Oh Bruce, and you wonder why the people talk.

Batman needs to get out of the cave more often. I hear Zatanna is single...and hottt

I think the other leaguers are just gutterminds.  Especially that sneaky Hal.  Never trust a man who wears gawdy jewelry. 

The sounds this pairs costumes are making here must be hi-larious...

Now we’re talking.

Alchemy-punk?

There are already so many great webcomics to keep up with out there. A lot of them tending to center around  absurd/ironic humor and a rotating cast of quirky characters.  I personally think that is a fine formula for a comic, and allows for a surprising ammount of flexibility  and innovation within those margins.  Yet, amongst all of the comics I eagerly await each week,  I find myself most looking forward to the latest episode of Gunnerkrigg Court.   It’s a longform comic, with a sprawling, continuing narrative told in fragments on alternating weekdays.   It lacks the instant payoff of its chuckle-inducing compatriots, but it never fails to grasp my full attention and hook me like a fish for the next two days.   It follows the story of young Antimony Carver and her trials while attending a university specializing in arcane arts.  There are plenty of ghosts, robots, dragons, coyotes, shapeshifters, and all manner of mystical hijinks.   I feel like it would have made a great title for the Vertigo imprint, or other lines in the vein, but I am more than happy to type the word ’Gunnerkrigg’ in my browser every week.  It’s already been collected in one volume (yes, I am proud owner, and if you are all good boys and girls, you probably coax me to borrow it)  and hopefully more will be following.   I highly recommend sifting through the 22 chapters that have already progressed. ..

Oh, How can heaven hold a place for me, when a girl like you has cast a spell on me?

http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=1

enjoy!

I bet the ballgag manufacturer unions are furious!

Really, offshoring knows no bounds.

The era of infection

This Wall Street Journal article examining the starkly different mortality rates between Mexicans and Americans affected by swine flu makes a pretty stark point about global public health.

Scientists say the virus found in Mexico and in the U.S. appears to be the same, and therefore different mortality rates likely aren’t due to the virus itself. Doctors say the greater vulnerability could have to do with genetic makeup, though they view that as unlikely.

Much of the difference in mortality rates could have to do with timing. As the disease hit Mexico very early, doctors didn’t suspect anything unusual when patients came in complaining of high fever and body aches. Especially in Mexico City, with its high altitude and smoggy air, common colds that develop into a throat or chest infection with a fever are frequent in winter months and beyond.

The factors at play here are depressingly familiar from other epidemics.  Poor environmental quality masks the initial symptoms.  A poor healthcare system discourages people from seeking care.  And poor epidemic surveillance makes the mortality rate look huge and scary at first, since only the most serious cases are identified.

It’s now undeniable that we are in an era of new infectious disease activity.  It’s been building since the 1970’s (most prominently with AIDS), but the 2000’s have seen the real rebirth of infectious disease as a significant health threat.  But our responses continue to be largely focused on a given pathogen, and limited to our national boundaries rather than on the global conditions that promote or exacerbate epidemic and pandemic disease.   For example, the main American response to the Avian Flu scare in 2005 was to promote vaccine and Tamiflu stockpiling (including by waiving certain liability protections).

While elements of this strategy were hotly disputed at the time, the fundamental problem is that they are mainly defensive.  Stockpiling doesn’t help you catch that first infected person, and it doesn’t tell you how to coordinate your response.  If anything, it can lead to situations like the really awful standoff between the WHO and Indonesia, which refused to release its epidemiological data ostensibly because they feared it would be used to develop treatments protected by rich-world patent law rather than publicly available treatments.  And of course, while those Tamiflu stockpiles will help us deal with the current swine flu outbreak, they would be useless against some other new infectious disease threat more along the lines of SARS.

The current outbreak is a reminder of the fundamental problem with trying to use defensive, biomedical measures as our PRIMARY public health measures.  I hope we learn from this outbreak and shift to much more proactive investment in and monitoring of global health.

Here is a thing that terrified me as a child

Being a South Asian genre nerd, one of the things I am pretty much obligated to love is the story of Vikram and the Baital (or vampire).  I remember being suitably freaked out when one of my uncles first came to the states from India and presented me with this delicious piece of horror:

More after the jump

But will you use you powers for good…or for awesome?

Excelsior!

26 doctorates and no one can remember to bring chips.

It’s a brave new world out there.  A world virtually saturated with information.  A constant background radiation of blips, blurbs and adages.  It’s hard work trying to figure out what’s worth paying attention to and what’s just mind-spam.   And that, my weary reader, is why we are here.  Burning the midnight oil down here in the lab, titrating concetrated awesomeness for the people.  . 

Let’s begin…

Uh. Is this thing on?

Lets hear it for totally ditching any microscopic traffic I once had!

So apparently law school can get busy.  Who knew, huh?  But I am back, and bloggier than evar!  Hopefully I will be able to return to a semi-regular posting schedule soon, and we can get this baby back up off the ground.

Because this guy has popularity to burn

At some point in the future, when some crazy right-winger is babbling about how George W. Bush was really a misunderstood Hero-Genius along the lines of Harry Truman, and how we should ignore [insert list of failings too exhausting to write about right now here], remind them that this is the guy who spent his “legacy” period in the White House doing things like cutting healthcare services for poor people. (h/t Matt Yglesias)

I guess that cruelly denying very poor people critical health services sure is one way of shaving down that pesky Emerging Democratic Majority…

What I did last night

For all the talk about Barack Obama being a socialist radical America-hating Muslim, you would certainly not expect people to literally spontaneously break out into the national anthem on the streets of Washington DC at the news of his election.

Just saying…

Yes we did!