Some Swine Flu factoids

As at 2 October 2009, in Australia:

• 36,670 people have been confirmed to have swine flu
• 183 of them have died - that's about 1 in 200
• 4,806 have been admitted to hospital
• in the past week, 36 people have been admitted to hospital, 10 of them into intensive care
  

I found this data in the latest bulletin on the Australian Government's Health Emergency website, which has lots of info about the swine flu pandemic.

I dug this up while I was responding to a post on a forum, where a guy posted a link to an anti-vaccine video, which was referring to the 1976 swine flu vaccine in the US. In that case, 25 people died as complications from the vaccine, and about 500 more got Guillain-Barré syndrome.

But considering they vaccinated slightly north of 48 million people (48,161,019 according to Wikipedia), that's a death rate of 1 in 1,926,440, and a serious-side-effect rate of 1 in 90,528.

I'll take those odds over swine flu's 1-in-200 lethality rate any day!

To make it perfectly clear: For every person who died from the 1976 swine flu vaccine, it's possible that nearly ten thousand would have died from the swine flu itself, if not for the vaccine.

That's just deaths. Ignoring non-fatal complications, like having to have both of your feet amputated.

Now, I understand that modern influenza vaccines don't have anywhere near the rate of serious side effects as that 1976 swine flu vaccine. You'd think we'd hear about it if they did, considering there are literally hundreds of millions of doses given each and every year. But even if they did, they would still be saving tens of thousands of lives.

I know I'm getting the swine flu vaccine as soon as I can.

How about you?

Want to roller-blade across Antarctica?

Well, you're not the first to come up with the idea... while trying to find some info for work, I happened across this page on the JACARA (Joint Australian Centre for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica) website. After reading a bit, I found this priceless paragraph:

Tonight there are a couple of talks by a team of French and a team of Dutch folk who are skiing their way across Antarctica. I've decided to give the talk a miss partly because I want to get on with doing stuff, and also I find it hard to fathom why anyone would want to ski across Antarctica when it's already been done. Particularly bizarre are those folk who choose to walk, when skiing is a lot easier and being towed behind a parafoil easier still. If you're going to be cold and miserable for 6 weeks why not just lock yourself in a meat freezer and listen to Spice Girls tapes. I look forward to meeting the first group to roller-blade across the continent dressed only in board shorts, T-shirts and back-to-front baseball caps.

Heh. The guy's got a sense of humour... but then, spending time down there, you'd better be able to see the lighter side of things!

Funny thought for the day...

"The reason Santa is so jolly is that he knows where the bad girls live..."

Riverfire 2009

Well, we didn't go, again. Not up to dealing with humungous crowds (prolly a quarter of a million people downtown tonight) so we watched it from home. The F-111s cruise past just to the east of our place on their way downtown, so we get to hear them go by.

Took the obligatory photo of what might be the very last public dump & burn from Australia's F-111s, thanks to some clueless bureaucrat deciding to retire them 5-10 years early, because "something we don't know about might go wrong". So they're replacing them with some Superbugs, and plan to buy "up to 100" F35s, to be introduced from 2012. Yeah, nothing will go wrong with that plan...
Hint: Australia will not get JSFs before 2015, possibly 2017, and they'll probably cost about $120m a piece, not the $65m the bureaucrats still sometimes claim. That's assuming the yanks don't cancel the whole program...

Goin' out with style!

You know you're having a crappy year when...

...you've been to three funerals of immediate family members, and all the coffins are this size.

Are Sony really this nasty?

Spotted this comment in the off-topic thread on Groklaw:

And speaking of hardware shenanigans, a friend of mine just recently bought a Sony CD recorder, only to get it home and find out that it wouldn't record on any of his blank CDs. After experimenting, I discovered that it only records on Sony "digital audio" CDs. Talk about product lock-in!

Now he bought it because the burner in his computer was no longer working (would read, but not write), and since he's a musician, he thought rather than replace the one in his computer, he'd buy the standalone because it also let him record directly from analog sources. So I asked him about the one in his computer. He said it stopped working after his wife had upgraded something on the computer.
That made me think "hmmmmm", so I offered to look at it. Surprise!
The 'upgrade' his wife had done was to replace the CD burner... with a Sony! So I popped a blank Sony CD into that, and lo and behold, it suddenly worked.

Not sure how that's legal, but they are clearly doing it. But they lost a customer... he took the recorder back to Best Buy for a refund, and he's replacing the burner in the computer.

That's kind of weird, and you think would fall afoul of various laws relating to consumer protection & anti-competitive behaviour. I'm pretty sure it would be illegal here in Oz unless the fact the burner only worked with Sony branded CDs was prominently marked on the box.

I presume the guy is trying to burn standard Redbook audio CDs, so I can't see any reason why any other media wouldn't be acceptable, other than Sony trying to force people to buy their (often overpriced) product. Just like the printer manufacturers & their proprietary ink cartridges, I suppose.

Does anyone know anything more about this issue?

One more annoying thing about Windows

Ok, today's annoyance: I moved the computer around (actually, I moved all the furniture in the study around, but that's another story).

When I plugged everything back into the computer, I didn't bother to make sure I plugged all the USB cables back into exactly the same port they came out of.

Upon booting into Windows, I'm greeted with the "found new hardware wizard", and my (USB) keyboard & mouse don't work. A hard reset later, and at least the k/b & mouse work, but I still get Windows asking me to install drivers for my TrackIR5. Which was already installed & working prior to the move...

This isn't the first time this has happened to me. It seems that Windows decides that because this piece of hardware wasn't plugged into that particular USB port, it must be a new piece of hardware that needs new drivers installed, and not at all the same as the one that was plugged into that other USB port at the last boot, and which isn't on that other port any more...

Grrr...

If only my games were playable on Linux.

I don't suppose anyone knows how to get ArmA II (Steam version) & SupCom working via Wine?