If you are interested in following fires in California, here is a blog post with enough links to get you started. Don’t neglect checking the comment section.

People need to understand that you can not use the road in disasters. This rant demonstrates why.

If you don’t already know about Storm, you should educate yourself by reading this blog post. Between the information contained in the post and all the links that it has you should have a pretty good idea of why “Storm” worries people.

We are talking about a virus that is so scary some people are talking about it being the creation of some government or other. I don’t buy that theory at all. Lately, who ever controls Storm has been using it to attack anti-fraud sites. That seems like a pretty petty occupation for a government.

But the fact that Strom was not cooked up by some government should scare people more then any conspiracy theory. Cyber gangs are staring to get sophisticated enough that they are becoming truly dangerous.

These links are pretty serious and they have a lot of eye candy. So don’t bother looking at them unless you have some time to blow.
We will start you off easy with a post from Andrew Cusack’s excellent blog on the rebuilding of a historical church in Maryland. Being the committed and historically minded Click Here to continue reading.

Here are two things, not of sufficent worth to rate a post by themselves. The last is something that could make a very long post, but which I don’t have the time at present:

Fatal Mushroom

If you promise to never, ever, eat a wild mushroom, you don’t need to read this article. Go here to read […]

With the honeybees disappearing, you thought that the good old bumblebee would help carry the load right? Unfortunately, bumblebees seem to be disappearing as well. This from Fox news…

Thorp, an emeritus professor of entomology from the University of California at Davis, found one solitary worker last year along a remote mountain trail in the Siskiyou Mountains, but hasn’t been able to locate any this year.

He fears that the species — Franklin’s bumblebee — has gone extinct before anyone could even propose it for the endangered species list. To make matters worse, two other bumblebee species — one on the East coast, one on the West — have gone from common to rare.

Amid the uproar over global warming and mysterious disappearances of honeybee colonies, concern over the plight of the lowly bumblebee has been confined to scientists laboring in obscurity.

But if bumblebees were to disappear, farmers and entomologists warn, the consequences would be huge, especially coming on top of the problems with honeybees, which are active at different times and on different crop species.

If this trend continues, it will be just one more thing making food prices expensive.

A while back an anonymous commenter tried to get me to react to this article in Slate. In the words of my anonymous commenter, “I just posted that to see your reaction to the educated class contemplating encouraging species suicide.”
I don’t know why this person wanted to bait me. I have posted numerous posts on Click Here to continue reading.

This from Reuters…

“We have identified a specific change that could make bird flu grow in the upper respiratory tract of humans,” said Kawaoka, who led the study.

“The viruses that are circulating in Africa and Europe are the ones closest to becoming a human virus,” Kawaoka said.

Recent samples of virus taken from birds in Africa and Europe all carry the mutation, Kawaoka and colleagues report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens

“I don’t like to scare the public, because they cannot do very much. But at the same time it is important to the scientific community to understand what is happening,” Kawaoka said in a telephone interview.

Honestly, if a pandemic comes, I doubt it will come from Bird Flu. I don’t really have any good reason for this belief, just Murphy law. Disasters never seem to come from where you expect them.

On a similar vein, why don’t people worry more about the flu strains that already afflict humans mutating into killers? Seems to me that all they would need is a little fine tuning to start killing large numbers of people.

From the Guardian….

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new energy sources and techniques to combat global warming.

I personally think that his claim of creating artificial life is a little bit oversold. It seems to be more a Frankenstein style creation of slapping different pre existing parts together rather then making anything from scratch.

Still, it is an achievement of sorts. So was the atom bomb.

This rant about a lonely widow struck me as being a good complement to this week’s essay of the week.