OK, now I see it. It looks like you're arguing from three or four years of data. That's weather, not climate, although it is *influenced* by climatic phenomena like El Niño/ENSO, which you ought to read up on. Two or three of these years in small slice of data were La Niña years. La Niña years tend to be substantially cooler than the trend.

Short answer, you aren't talking about enough data to amount to a climatic trend.

I once saw an economist get up in a symposium and claim that the carrying capacity of the Earth -- the number of humans it could support -- was infinite.

Observed temperatures of what time period are you talking about?

Ooh, ad hominem *and* strawman. Well done, but next time see if you can squeeze *three* fallacies of distraction into your argument.

Well, the point isn't priority of discovery, as it would be with a patent application. It is a question of whether Delphi engineers knew of a potentially fatal design flaw in the switch and failed to notify users whose life was endangered (including his clients' daughter, who was killed by a failure in that part, apparently).

A redesign is not necessarily a smoking gun, in my opinion. An engineer who worked on that kind of stuff could say whether a reasonable engineer would regard the original design as faulty, and make the changes seen to correct the fault.

Alright. Cite *one* instance where a company has done something like this and been sued.

The problem is, that 'no wrongdoing' verdict might come after years of litigation, costing millions of dollars, a non-zero amount of business impact (people getting depositioned, document discovery, etc etc) and who knows how much lost customer goodwill.

After all, smoke=fire, mud sticks, etc etc.

Well, whole the point of the article is that the pneumonic transmission may have been responsible for more fatalities in the Black Death than previously thought. In any case, it's the same infectious agent, different tissues infected. So Y. pestis can be vectored as bubonic plague and then subsequently spread as pneumonic plague -- or vice versa. That's my understanding, although as I said elsewhere I've never worked on plauge projects so I may be wrong. But it doesn't seem like much of a stretch given poor hygeine and general health at the time that both types of infection should descend from a common index case.

The mobility of the *typical* rat vs the *typical* human is neither here nor there. It's the absolute number of humans and rats on the move, and clearly there were plenty of both. The main issue with people moving from place to place transmitting Y. pestis pneumonically is the rapidity with which humans succumb to such an infection. But the great London plague of the mid 1600s came over from Netherlands, which is a much different matter than transmitting an epidemic from Cathay to Rome.

Sure it works for people on corporate time. Your problem with not seeing the Sun is caused by your *work* schedule, not your *sleep* schedule (not to mention your lousy office).

I've actually been in the same position, working in a windowless lab with no wall clock. This was in the days before computers didn't have battery backed up clocks and boot roms. I'd come into work, load the bootstrap program in through the front panel switches and if I didn't have a watch on I'd work until I was done with what felt like a day's work. Then I'd go out, not knowing whether it was day or night outside.

I'm suggesting you keep time according to the solar hour angle (e.g. the angle between a great circle intersecting the sun and both poles, and the celestial meridian which passes through your local zenith). I'm not recommending you keep time according to the elevation of the Sun relative to the local horizon.

In a nutshell: if possible, contrive your schedule so you can act as if nothing is changing. Don't get up earlier because the sun rises earlier, or because we're changing from daylight savings to standard.

Naturally, this won't work for people living in very high latitudes whose job requires them to be working at sunrise. But it won't work for people doing shift work either.

Why not go to bed at the same solar time and wake up at the same solar time? This involves waking up earlier than you need to on work days during standard time. But so what? During daylight savings time, spend an hour in the morning in a cafe drinking coffee and reading a novel.

Years ago that would mark you as a weirdo because you couldn't stay up and watch some hot TV show that starts at 10PM, but people aren't slaves to the broadcast TV schedule any longer, so why not do things on your own schedule?

I'm by nature a night owl, but staying up is no big deal for me. Getting up early is a lot more rewarding; everything you like about being up abnormally late is true of being up abnormally early.

Well, for one thing the fatality rate is less than 100%. And the infection rates were less than 100% too. Were the infection and fatality rates 100%, the epidemic would quickly burn itself out. You can set up a differential equation describing this situation: the rate of transmission is proportional to the chance of transmission and how frequently an infected person encounters an uninfected person. But that frequency of contact drops as populations are decimated, so that a particularly aggressive strain soon finds itself dealing with a host population to sparse to maintain itself.

In fact plague *did* kill everyone in many isolated places. Some villages were entirely wiped out by aggressive infections, but if you think about it, the strains that killed everyone quickly were doomed to extinction. There's an optimal level of virulence if you want to spread a pathogen as far and wide as possible.

Consider tuberculosis, which is *highly* transmittable between humans and unlike plague does not require an arthropod vector for transmission. Why hasn't tuberculosis wiped out everyone? Well it *has*, many, many times, wiped out all the humans in small, isolated communities. In fact some scholars have speculated that the vampire legend arose from the spread of virulent strains of TB that wiped out small, rural populations. But in a large population the emergence of an aggressive strain still isn't going to get everyone. Some people will escape infection by chance, and people will flee the area. It's the slow-burning, persistent strains that take months or years to kill someone that have the best chance of surviving long term.

Well, the Norway (aka "brown") rats are carriers of an almost incredible variety of infectious agents that are human pathogens, including hantavirus and Toxoplasma.

The issue with rats isn't that they're *particularly* susceptible to zoonotic pathogens. The issue is that they're well adapted to living around human habitations,which provide them with excellent protection from predation. With plenty food and shelter and no predators, they reach unnaturally high population concentrations. These populations are "preyed upon" by germs instead of carnivores, because inevitably everything in nature is food for something else. Some of those pathogens will also effect humans, and since those dense colonies are living in close proximity to dense colonies of *humans*, brown rats present a public health concern, even though none of their pathogens have quite the marquee name recognition of The Black Death.

Another example of this phenomenon is the raccoon. Because raccoons are still frequently encountered in natural settings people don't have the same revulsion towards them as they do towards rats, but raccoons are just as well adapted to living with humans as rats are. In places where high raccoon populations live in close proximity to humans, they're a serious health concern. I've known natural science geeks -- people who have no qualms about handing dead animals or picking through animal scat -- to treat suburban raccoons with revulsion. A suburban raccoon can be a terrifying bag of disease, and there are documented cases of people dying as a result of handling their poop.

It doesn't mean racoons are *bad*, or that rats are *bad*. It means that wild animal populations with nearly unlimited resources and no predation are an all-you-can-eat banquet for germs.

Well, I'm not sure what "people" you are talking about, but if you're talking about "researchers", the answer would be "no". Researchers are definitely not representative of general population of what they "like" and "dislike".

Two war stories follow.

Some researchers in a tropical medicine discovered that a mens room at the school had been infested with tiny little flies. Did they complain to the management? No. They trapped some of the flies, brought them back to the lab and bred them as pets.

I was walking in the woods one day with a zoologist friend of mine, when we came upon a rotting coyote head in the middle of the trail. "Ooh!" she says, "I want to show that to my students!" Whereupon she picks up the head, maggot-ridden eyeholes and all, and pops it into the pocket of her windbreaker.

So no, I don't think anti-rat bias is a problem for researchers.

Person who worked for years in arthropod borne disease control here.

Except for the reporting screw-up about virus vs. bacteria, this is all just quibbling. The reporters got it wrong as usual, but that doesn't mean that the researchers got it wrong.

Zoonotic diseases (ones that spills over from one animal population to another) always have fantastically complex life cycles. In epidemics of zoonotic diseases it's common for epizootic transmission (transmission between species) to be overtaken by enzootic transmission (transmission *within* a species). For example influenza is a bird pathogen that can cross over into mammalian species like swine and humans. If flu epidemics didn't shift gears from epizootic transmission (bird to human) to enzootic (human to human), they wouldn't be as big a deal. Just stay away from chickens.

So the idea that the black plague was primarily spread among humans enzootically is hardy groundbreaking epidemiology. It certainly doesn't mean that it's not dangerous to live in a place infested with plague-ridden rats. But the shift to enzootic transmission is something that's a bit different from the mosquito or tick borne diseases or occasional, isolated epizootic plague infections we're largely familiar with today.

It's a neat finding, in that it wasn't necessarily expected, but it makes sense in retrospect. In something like West Nile Virus, the natural focus of the pathogen is migratory bird populations that fly thousands of miles. But while a rat can hop on a ship and travel thousands of miles, the vast majority of rats spend their entire lives in a radius of a few hundred feet. Humans are much more mobile than rats; even if a few rats hitch a ride on a ship, they never go anywhere far *without* humans.

What's simplistic is the assumption there has to be only *one* factor involved in a zoonotic epidemic. Without epizootic transmission the plague would not have happened in the first place. That's not news. Without human-to-human enzootic transmission it would not have spread so widely or kill such a high percentage of the population. That is news (I guess -- I didn't work with people doing plauge so I have no direct knowledge of what people in that field thought). Of course before it becomes established science it's going to have to stand up to criticism for a few years.