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Pat Toye asked me to come up with a list of things more likely to kill you than swine flu to help calm down his over-reactive coworkers.  Right now, with 250 infected folk and an expected mortality of 2-4%, that puts us in the 5-10 dead area.  I work with the assumption in the US that only about a 1/4 of people will actually be correctly diagnosed and seek medical attention and still die so I’m looking for things that kill between 20-40 folks a year.  This is a short list from some of the more memorable filings in the “how people die” list:

  • Being trampled by a pig
  • Attacked by a robot (malfunctioning or damaged industrial robots mostly)
  • Allergic reaction to beaver meat or other large rodents
  • Choking on a writing instrument (mostly pens and pen caps)
  • Blood loss from a laceration caused by a household appliance (excludes suicide)
  • Committing suicide after losing an RPG character (excluded as it wasn’t an accidental event)
  • Overexertion during sex or masturbation
  • Being pushed in front of a moving object
  • Immolation in one’s own sleeping cloths
  • Assault by smoke, cinder, ashes or embers

Lets compare that to the biggies:
Cancer kills someone once a minute
Heart disease kills someone once every 30 seconds

Swine flu is currently slightly deadlier (factor of between 1.5 and 2) than dying from assault by strong acids or bases, being eaten by rats, or suffocation by flatulence.  Note that mortality statistics are tough to pin point, for instance if someone has a heart attack while driving and crashing into something the death could be heart disease or motor vehicle collision, but most statistics gun for proximate cause, what initial event initiated a chain of events that resulted in mortality.  So if someone accidentally jabs themselves in the eye with a mechanical pencil and while blinded stumbles into an open manhole cover the mechanical pencil is the proximate cause.  These numbers are from a number sources including the IIS, the CIA World Factbook, the root mortality study of 1988 and other things I’ve picked up like a 2003 article in Maxim magazine and margin notes in an insurance textbook.  Use with caution.

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My shopping list of the camporee has involved some strange bedfellows like 12 hula hoops, 13 tennis balls, 2 funnels, 3 beach balls and 2 kids sized exercise balls.  Some oddities:

  • I went to Toys R’ Us to buy kids exercise balls thinking they’d make giant kick balls.  I asked a store attending how burst resistant they were to which she replied “profoundly, I know someone who couldn’t even pop one with a mechanical pencil.”
  • Me yelling asking a cluster of teens at Oxford Valley mall to make way as I walked through their cohort with 12 hula hoops wearing aviator glasses.
  • The Leslie’s Pool desk attendant asking me if diving rings would do instead of a beach ball for my giant volleyball game.

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Camporee preparation has proven…. difficult.  Today I walked the event site and found a collection of gopher holes, poison ivy bushes and meteorite impact sites that sized to perfectly consume the human leg.  I paced out sites for the various giant events and traced lines like trying to construct a golf course about Centralia, PA.  I was dressed in work cloths as that’s where I’d come from and got not a few odd looks from disc golf hippies, parents and kids regarding the strange man walking about in business casual but removed all doubt of my insanity when I went back to my car, took out my 75 cm exercise ball and started rolling around the field on it testing its resistance to bursting on thorns and such.

Apparently I passed some rubicon of sanity as the park ranger only slowed and stared but didn’t quite stop as I sat on the ball rolling around in a wheat field.  Some day I should do a performance art piece and get 10 fat men in business suits to do jazzercise in a wheat field with exercise balls.

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Marketing’s recent return to our office clime has resulted in some odd collisions.  As a thank you to engineering, they left out donut holes for us assumably the night before as I saw no marketing folk in when I arrived at 5 AM.  There was a box on each photo copier and the coffee area and each of my passes about those areas netted two more donut holes, a habit some other early risers also picked up.  When the first marketing person did arrive the donut holes were largely gone and consolidated into one box that I wound up finishing the next day as no one wanted to take the last one,  despite having no qualms with consuming this lone survivor’s numerous kin.

I briefly convinced myself I’d not consumed in excess until I calculated that each box would have had to have been about 1/4 mile away from each other to create sufficient calorie expenditure to equilibrate input with output.  At least if I stuck to the two furthest boxes I could be fine within an order of magnitude.  That’s good enough in many sciences, I hope nutrition’s one of them.

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I made crackerjacks for my Monday Baked Good and got a largely positive response except for a few people that did the following:

Person: You know *chomp chomp chomp*, this isn’t technically a baked good.
Me: *Shouting over the sound of their munching* Why not?
Person: Well, *chomp chomp* you didn’t really bake *chomp chomp chomp* it.
Me: *Avoiding getting between person and crackerjacks for fear of losing finger* It went in the oven for over an hour.
Person: *Chomp chomp* eh… I still think it’s cheating. *Takes  1/2 lb chunk and leaves*

Good to know their purity of purpose didn’t get in the way of them eating four pounds of crackerjacks.

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Our second tenant moved the rest of his personal items in, apparently.  The room was largely empty at around 10 PM when I saw two pinpoints of light part in front.  For about 30 seconds I heard muffled footsteps in the hallway outside my closed room door and a single “plop” of boxes being dropped.   Then, silently, the pinpoints left and all was quiet.  I peek into the room at about 11 PM and there were about 25 24″x24″x18″ boxes and an entire queen-sized bed-frame, matress and box spring.  I think we’re renting to either a Shinobi of the Silver Court or possibly David Copperfield.

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Bill Mischke turned 50 on Friday and I volunteered to help setup, this was run by his erudite field commander-like wife and AnnaMarie Pepper.  The 10 minute discussion of which table covering to use was fine, but the three rearrangements of the cake table taught me something:   Until today, I thought world’s most powerful microscope (that I knew of) was a scanning tunneling microscope that has a resolving power of about 0.1 nanometers.  This is sharp enough to see individual atoms and to resolve material imperfections that can not be directly seen but only inferred due to butting up against the limitations of Heisenberg uncertainty.  This may sound sharp, but I have no doubt that under the right circumstances the descriminating power of a middle-aged Jewish woman planning a celebration for a life milestone is at least twice this.

General Pictures

[flickr album=72157616996753060 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

Portraiture

[flickr album=72157616997002158 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

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Bill Mischke turned 50 on Friday and I volunteered to help setup, this was run by his erudite field commander-like wife and AnnaMarie Pepper.  The 10 minute discussion of which table covering to use was fine, but the three rearrangements of the cake table taught me something:   Until today, I thought world’s most powerful microscope (that I knew of) was a scanning tunneling microscope that has a resolving power of about 0.1 nanometers.  This is sharp enough to see individual atoms and to resolve material imperfections that can not be directly seen but only inferred due to butting up against the limitations of Heisenberg uncertainty.  This may sound sharp, but I have no doubt that under the right circumstances the descriminating power of a middle-aged Jewish woman planning a celebration for a life milestone is at least twice this.

General Pictures

[flickr album=72157616996753060 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

Portraiture

[flickr album=72157616997002158 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

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Me: So, how was your day of offroading?
Dad: Great, I got a text message that Jim couldn’t go so Rob and I went.  Remember the rock trail at Big Dog I turned over on last year?
Me: Yeah,  Ryan took pictures.
Dad: Well, I made it this time, I was also the only one to make it through the log course in one pass.

I’m so proud!  My dad figured out how to check his text messages!

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I’d noticed a change in the tenor of work but didn’t get confirmation as to the cause until recently:
Me: Hey
Coworker: Yeah?
Me: Is it just me or are there more well-dressed angry people walking around?
Coworker: Global Marketing got moved into our building and they miss their spacier cubicles.
Me: Ah, that would also explain the increase in the number of expensive yogurts in the fridge and the uptick in the number people buying chai from the cafeteria.
Coworker: Yes.  I think we should change the uniform of R&D to sweats and see if we can make them pop.