Winter Arriveth

We're getting our first real snowstorm this morning, and we made our first drop into the single digits two nights ago.  Quite a contrast to last year, where it didn't get this wintry until mid-January.

And as is generally the case in the first snow of the season, folks who have put off getting their snow tires, or who are simply dumb and/or inexperience enough to be driving as though it makes no difference, are causing the usual number of accidents.  In the last 15 minutes here at the office we've heard from several of our folks, calling in late because they're stuck in traffic -- and reporting a 5 car pile-up on one of the routes into town, and an over-turned 18-wheeler on the interstate.

UPDATE, 10:30 AM: 2 hours later, our missing sheep just arrived.  There were barely any flakes drifting around when I left home this morning at quarter of 7.  When I stuck my head our the door on the way back from a meeting just now though we were up to three inches and still coming down steadily.  Ah, the joys of snow.

Alas, we're probably going to lose it in no time, it's supposed to warm up over Thanksgiving.

Nov. 20, 1923

A happy birthday to Nadine Gordimer! 

The Nobel Prize-winning South African author is 83 today, and next week her new story collection comes out, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black.  My favorite two story descriptions from it are:

'The historian in “History” is a parrot who confronts people with the scandalizing voice reproduction of quarrels and clandestine love-talk on which it has eavesdropped.  “Alternative Endings” considers the way writers make arbitrary choices in how to end stories—and offers three, each relating the same situation, but with a different resolution, arrived at by the three senses: sight, sound, and smell.'

from Global Warming, to Corrupted Blood

If you're looking for another cute fuzzy victim of global warming besides polar bears, how about this guy?



Yes, his leg that he's checking on really is in a little cast. Science News caption: "This koala, injured in a bushfire, is recuperating at a wildlife rehabilitation center. Animals, agriculture, and people are all feeling the heat of Australia's prolonged drought, the most severe in the country's modern history."

Elsewhere: in what seems to be an occasional "shades of X-Files" feature, we've got researchers successfully integrating tiny robots into cockroach 'society' -- in the sense of being able to influence other roaches to behave like them.  Also, a lucky astronomer spotted the brightest supernova yet witnessed, 100 billion times as bright as the sun (which is good, since it was in another galaxy, 4.7 billion light years away) and twice as bright as the previous record holder.

But as usual, I save my favorite science entry for last.  Usually, one's eyes glaze over at a line such as:


"Simulation models are of increasing importance within the field of applied epidemiology." 


But what if you knew that what prompted it was this:



Yes, none other than Hakkar the Soulflayer, dread god of World of Warcraft, unfortunately laid to rest more than 2 years ago.  Unfortunate, that is, because the programmers had put him in a remote dungeon in possession of a terrible curse called "corrupted blood" that would be unleashed when he died.  It was designed to function like a highly contagious disease that would be a vengeance on his conquerors.

What the programmers puzzlingly failed to anticipate was that some characters, realizing they were dying, would teleport out of the dungeon to seek help -- infecting other players, as well as things that couldn't simply die, like shopkeepers and animals, which helped carry and spread the disease.  For 5 days, it devastated the online world.  A couple years later, a pair of savvy researchers published a paper in Lancet Infectious Diseases (pdf link) based on interviews and observations about how people reacted -- and its implications for a possible real-world epidemic.  In the future, they hope to do a controlled outbreak that better fits with virtual people's risk perception -- since dying is a small price in such a game, they are eying a "socially spread threat [that] instead disabled some of a character's abilities, depleted his or her coffers, or destroyed a powerful weapon."  There's a real virtual plague for you.

The most encouraging news out of this incident, perhaps, is that while many players fled or logged out (and a few tried to help spread the disease, what has been called "the first act of virtual bioterrorism"), many people actually put their characters at risk to try to help and heal others.  It's all bizarre, of course, but I do find that encouraging after a fashion.