10 Thoughts for September 23, 2014

It's been a week since I last blogged one of these.  No reason aside from being lazy.

1. The West Africa Ebola outbreak, according to the CDC, may reach 550K to 1.4M infected by late January.  The WHO Ebola team now estimates the amount of infected will exceed 20K by November -- previously they had predicted 20K by the middle of 2015.  The infection rate continues to grow exponentially, making the 1.4M completely plausible, especially if it overlays with influenza season.  The bigger this thing grows, the harder it is to contain it.  Can you imagine, however, how the region and the world reacts, when the number of infected has grown to 100K?  Chaos, people.
2. Google officially announced that it has joined Microsoft in quitting ALEC.  That's great news, as now I don't have to boycott Google. :D  But it does make you wonder what they were thinking when they joined ALEC last October.
3. So I just purchased two 4TB refurbished Hitachi hard drives for $100 each, via Woot, to fill up my recently received Zyxel NAS.  Normally I would never buy refurbished hard drives, except according to this Backblaze post about the hard drives they use, this particular Hitachi model scores exceptionally low failure rates -- 1.5%.  For reference, a Western Digital Red model (specifically designed for use in NAS), has a failure rate of 3.2%.  Furthermore, Hitachi drives have the highest survival rates at the end of 36 months, according to Backblaze.  They're supposed to arrive next week, so we'll see how the NAS build goes.
4. The Treasury Department has unilaterally moved to limit tax inversion schemes which allow US corporations to avoid paying taxes by shifting its corporate headquarters (on paper) to another country via majority ownership.  The downside is that it will not apply to existing corporations who have already performed a tax inversion, which seems like a mistake that benefits those who've already shifted ownership.
5. If you've watched videos on YouTube of attacks from either side of a Muslim-involved conflict, doesn't it strike you as odd, that anyone would insist loudly, that God is great, while shooting at their opponent?  I would think that, if God were truly willing to intercede, both sides would see their weapons fail to operate or otherwise simply disappear.
6. Insects are apparently easily affected by Fukushima radiation exposure, leading to abnormalities and premature deaths.  Godzilla is coming.  ;)
7. Kansas is at risk of turning a hue of blue.  Governor Sam Brownback has been behind in the last four polls, all in September, including two GOP-leaning ones (Rasmussen and Fox News).  Meanwhile, with the exit of Democrat Chad Taylor including his removal from the ballot, Independent Greg Orman (previously registered as a Democrat in 2008) has led Senator Pat Roberts in all three polls this month, two of which are GOP-leaners (Fox News and Rasmussen).  The point here, is that national GOP groups are having to spend lots of money defending what they thought was a diehard red state, which is rather interesting.
8. Sticking with politics, last week Monica Wehby's campaign suffered a humiliating blow when it was revealed that her website used position points lifted verbatim from Karl Rove's poll-testing questions.  What was revealing to me, was that though she was running on the repeal of the ACA based on her experience as a doctor, she did not insist on writing at least this portion by herself.  If you trust the message coming out of her camp, she supposedly delegated this central issue of her campaign to a former staffer.  So either she's lying or she has terrible management of her own campaign staff.  Can you imagine that something so critical as policy issues hadn't been vetted one bit by the candidate herself?  T'is a sinking boat, especially now that the Koch brothers have bailed on Wehby.  
9. Did you get an iPhone 6+?  Take care with handling it -- don't put it in the pocket of your tight jeans -- because it is relatively easy to bend.  I suspect that Apple was planning to use the sapphire glass' high resistance to flexing as a means to counter the aluminum alloy chassis' low modulus of elasticity, so when it ended up replacing the sapphire glass with a flexible Gorilla Glass (or variant), it left the iPhone 6+ vulnerable.  Call it Flexgate?  The thing is, Samsung already tests for these problems, making Apple look really bad if they looked over these issues when going with a big screen.
10. I thought that with the cooler temperatures I could turn the central AC off and open the window.  But as a result of the rain, the humidity has increased substantially that the lower temperature does not compensate for the increased humidity -- I feel like it's a Hawai'i winter.  It's not as bad as a Hawai'i summer with no breeze, though -- the worst kind of summer.