back down with Esteve to get the alpha out the door ASAP.

In March 2004 I was in a silly mood (yes, a euphemism) and dreamed up the idea of airports installing giant mood rings as security devices. Prospective passengers would be made to walk through the mood ring. If it showed a happy and peaceful color, you could get on the flight. You could carry a gun or even a bomb, no problem. But if the mood ring indicated anger, you’d be denied entry or forced to fly in a special Angry Class. In Angry Class the service is shit. The airline knows the passengers are angry before they get on the plane, so why bother?

I started to write the news:

Today the US Department of Homeland Security announced that the US is insisting that countries install the new Passenger Mood Assessment Security Screening (PMASS) in all airports with direct or connecting flights to the US. The system, developed by Kellogg Brown & Root (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Halliburton, an oil-services company), is based on techniques borrowed from functional magnetic resonance imaging and, most controversially, the mood ring industry.

Ashcroft, Bush and Rumsfeld flanked Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge today as he announced the new measures. "People have no right to turn up at the airport with a bad attitude."

Halliburton wins a no-bid contract, shortly after moving to buy up all known mood ring manufacturers, mystifying investors (stock falls sharply, then rises sharply on news of contract). To fly people to the US, other countries are forced install giant mood rings and to hand over the mood data of all embarking passengers to US authorities.

You get the picture. I sent an outline of this to the folks at The Onion, but never heard back.

It’s a joke, of course. Couldn’t possibly happen. Right? Think again.