Recognizing privilege

This morning, Omaha and Kouryou-chan are off at PAX, and that leaves me as the person to do the grocery shopping. Omaha operates out of a text document on her smartphone, but, oddly for my geekiness, I like the work of paper. She had transferred her document to my Palm, but out of habit I typeset it (using LaTeX, natch) and printed it.

It's 296 items in five nicely-printed three-column pages. Spices, meats, batteries, light bulbs, produce, dairy products, and household cleaners.

Somewhere in the world, a family has only two items on their list: "rice," and "clean water." And they may not be able to get either.

Rainfurrest: "Did you mean..."?

I was putting Rainfurrest into my calendar. The word Rainfurrest was underlined, meaning it was misspelled. Alternative spellings offered were:

• Painfullness
• Painfullest
• Restrained
• Infuriating

I think that's an omen.

Science can now Destroy All Viruses

A clever drug named DRACO has destroyed all viruses to which it was exposed in laboratory settings. The drug is a clever nanomechanical marvel: it recognizes cells in a unique state caused only by the presence of a virus, the manufacture of double-stranded RNA, the stuff viruses use to take over the cell's biochemistry, and releases the chemical signal for immediate cell death, causing the cell to self-destruct before the virus can begin reproduction.

DRACO is a general-purpose antiviral. It will kill every virus in the body in order to do its work. DRACO has worked well in mice, destroying all traces of a target influenza virus.

When we started mucking about with antibiotics, we discovered that there were nasty side-effects to killing every bacterium in your gut. Given that viruses are even more intimate with our biochemistry-- our cells show aeons of viri tinkering, genes inserted into us from other vectors-- I predict that killing off every virus in the body will also have particularly nasty side effects.

I would be nice if something this clever and obvious could be found to target bacteria. We need new antibiotics, and soon.