Stop Ebola with physical separation methods list.

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Coping with Ebola, Ebola, List of Ebola strategies., Stop Ebola with physical separation

Links to a history of Probaway’s [EBOLA UPDATES] Today there is no cure for Ebola, there are no effective treatments for Ebola, there is no vaccination for Ebola. The only known way of coping with Ebola is physical separation from the virus. Here is a starter list of ways to separate humans from Ebola. This isn’t intended as an operational guide, but as a stimulus to alternative thoughts.

In tropical Africa

1. Avoid possible Ebola carriers such as bats and primates.
2. Avoid fresh bush-meat in markets.
3. Prepare food by cooking, and wash hands immediately after touching bush-meat.
4. Wash everything that has been touched by bush-meat.
5. Learn not to touch your eyes, nose, mouth by using “hot” capsaicin on your fingers.
6. Put up mosquito netting on windows and around beds.

Living near Ebola victims

1. Avoid touching public items such as doorknobs with hands. Use foot or elbow.
2. In public places, avoid all sick people.
3. Wash refrigerated items before using. Ebola virus survives on cold surfaces.
4. When you are sick avoid all other people, and warn them you are sick.
5. When a family member is sick provide a separate bed, away from others.
6. Don’t touch sick people or their effluvia. Wash it and yourself immediately.
7. Never touch a dying person or a dead one, but leave home and call for help.

Living in an Ebola area

1. Avoid crowds, buses, and markets as much as possible.
2. Purchase a month’s supply of storable food like rice and beans.
3. Stay in contact with friends using cell phones.

Treating sick friends

1. Treat feverish people sick with flu or malaria as if they have Ebola.
2. Provide water, food and necessities and toilets by placing them near the sick person and then stepping back.
3. Be as emotionally supportive as possible, but from across the room.
4. Never touch your eyes, nose or mouth when near a sick person.
5. Frequently wash thoroughly when around any sick person, and apply capsaicin to fingers.

Medical personnel

1. Follow your self-protective procedures carefully.
2. Practice not touching your eyes, nose, mouth by using capsaicin.
3. Monitor your medical companions following procedures.
4. Avoid intimate contact with Ebola medical personnel, when off duty.

Hospitals and sick shelters

1. Sick people should be in individual rooms; undiagnosed flu, Ebola, malaria should be kept separated.
2. Outdoor one-person tents separated would impede transmission.
3. One-person tents designed to wrap a corpse makes transporting them safer.
4. The dead must be instantly wrapped, and with clear plastic over face for photo ID.

Transportation

1. Limit international, intercity and intracity movement to necessities.
2. Stop tourism, even business travel, to infected areas.
3. Test temperature of all travelers and reject all sick people; don’t believe a person’s statements that they haven’t been exposed.

The intent of these suggestions is to create as much physical separation between people as possible for the duration of the Ebola epidemic.

Links to a history of Probaway’s [EBOLA UPDATES]

Spinoza – Theological-Political Treatise

Tags

Deadly religious behavior., Spinoza

“I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.” Wrote Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677) in Theological-Political Treatise.

When one misconception is permitted to enter into one’s world view, it becomes possible to build a whole reality of falsehood upon that point. “Inasmuch as people defend their cause, by miracles, that is by ignorance, which is the source of all malice, they turn a faith, which may be true, into superstition. The superstition is then engendered, preserved, and fostered by fear.”

The first quote set my teeth ajar, on first reading, and so I was ruminating. The reason is strange; I knew it was true enough about Christians, although the Western news these days has been mostly aimed at Muslims fighting one another, but it was the Christians who have had massive wars over details of their respective variations on their religions, so obscure they are unresolvable by debate. The Philosophers Squared article on Montesquieu ends with, “Monotheism is the most evil idea ever created by man.” With the former Roman polytheism everyone just accepted everyone else’s idea of god as their personal belief and thus there were as many gods as there were people, plus however many more gods that one cared to create. My question was, why do people fight so bitterly over questions that have no verifiable answers?

The problem seems to be with deep “belief,” and that goes back to early formal Christianity and St. Augustine (354 – 430) with his anti-science idea, “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.” With that idea ingrained and hardened into doctrine for seven centuries of the Dark Ages the unchallengeable doctrine of the church became absolute, and rational thinking and proofs by experiments with observable and testable nature became considered foolish, and then an evil to be destroyed. Many years later, St. Anselm (1034 – 1109) proclaimed, “Unless I believe, I will not understand,”  and then Duns Scotus (c. 1266 – 1308) declared, “Those who deny the existence of contingency should be tortured.” What he was referring to was doctrinal belief, and soon came the Inquisition to verify the depth of belief with torture.

Cosimo de Medici (1389 – 1464) founded the Platonic Academy of Florence, which is reputed to have had major impact on the creation of the intellectual life of our modern world. This school found and translated the works of the Classic Greek and Roman scholars. It has taken five centuries to even approach the clear mindedness and good sense of the Classic Greeks and Romans. Their philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism had been vilified and even to this day they are words with unpleasant connotations. Perhaps Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) said it best, The least deviation from truth will be multiplied later. St. Augustine’s untestable idea opened the doors of imagination wide open to error. “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”

Unfortunately one need only turn on TV to see and hear the most preposterous ideas founded on invisible baseless assumptions glorified by hordes of slack-jawed followers. I support free speech by everyone, but …

Foolish speech based on fantasy must always be challenged with honest speech based on reality.

World population history tweaked

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A smoothed estimate of population, Population 2000 CE, Population 3000 BCE, Population growth, World population explosion

The exact number of people living on Earth at the present moment is (7,264,145,184). This is an estimate, and the historical figures are clearly even more speculative. The previous Probaway post, World population history graphed and smoothed, took several authorities’ estimates and drew a more easily remembered line through their speculations. Below I have tweaked those charts to make them even easier to memorize.

World population history estimates from United Nations, Hyde, McEvedy, and Probaway

The intent of the World population history smoothed is to make more easily remembered the dates and their associated population numbers. That memorable line remains close to the estimates made by the authorities and well within the error bars marked in red lines. The Probaway estimate goes outside of the authorities’ own estimates for the year 1000 CE, but it is well within the error bars based on their data. The advantage gained by this method of presentation is easy memorization of some very complex data. The population of the world doubles each one thousand years for six thousand years. With that assumption the only fact that needs remembering is that at 1000 BCE there were 100 million people on Earth, and the population doubled every thousand years from 5000 BCE to 1000 CE.

Remember, 100 Million in 1000 BCE, and 4 Billion in 1975

The population since 1000 CE is different, but it too can be remembered easily within the error bars. The population in 1975=4 billion and doubles in fifty years both past and future. From 1925=2 billion to 1975=4 and will be 2025=8 billion. It had doubled in twice that time from 1825-1 billion, and doubled again in twice that time from 1625-half billion. Learn these few facts and your estimate of the world population will be reasonably accurate for seven thousand years.

[Update – No new data but a cleaner presentation. Click image for a bigger, printable view.]

World population from 5000 BCE to 2025 graphed on a logarithmic chart. The data is smoothed but within error bars of demographers.

The population after the super-volcano, Mt. Toba erupted 72,000 years ago, is thought to have been reduced to between 1,000 and 10,000 people.

Information is vanishing!

There is a great vacuum of good information being created in this world of ever-increasing access to information. I have noticed this because what I know to be my best blog posts are impossible to find even with a detailed search, whereas some of the most trivial of them, at least for me, were getting thousands of page views. It is the articles with flashy but common titles that gather hits, but exploring a new and potentially valuable idea gets no notice at all.

It is to be expected that popular, easily accessed stuff would get the most attention because the great bulk of people are interested in the same sensational things. The Maturity Chart, which has five basic levels, Immature, Adolescent, Adult, Mature, and Sage, is useful for measuring popularity. It is the Adolescent-styled material that gathers the most interest. This is because the immature level probably doesn’t have much access to information yet, although that is now changing because touch screen tablets have been set up for infants so they will have pre-verbal access to information of interest to them. At present adolescents are probably the most active computer and online information-driven people with young adults coming in close behind. Adults’ attention is focused on practical matters and that is where their online searches would be aimed. Some older people grow to a maturity that requires their having more relationships that require more attention to other people’s needs, and to motivating other people to being productive. There are fewer of these types of mature people and they are seeking a different type of information, and thus search engines based on word popularity bury their mature searches beneath the more common adolescent ones. Sage-level information might be published online, but it would be buried in a current web word-search by the avalanche of more popularity-driven information.

The more abstract the style of information the more difficult it is to find. There are flashing ads of seemingly relevant information that is intended to distract and generate confusion and guilt for the adolescent viewer, leading into purchasing some piece of nonsense junk. That information leads to sales, and so it floats to the surface, but in so doing really valuable information is pushed into unfindability.

Hopefully the newer style of search engine strategies based on meaning will be more efficient at discovering the more mature ideas, and revealing them to the public.

Maximizing total human potential is my goal.

Tags

Bioethics, Coping with Ebola, Maximize the total human potential, Minimizing the suffering of the innocent

[Current Probaway update search for – Ebola.]

Ebola is rearing its very ugly head this month, and the response of humanity has been both glorious and horrifying. The United States government has stepped up quickly and is sending what is hoped will be timely aid, but even this quick response to a remote threat may be too slow because the nature of uninhibited life forms, such as disease, is to grow exponentially. This is just nature doing what it does, but in this situation we humans are the growth medium, and from our point of view this is potential disaster. Perhaps the ancient methods of coping with epidemics will be the only ones that work, and that is simply isolation and exclusion, not permitting any exchange of people or even goods. What is being done at the moment in the infected areas is having three-day curfews in hopes of slowing the spread. Perhaps that will work because this disease develops quickly, but what of the people that are confined in a house with a sick person? This procedure would be nearly condemning them to catching the disease and thus to death. How do you confine people to their homes when people don’t have stored food, and what happens when a large city has its people coming out to their grocery stores and mixing? What if a city catches the disease and the only option is to shut the borders, because letting hundreds of thousands of infected people go streaming into the world would get ugly?

Now for the even uglier part. Some people welcome the culling of humanity back to 10% or less of its current population. A google search came up with Eric R. Pianka, who is a proponent of disease as a functional method of population control, and he is used as the straw man to politicize the arguments into the most extreme forms possible. There is some reason to support any of the arguments, but shoving every idea into absurd ideological boxes makes finding a comfortable solution even more difficult. What happens with this procedure, when applied to Ebola, is that it will function to let nature take its course, because everyone pursues his own course of action, and some of them are deadly. In this case that will be a very nasty one, because containment will prove impossible, with some people supporting and demanding every individual’s right to do as they choose. This comes down to people fleeing the infected areas and there soon develops an even larger area of disease which is even more difficult to contain without even more draconian measures.

“Minimizing the suffering of the innocent” is an overview that takes into account the individual’s rights but balances their rights with the rights of all the other people of the world. And a second ideal goal, “Maximize the total human potential” takes into account people of the future as well as those now living.

It seems likely that the human population will eventually drop to a much lower level than it is today. Unfortunately to maintain a stable human population will require popular laws that enforce who has children and how many. Of course nature will inevitably win, no matter what we do, but the most pleasant existence for humanity will be where we behave reasonably toward one another, and that includes population control.

The dark side of Darwinism is the death of living things.

Tags

Darwinism's dark side, How to help sick people?

Earlier I was talking with some people about Darwin’s famous line, “Survival of the Fittest,” actually created by his bulldog Huxley, but the phrase wasn’t the issue, it was the personal threat. The problem for most people is that they realize they are not perfect specimens of the human species. It seems everyone I encounter, when I talk to them for very long, mentions their problems, and usually their problems are severe. It is strange, because nearly everyone that comes walking down the street looks healthy and sane, and yet it isn’t so. It isn’t that they are faking anything, it is just that a person who is reasonably dressed and walking normally appears to be holding their lives together and progressing reasonably well. These folks might even say to a Pew research questionnaire that they are in good health and quite happy, even though they are seriously overweight, have a heart condition, aggravated by diabetes and attempted suicide a couple of months ago… but now they are great.

College students have some similar statistics that can be applied to them, that are shocking – 75% graduate with debt, and the average debt is $35,000 and non-voidable. These are the young adults on the supposed path to a successful economic life. These are the Darwinian winners. Hm?

College loan debt puts middle class grads deep into debt. Graph from Bloomberg.com

The conversation I mentioned earlier was hostile toward Darwin because it seemed he was promoting the elimination of humans who were not perfect. But that wasn’t true. In fact Darwin spoke piteously about the squandering of life by nature, where few perfectly healthy examples of any species ever lives to anything near their potential life expectancy. There is a strange distortion of perception with my conversational companions, because a girl born in America today can expect to go through all the dangers of life and still achieve eighty percent of her maximum plausible life expectancy of one hundred years; and yet there is currently a hue and cry about how dangerous our lives are and how the government should be taking much better care of us. I don’t think most people realize just how dangerous and unforgiving nature really is to its creatures.

Darwin was himself physically and emotionally sick most of his adult life and didn’t even attend the original reading of his own evolution paper to the Geological Society of London, along with Wallace’s paper. He stayed home because his daughter was dying of scarlet fever. Darwin was often emotionally devastated by local sickness and death. What modern sickly Americans may be dreading is the realization that a hundred years of increasingly effective medicine has permitted a degradation of the DNA that was bequeathed to them. Counterproductive genes have been bred into our gene pool by five generations of parents who would have died in earlier times because of poor health. Diabetes is a common modern threat that wouldn’t last long in the wild. In wild societies many children don’t reach reproductive age, and the natural selection process eliminates those least able to function in their local situation, and even the healthiest are challenged.

Modern medicine is both saving humanity in the short run and condemning it in a longer run. Only five generations of modern medicine are probably already having measurable deleterious effects. I don’t like what’s happening, but I do support every single person and the whole of humanity to achieve the greatest abundance of life they can attain. That’s my life goal, at present. Relative to the gene problem I support modern science and the search for ways to correct these genetic problems. It appears it may be successful, and these problems can be eliminated in a socially more responsible way than is available at present.

Action is driven by thoughts, and better thoughts bring better action.

Tags

Don't waste time where action is impossible., Prepare for action, The use of knowledge is acton.

The world is loaded with problems, and some of them impact us directly, while others are remote, but well promoted by the media. It would seem reasonable that every individual would consider where they want to exert their energy, and that would be where there will be some discernible effects. The effects created on a local level don’t have the grandeur that participating in world affairs offers, nor is there the social support of large numbers of people participating in world affairs. These are decisions that every individual must make for themselves, or perhaps what happens with most people, just go along with one’s social group, and fill a niche imposed from outside.

A more energy-consuming path would be for an individual to collect sufficient information on the problems that they could relate to, so they can make a well-balanced choice. Once they have made a choice, to then go more deeply into the factors that make the problem important to them, and then to apply their energy to solving it in some meaningful way. It is important to make some attempt at actually coping with the problem and trying to sell one’s solution to the public, because this first attempt sharpens the details that need to be coped with. Once those are discerned it comes time to dig in and study with passion for a while, and,  depending on the situation, try to limit this to gaining all the data and abilities needed for successful accomplishment. Find what is needed and study that, but then one must ask, how much do you need to know? The answer is highly variable, but a good guess would be to know with certainty what you must know, and know with certainty that you have gathered enough information to know you are doing the right thing, and then do it.

The whole reason for these background preparations is so that you may succeed with your actions. Be prepared to act decisively when each of the moments for action arrive. Preparations that go beyond that needed for a high degree of probable success are counterproductive, because the window for effective action is a small one. Make the preparations as thoroughly and as quickly as possible but be aware that once the actions are in play things will change, and your preparations won’t be perfect, but they will be useful, with some doable alterations, to completing the goals. Be prepared, but when prepared boldly move forward with confidence. If you know your preparations are adequate you will succeed.

Action is driven by thoughts, and better thoughts bring better action.

Are we ranking unimportant things as important?

Tags

What is important, WHY do foolish things?

I watch Tosh.0 on Comedy Central TV, as do about two million others per episode. The show is made up of downloads of internet videos created by people throughout the world. It has a fast-paced comedy format by the handsome and quick-witted Daniel Tosh, who makes snarky comments about people doing astonishing things. A lot of what gets aired are simply funny antics, but many of them are people doing astonishingly risky things with little or no potential reward. It is hard to believe that many of the people presented were not seriously injured or even killed. Last week a skateboarder coming off a railing broke his leg between the knee and ankle and we could see the bottom half of his leg sticking out at a right angle from the upper portion. There have been other similar stunts where the person hit their head on concrete after high falls, no doubt with serious permanent injury. WHY? Why do people do these incredibly dangerous stunts with zero potential reward?

Obviously these seemingly sane people thought what they were doing was important, or they wouldn’t have been doing it. Sometimes there were interviews with the people about to do the stunt, and they appeared to be normal and sane, and they knew what they were about to do was very dangerous. This is different from people walking across the street, where they think the driver sees them and is going to yield, but as it turns out doesn’t yield. In those situations it is a miscommunication, and sometimes that results in a person getting hit, and sometimes killed, but it wasn’t a preplanned foolish act by either the pedestrian or the driver that got them into trouble. It was a mistake in communication.

One time on Tosh.0 we saw a guy who wanted to see if his bulletproof vest would stop a high velocity pistol bullet, so he had a friend shoot him from a few feet away. Needless to say, it didn’t stop the bullet, so when he pulled off the vest we saw a hole in his chest. Apparently it didn’t strike a vital organ, so he didn’t die, at least in the first minute. If he succeeded in dying, at least he would get a Darwin Award for taking his genes out of the human gene pool for voluntary stupid behavior.

The things to be seen on Tosh.0 are extreme examples, but when we look to our friends’ behavior, and our own too, are we doing foolish things with no potential reward, or at minimum no reward commensurate with the risk? It may be difficult to judge the subtleties of some kinds of potential actions, but before any act that gives us physical anxiety that wells up from the gut, it is reasonable to ask, is the potential payoff worth the risk?

Exploring the idea of games for creating habits of kindness.

Tags

Games for a new world order

Games are wonderful things. Usually we think of them as fun activities for children to distract them from annoying us adults. Of course they have benefits for the kids too, because they learn all sorts of useful skills, like getting along with other people with whom they are in conflict for the duration of the game. Some games create the need to understand the thoughts of other people; both your partners’ and your opponents’ thinking needs to be understood to play some games well. Games like American football require great assets of native physical ability, great mental knowledge, flexibility of thoughts, cultivated skills, and competitive spirit for each of the many positions. All of this is admirable for cultivating a culture of advancing economic growth, and it has served humanity well for developing those skills necessary to dominate nature and other people.

Humanity is now entering a new phase of what is being called the anthropocene era. It is a period of time in which humans are the dominant force in changing nature, and it will leave a record to be seen in future geographic strata. Humanity is moving from the role of dominating and using nature and its products to husbanding them. The whole world has become like a farm that must be maintained by man, rather than a wilderness upon which we prey like any other wild animal. If we are to create a human culture that is resonant with the role of balanced husbanding of the world, we need to raise our children and cultivate our adults into a new personality. We must create a new kind of common person set within a new kind of society. That may sound outrageous, but only because it is spoken of in clear terms, rather than in the style of political rhetorical spin to which the public has become accustomed. I see this as less manipulative of an individual’s life and rights, and more of a change of the rules of compensation for personal behavior. The idea is to reward people for taking the whole processes of society and the world into their monetary transactions, in such a way that those entities also benefit.

How might games, and business too, be structured to generate kindness and mutual growth as opposed to the current paradigm of maximizing personal profit? Nowadays, a business transaction is designed to maximize the profit of the various parties concerned, but the situation needs to be changed to one that includes maximizing the health and sustainability of those not directly involved in the transaction, and it must be something more than obeying socially imposed laws, with their enforcement and punishments of violators. How can the transactions of the world be conducted in such a way that those outside of a private transaction also benefit by the transaction? That would somehow have to include the maintenance of the world environment while enhancing their own. Adam Smith’s analysis of this problem suggested that each transaction that benefited both parties also benefited the whole society; it was called the hidden hand of commerce, and that has worked well enough for generating world wealth. The unfortunate side effect is that it has worked so well for promoting human wealth, and so poorly for maintaining the world’s ability to provide long-term largesse.

I don’t know how to generate a system that is more productive than the evolutionary business model where those who are best overall at producing good cheap goods succeed, and others fail. That idea was developed by Smith, but now that we are approaching the exhaustion of the resources to maintain that style of supplying goods to people, we need to consider a system that sustains rather than conquers. Perhaps that isn’t possible; perhaps it will always be the short-term winner who survives for ever and ever, always the winner of the current battle. It’s a tragedy of the commons writ large enough to cover the whole world.

To begin this process we need people raised from childhood with the practice of kindness as a virtue.

Aristotle and an Aardvark go to Washington by Cathcart – book review

Tags

A few truth teasers, Aristotle and an Arrdvark, How to lie convincingly.

If you desire to make lying and cheating your career path, Aardvark is the book for you. The authors cover that real use for this book with the pretense of using the ideas presented there for identifying liars and cheaters, but that’s a thin ruse. It’s loaded with so-called good advice quotations from our nations leaders, like, “Do not betray the people who are depending on you.” Also, there are obvious suggestions, like, “79.48% of all statistics are made up on the  spot.” And, there are many ways to tell the truth, for example,”A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

The Aardvark is a shortish book, with smallish pages, but it’s essential reading for every politician and newscaster.