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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 17
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      Industrial revolution cities “... were unable to sustain themselves— they needed a constant influx of healthy peasants from the countryside to make up for the lives lost to infection. Wars too brough epidemics in their wake.”

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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 17
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      1830 and 1889, two flu pandemics in 18th century. So these things are not common. Wonder if there’s been a coronavirus pandemic before SARS-COV-2 and -1.

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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 17
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      1889 “Russian” flu — 3 waves, mild-severe-mild. 1 million. First one to be statistically profiled. It also attacked adults, not just elderly and children. Apparently Edvard Munch Scream was fly inspired 😱

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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 17
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      By early 20th century cities were self-sustaining thanks to germ theory of disease, vaccines, and sanitation. Wars became deadlier than epidemics and military doctors learned to control disease in conflict. But viruses still a mystery.

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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 17
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      Even in the 19th century people thought of epidemics like earthquakes. Acts of god and beyond control. Hmm. Even with earthquakes today you can sort of manage risks by building on bedrock far from fault lines. I guess plate tectonics was like germ theory.

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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 24
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      “In England [the plague’s] last visitation coincided with the Spanish flu” Infectious disease was still the big killer. Antibiotics hadn’t yet been discovered. Modern germ theory was still pretty new.

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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 25
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      Pasteur and Koch did their work between 1850-80. As new in 1918 as genetics today (which was unknown then) Viruses were discovered in 1890. So as new then as the World Wide Web today. Modernity is young.

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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 25
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      March 4th 1918, guy named Albert Gitchell reported sick to the infirmary at Camp Funston in Kansas. Conventionally regarded as the start of the pandemic.

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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 25
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      By May, all over Europe and starting in Africa, by end of May in India. by June/July in China, Japan, Australia. Unclear where it started, but war helped spread it fast.

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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 25
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      3/4 of French forces and half the British forces fell ill. This was the milder first wave.

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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 26
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      Longish tour of the spread of the second wave. Rather dry account of the complex pattern of spread. Peppered with a few anecdotes featuring Jung, Yeats, Kafka, Leo Szilard, etc. The war wraps and celebrations immediately cause crowd superspread events.

      12:02 AM - 26 Sep 2020
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 26
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          Second wave was deadliest and ended by December. Australia was the only major region that kept it out via quarantine. But third wave in summer 1919 got them too. So 3 waves of a few months each. Kinda different from the relatively continuous ooga-booga of Covid.

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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 26
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          Now that we’ve surveyed the station-temporal contours, on to Chapter 4, about the disease itself. Mostly mild in first wave but deadly in second. Mutation? Most deaths due to bacterial pneumonia, Faces and extremities turned dark and they came up with a color coded death watch.

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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 26
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          So far I’ll admit this book is very dry relative to others. This African-grandmother circling narrative model is a little almanac-like. I think we’re going to go over the 3 waves with a dozen different lenses.

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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          “The distress of the bereaved was compounded by the look of the cadaver: not just the blackened face and hands, but the horribly distended chest” That’s Spanish Flu. Do Covid victims look as distressing?

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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          Extended section on the symptoms. It’s interesting to compare this to the relatively limited descriptions of blac death in the Tuchman book. Distant mirror vs proximal mirror. That came alive better but this feels more grimly real and less like aestheticized fiction.

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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          “Delirium was common... [a doctor] described his patients’ anxiety-provoking sensation that the end of the world was nigh, and their episodes of violent weeping.”

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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          Vignette in Rio, anchored by the story of a young man, Nava, living with middle-class uncle’s family. He fell sick. Depressingly familiar tale of good shortages and closed schools. It was initially dismissed as an old-people-killer and elites didn’t want over-reaction.

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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          Vaccines had only just been socialized. Ten years earlier smallpox vaccinations had led to vaccine riots in Brazil. By 1918 most were vaccinated but state public health was still unpopular.

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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          Bodies piling up in street. A famous carnival reseller, Jamanta, Jose Luis Cordeiro, drove a tram up and down the streets collecting bodies and dumping them at the graveyard. The church bells rang continuously driving people living nearby nuts. Shades of NYC under Covid.

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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          “Terror transformed the city, which took on a post-apocalyptic aspect. Footballers played to empty stadia” Err why? They didn’t have TV...

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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          Color blindness was a symptom, so many accounts are shaped by the bleak colors. The book takes its title inspiration from one such, a Katherine Anne Porter story. Pale refers to the literal paleness. This pandemic was witnessed in black and white by many https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Horse,_Pale_Rider …

          1 reply 1 retweet 13 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          Chapter ends with the death of Nava’s pretty second cousin who he appears to have had a crush on. This thing was very quick compared to Covid. In and out in 2 months but huge toll very quickly. Must have been like a horror movie.

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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          Chapter 5. Extended riff on dangers of naming diseases poorly (eg swine flu is not spread by pigs but pork exportsxweee banned by several countries anyway). Discussion of CDC naming guidelines which looks grim in light of Trump drumming on China/Wuhan virus.

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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          Spanish Flu was of course not Spanish. It had been in US, UK, France for months before it arrived in Spain. Wartime censorship plus neutrality of Spain plus encouragement from the nations at war led to the name sticking.

          1 reply 2 retweets 12 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          This book is making me relive March/April in a deja vu way, and also re-frightening me, which is good. I might have been getting sloppy. Earlier this week, someone in my close circle died of Covid, much too young, and it was a sudden sharp reality check. This is still very real.

          2 replies 2 retweets 24 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          “In Senegal, it was the Brazilian flu, and in Brazil, it was the German flu...” Some progress. In 2020 we have more certainty around origins but at least largely call it coronavirus except for troglodytes like trump. Some evolution of a shared sense of humanity.

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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          That was a short chapter on names that ended on a note of “sorry Spain, sucks to be you” Took a while for it to be recognized that there was one global pandemic in, not many local ones. Again, progress. We knew pretty quickly. It was named, tagged, and tracked fairly early.

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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          Now back to the medical story and a confused early understanding due to a misattribution of influenza to a bacterium by germ theory pioneer Richard Pfeiffer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Friedrich_Johannes_Pfeiffer …pic.twitter.com/OioqL0564X

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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          People confused it with cholera, dengue, plague, typhus... most doctors would only have looked at surface symptoms like black spots on cheekbones. The most advanced practitioners would have made sputum bacterial cultures mistakenly following Pfeiffer’s theory.

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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          This was just 102 years ago. All four of my grandparents were living through this 😓 Today we’re lucky enough to have political controversies about proper testing of the correct thing. The FUD in 1918 must have been mind-boggling. They were MINOs: Moderns in Name Only.

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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          In Chile, elitist doctors thought it was typhus (spread by lice and apparently considered a disease of social decline), blamed the poor, and launched a misguided typhus campaign but didn’t ban gatherings. The 2 look alike except typhus spreads slower and ends in a rash.

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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          The sanitary brigades invaded poor homes and ordered the poor to strip, wash, and shave hair. In some places they burned down poor tenements and the homelessness probably caused flu to spread faster. All societal ignorance reliably hurts the poor first. 😶 Still true with Covid

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        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 27
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          Now a vignette from Shanxi in China where a reformist warlord battles traditional Chinese medicine with the aid of American missionaries who were the only source of western medicine. The locals mightily resisted modern medicine and sought refuge in appeasing dragon gods.

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        25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 28
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          Sadly I think this stuff is still potent. Indian WhatsApp is full of bullshit traditional medicine ideas and religious crap. Though to their credit, people seem to be treating them as a second line of defense rather than first.

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        26. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 28
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          Gotta admire the Christian missionaries who spread western medicine through the test of the world, as well as their politically courageous local sponsors, in the early 20th century. Double jeopardy: religious and lifestyle hostility.

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        27. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 28
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          This book is giving me a sense of civilizational memento mori. Modernity is so young and fragile. Just a hundred years ago the world was vastly shittier than it is today, yet we’re callously risking hard-won things for shallow vanities. Kudos to GWB for learning this history.

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        28. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 29
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          “Watson [one of the missionaries in Shanxi] measured the impact of the governor’s [Yen] modernization efforts by his own practical yardstick: how many villages spontaneously organized their own quarantine at the first indication of an outbreak.” Worked well apparently.

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        29. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 29
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          Possibly, it’s not current state of knowledge but openness to new states that determines success in adaptation. These superstitious Chinese villages 100 years ago in Shanxi were more open to learning and change than many ostensibly modern parts of the US today.

          1 reply 2 retweets 16 likes
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        30. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 29
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          People in Allied countries suspected biowarfare and wondered if Aspirin made by German company Bayer secretly contained more and whether German U-boats were spreading the flu. Today that would be suspicion of Russian or Chinese vaccines.

          1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes
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        31. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 29
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          This chapter has a vignette about a devout but backward part of Spain, Zamora, that avoided mass gatherings but excepted church gatherings. Had a devout and anti-science bishop who catalyzed lots of masses and funeral parades. Ended up with the worst record in Spain.

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