6 ms·

When kids start school?

by eli 7y ago

xvector 7y ago
Why every other year, then? Cursory research tells me that this sort of cycle is super uncommon. This sort of thing strikes fear deep into my heart. There’s nothing I can do to stop it. We can’t abandon our weak fleshy human bodies soon enough.
- nonbel 7y ago
  > "Cursory research tells me that this sort of cycle is super uncommon." No, this is common. Look at measles: https://wiekvoet.blogspot.com/2014/03/looking-at-measles-data-in-project-tycho.html https://wiekvoet.blogspot.com/2014/03/looking-at-measles-dat... You can see two things: 1) It is very seasonal, peaking in the late spring. My personal guess is it has to do with the relative humidity. 2) It is not uncommon to have 1-2 skipped years between large outbreaks. This is because the susceptible people accumulate until there is an outbreak. See SIR models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem... If we are seeing that in this case, that means the virus is infecting many more kids than the few being detected due to these symptoms. Basically the virus is circulating freely but this is a rare complication.
  - seventytwo 7y ago
    My first thought was some kind of two year life cycle of an organism... there are some strange life cycles out there, like cicadas (or similar) that have 17 year life cycles. Perhaps this is something similar? Maybe a mosquito-borne parasite with a two year cycle?
    - nonbel 7y ago
      There really is no need for that. All you need is for the growth in number of susceptible people (usually roughly birthrate) be slow enough that the threshold for an outbreak isn't reached for a couple years. One reason for this could be a previous large outbreak so the growth is starting from a low baseline.
- bdamm 7y ago
  Another fascinating virus with cycles is the chicken pox virus. Not only does it cycle in the community as viruses do, but it also cycles generationally because older adults with shingles can infect children and give them chicken pox; it's the same virus with two very different activation modes. In general our fleshy human bodies are amazingly good at fending off viruses, especially compared to our computers. Put a 10-year old computer out on the public Internet and see how long it lasts. A: Minutes, maybe hours.
  - nonbel 7y ago
    > "Another fascinating virus with cycles is the chicken pox virus." I'm not aware of any virus that is not cyclic.
  - komali2 7y ago
    On the other hand the Guitar Center POS system, which is accessible from the internet (as far as I understand, without DNS, just like, if you've got the IP address, you could hit it). But, it's so ancient that it appears to be totally immune to any of the late 90s viruses that are probably still floating around.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Oddly enough only for relatively recent computers. Put a windows 3.11 box online and there is little surviving to infect it.
    - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
      That is not a security model I would be enthusiastic to try.
      - inlined 7y ago
        I had to use a similar excuse in college. I had finally got Gentoo 64bit for the G5 processor working on my Mac Pro when I went back to school. They wanted me to install their security spyware suite to get internet access in the dorms. My response was that I was probably one of a dozen people in the world running that OS build. What antivirus could they give me? Of course I didn’t tell them it still booted into OS X and I was playing with making the OSes cohabitate better (e.g. shared UID across OS)

When kids start school?

by eli 7y ago

When kids start school?

Why every other year, then? Cursory research tells me that this sort of cycle is super uncommon. This sort of thing strikes fear deep into my heart. There’s nothing I can do to stop it. We can’t abandon our weak fleshy human bodies soon enough.

nonbel 7y ago
> "Cursory research tells me that this sort of cycle is super uncommon." No, this is common. Look at measles: https://wiekvoet.blogspot.com/2014/03/looking-at-measles-data-in-project-tycho.html https://wiekvoet.blogspot.com/2014/03/looking-at-measles-dat... You can see two things: 1) It is very seasonal, peaking in the late spring. My personal guess is it has to do with the relative humidity. 2) It is not uncommon to have 1-2 skipped years between large outbreaks. This is because the susceptible people accumulate until there is an outbreak. See SIR models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem... If we are seeing that in this case, that means the virus is infecting many more kids than the few being detected due to these symptoms. Basically the virus is circulating freely but this is a rare complication.
- seventytwo 7y ago
  My first thought was some kind of two year life cycle of an organism... there are some strange life cycles out there, like cicadas (or similar) that have 17 year life cycles. Perhaps this is something similar? Maybe a mosquito-borne parasite with a two year cycle?
  - nonbel 7y ago
    There really is no need for that. All you need is for the growth in number of susceptible people (usually roughly birthrate) be slow enough that the threshold for an outbreak isn't reached for a couple years. One reason for this could be a previous large outbreak so the growth is starting from a low baseline.
bdamm 7y ago
Another fascinating virus with cycles is the chicken pox virus. Not only does it cycle in the community as viruses do, but it also cycles generationally because older adults with shingles can infect children and give them chicken pox; it's the same virus with two very different activation modes. In general our fleshy human bodies are amazingly good at fending off viruses, especially compared to our computers. Put a 10-year old computer out on the public Internet and see how long it lasts. A: Minutes, maybe hours.
- nonbel 7y ago
  > "Another fascinating virus with cycles is the chicken pox virus." I'm not aware of any virus that is not cyclic.
- komali2 7y ago
  On the other hand the Guitar Center POS system, which is accessible from the internet (as far as I understand, without DNS, just like, if you've got the IP address, you could hit it). But, it's so ancient that it appears to be totally immune to any of the late 90s viruses that are probably still floating around.
- Retric 7y ago
  Oddly enough only for relatively recent computers. Put a windows 3.11 box online and there is little surviving to infect it.
  - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
    That is not a security model I would be enthusiastic to try.
    - inlined 7y ago
      I had to use a similar excuse in college. I had finally got Gentoo 64bit for the G5 processor working on my Mac Pro when I went back to school. They wanted me to install their security spyware suite to get internet access in the dorms. My response was that I was probably one of a dozen people in the world running that OS build. What antivirus could they give me? Of course I didn’t tell them it still booted into OS X and I was playing with making the OSes cohabitate better (e.g. shared UID across OS)