Links - H1N1 and otherwise

It's been quiet because I've been busy.

(Not, alas, writing - note to self: soon as you say woot! been writing again!, life will eat you again. Best to keep it on the QT.)

Links related to work the H1N1 outbreak:

The best discovery I've made in relation to the outbreak is Virology Blog. (No, I don't follow everything in the more technical posts.) Check out the interview they linked to in Science Magazine - with the CDC.

A Washington State biosecurity firm reportedly warned of the Mexico flu spike two weeks before WHO picked up on it. (I tend to think that this is over-inflated, and doesn't give WHO enough credit.)

(Also in the out-there-but-possible theory bubble is an identification of a pig farms in Veracruz as the location of animal-to-human transmission. Making Light linked to an essay that seemed to point this as fact - looking at the source blog (another great find) I'm not so sure. The head of the Mexico Epi labs (interview here) casts doubt on the identification. FAO personnel are on-site, testing. Time will tell.)

Not as charitable a pov as some, but a thought worth considering What are our individual rights in time of plague?

Not charitable, but practical - Megan McArdle discusseslack of extra capacity in the USA healthcare system - specifically doctors and nurses. Which means - if we make it a point to provide more services to more people, we need a bigger factory to do so in. Especially if we are going to do more preventative medicine, which has a greater capacity to increase life and quality of life than pure intervention. (Comments to this post are occasionally acid but interesting.)

Links NOT related:

Sci Fi Catholic talks about an article in SF Signals dealing with religious systems in fiction.

Phil Carter - ex-Army Officer and lawyer - has a new job. I followed Carter's Intel Dump back when he was still in Law School. Don't agree with everything he says, but his perspective is valuable.

Via Instapundit, 50 Tools Everyone Should Own. There's a place for a post about this - about what it means to have those kinds of resources, and about how it would be different if the list dictated "Books Everyone Should Read" or "Places Everyone Should Visit" or "Clothes Everyone Should Wear" - about how some sorts of things are more vital than others, who makes those decisions, and what will still be important in 50 years. Don't have time for that post, though.

Also don't have time for posting about this post on...racism and science fiction/fantasy and SFF publishing and SFF fans. But. I found this post (and comments) about 100% more helpful and on-target than the bits of the LiveJournal conversations that have gone on in the last few years. Not perfect, not by a long shot, but making long strides towards being something that fixes the problem, rather than just providing a platform for yelling.

...And that will be it, as I have intentions to go write.