Swine Flu

 

1. I’ve heard that the virus has strains of four different viruses in it, too.  Makes one wonder.  North American swine and avian flu, human flu, and Eurasian swine flu segments are all in the virus, from what I’ve heard.  Tinfoil hat time?  Maybe.  Then again, anything’s possible, I suppose.

   Posted by BlueStateSaint       04/27/2009  at  04:35 AM  



2. Folks -
   These virii mutate extremely fast - a kinda darwinism in reverse on steroids. The virus replicates by the millions in very short periods of time. With that many replications, some small variants (mutations) occur. The most hardy of the mutated strains survive. There is something about the physiology of birds and swine in particular (swine actually have immune systems extremely close in characteristics to another species: Homo Sapiens) that allow these mutations to progress and form a variant that is (1) resistant or adapted to the immune system of the host and (2) able to replicate VERY fast - overwealming the hosts’ immune system. There is no “engineered” to this, other than by Mother Nature.
   We need to remember that Homo Sapiens is just another species, and in this case, we can be the prey instead of the predator.

   Posted by T       04/27/2009  at  07:45 AM  



3. Granted T, but ...

   A Turing Machine is a theoretical device that is programmed to make more Turing Machines.

   Give me a box of Turing Machine parts , all from Model XYZ. And a file and a drill and a welding torch and some scrap metal. Before making any changes, I can assemble one kind of Turing Machine from the parts. I do some filing, weld on a couple of bits, etc., to several of the parts. From them I assembly an new kind of Turing Machine. Ta da, I’ve modeled mutation. I continue to do so ... and every day I get a different Turing Machine. None of them can be called an XYZ model any more. But even if, by pure chance, some of the parts resemble the parts in an ABC, JKL, QX1, and a BDD Turing Machine, I can never say that the present version I have is made of parts from those other machines.

   Unless my parts box is being invaded at night by naughty elves who are swapping parts in.

   I’m not a virologist, but I’m pretty certain viruses don’t mate. They split off like amoebas. So how do the parts of other viruses get in there??

   Posted by Drew458       04/27/2009  at  10:02 AM  

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.