So We Do Know Where It Comes From?

According to a new Center for Disease Control study, you should not hug your cat, because it could kill you.

Not intentionally, although that might still happen if you mistakenly offend your furry little psychopath and then fail to appease its wrath with tuna and head scratching. But through catching a bacterial infection commonly called cat scratch fever. The CDC surveyed 13,000 cases over 8 years and discovered that the annual rate of outpatient diagnoses was 4.5 per 100,000, which was apparently more frequent than they anticipated. I know it's supposed to represent a percentage, but the idea of a half a case of cat scratch fever is still silly.

The bacteria are actually carried on fleas that are on the cats rather than on the cats themselves ("Told you so!" -- Augustus de Morgan and Jonathon Swift). So keeping fleas off the pets is a good way to reduce the risk of exposure. Since it's also a good way to reduce your risk of itching like crazy and having a houseful of fleas, a lot of people were already doing that.

Another opinion suggests that a common vector for the disease is the kitty next door, and suggests seeing the doctor so he can give you some cure. Unfortunately there is always the possibility of getting it some more, so it's probably advisable to not antagonize said kitty next door and perhaps try to calm it with a stroke of your hand (Nugent, T.).

Cheaters Never Prosper...Wait, How Much? Step Aside...

John Warner, writing at Inside Higher Education, comments on a story from The Chronicle of Higher Education about the money to be made in what CHE calls the "new cheating economy." Warner notes that if he went to work for one of the research assistance (wink wink) firms, he could make more money that he's making teaching a course as an adjunct professor.

Warner's writing a blog post rather than a structured article, but he points towards probably one of the biggest factors in this weird topsy-turvy situation: The morphing of a college degree from a signal that the holder has developed some basic elements of a learned character into a credential for employment. Cheating undercuts the whole purpose of the former, but it makes perfect sense for the latter. Because you can't cheat your way into wisdom but you can certainly cut corners to obtain a credential.

Can a person fake understanding Plato? Not with anyone who understands Plato, I'm pretty sure (and that's a subset of individuals that doesn't include me anymore; it's been too long since I had to read him). Handing in a bought paper for a class on Plato won't make up the gap. But if that same person is being hired by, say, a financial firm, is it likely that they'll ever run into a situation where they would need to back up the ideas their hired ghostwriter put in that paper? Nope, all the HR department cares about is whether or not there's a piece of paper somewhere that says diploma on it.

I'm writing not sure of what a solution to this issue would look like. And part of that, I freely admit, is that I've got no good answer for someone who might ask me why they shouldn't cut some corners when the point of the degree is checking off a box on an application instead of developing an understanding of the world we live in and how we might want to live in it.

NASA Looking at Pluto: "What the...?"

Maybe not verbatim, but it's certain that some of the space agency's scientists were shrugging and asking something like that once they got a good look at some data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Our favorite still-really-a-planet-no-matter-what-that-doof-Tyson-says emits X-rays. Now, things that emit X-rays in space are generally hot, gaseous or surrounded with a strong magnetic field. Pluto is 0-for-3 on that score, being cold, rocky and decidedly un-magnetic. Which means that NASA almost didn't use Chandra to study it. The possibility of it emitting the rays Chandra is supposed to detect was considered so low as to not be worth the time.

Using Chandra data as well as that from the recent New Horizons probe flyby, project leader Carey Lisse said that scientists think the radiation comes from Pluto's atmosphere interacting with the solar wind -- streams of charged particles given off by the sun. This means its atmosphere is more substantial than believed and that Pluto's not doing too bad of a job holding onto it. Lisse said that other distant objects may show the same X-ray activity, which will be one of those facts that causes astronomers to get positively giddy with uncertainty.

Because pretty much nothing excites a scientist like something he or she didn't expect to happen. It's more or less why they took the job in the first place.

Performing a Needed Service

Let's pause for a moment and offer a thanks to the folks behind the website and network "Stop Click Bait." Theirs is a work of great importance.

Clickbait, if you are not familiar with it, is the kind of "You'll never guess" headline about some celebrity, oddity or weird event that draws a reader to click on it and generate ad revenue for the company that posted it. Usually, the answer is mundane and disappointing.

Sort of like the 2016 presidential campaign.

Equivalencies

Over at Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux notes that most people understand offers of financial windfalls from Nigerian princes to be likely to enrich only those who make them, rather than those who fall for them.

So why, Dr. Boudreaux asks, do most of those same people believe those same offers to be valid when made from a lectern by a political candidate?

That's a good question.

This Week in Books

Pirate, the eighth outing of Clive Cussler's husband-and-wife adventurers Sam and Remi Fargo is the first of Cussler's many collaborations to feature a woman as co-author. It's a good choice, since out of all of his series the Fargo books are the only ones with a woman as a co-lead character. Burcell, a former law enforcement officer, has two well-regarded series of her own and was first published in 1999.

The Fargos are in San Francisco, trying for a little peace and quiet after their not-so-quiet time in the Solomon Islands. Remi has a line on a rare book to buy for Sam, but it turns out to be rarer than they knew, and a wealthy unscrupulous collector wants it as a key to a great treasure. His operatives at first try to scare the couple off, which works about as well as you might expect. The Fargos, unable to resist the lure of a treasure hunt especially when someone doesn't want them on it, pursue clues around the world before a final confrontation in a king's ancient castle.

Since Cussler saves his destroy/take over the world plots for his Dirk Pitt, Kurt Austin and Oregon Files series, the Fargo stories are often quite a bit lighter in tone. Burcell has a better handle on Remi's role and fleshes her out better than earlier collaborators have done. But she is no slouch in keeping the action humming, even though her own novels have leaned more towards procedurals than action thrillers. Some of the seams and joints show, but more outings with the characters will probably smooth them out. Russell Blake had certainly improved on Thomas Perry's lackluster run, but Burcell offers reason to believe that some of the Fargos' better tales are still ahead of them.

-----

Although he had worked closely with Robert B. Parker on the Jesse Stone television movies starring Tom Selleck, Michael Brandman's run with the characters following Parker's death was not well-received. Hopes lifted when Reed Farrell Coleman, a Shamus Award winner, was given the contract and published Blind Spot in 2014.

Unfortunately, Coleman was working with a character that Parker had not defined all that well, beginning the series just before his late-career doldrums set in, and not giving the Stone novels any boost as he did with his final Spenser books. So while the names of the people and the places were the same as they always had been, they resembled what came from Parker's hand not at all. Coleman added to his problems with a pair of mediocre stories that offered no other reason to enter the town of Paradise, Mass. Debt to Pay, Coleman's third Stone novel, does not solve these problems.

Mr. Peepers, the sadistic sociopathic assassin whom Jesse crossed in Blind Spot, is back to complete his plan for vengeance against those he believes wronged him. Jesse is not the only one on the list, but he's at the top, so when some other targets are found dead, he knows he will have to move to protect his ex-wife Jenn, since Peepers will try to get to Jesse through her. But Jenn is getting married in Dallas, and Jesse is in a serious stage of his relationship with Diana Evans. So moving to protect Jenn will be harder on him personally than he thought. Paradise patrolman Luther Simpson is also in danger, since he shot Peepers to save Jesse. With his attention divided between Dallas and Paradise and Jenn and Diane, Jesse may not be on top of his game, even though he will have to be in order to stop a possible bloodbath.

Coleman makes a number of mistakes -- he takes Jesse out of Paradise for much of the book, even though all of Parker's characters were creatures of their respective places more than anything else. They are much weaker in other locales. He makes the back-and-forth between Dallas and Paradise as confusing as possible. There's a scene in which Jesse and Jenn's new husband are in a bar fight with the ex-husband of the new husband's ex-lover that makes as much sense as it sounds like it would. Mr. Peepers abducts and terrorizes a young woman supposedly as a part of his plot but her role makes no sense. He develops his plans based on a supposed connection with Jenn that Coleman never clearly outlines.

Coleman is free and easy with Parker's characters, perhaps figuring on generating some interest based on George Martin's "Anyone can die at any time" schtick, but it's a flashy wax job on a rusty clunker. The main response Debt to Pay evokes from a reader is a strong desire to seek out Michael Brandman and apologize to him for criticizing what he did to the good and not-so-good folk of Paradise, Mass. Turns out he wasn't the worst thing to happen to them after all.

Lux et Veritas Day Care Center

Often when we read of something happening on a college campus these days it seems like it's some goofball professor saying something that makes you wonder why any parents would let their kids go anywhere near these places.

But then we see some of the extended video where a group of students closes in around a professor and shouts at him under the mistaken impression that they are communicating thoughts though they demonstrate no thinking whatsoever. At one of this country's most prestigious, academically nose-in-the-air infinitely smarter-than-thou institutions.

And you're left wondering why anyone who wants to be a scholar would go anywhere near these places.

In church mission planning, we are often told to ask our people what our communities would be like if our church disappeared tomorrow. What would be missed if we were not here? Asking that same question of Yale University once upon a time would have produced a legion of answers, but that number is shrinking and lately it seems there's no guarantee that its approach to zero will remain asymptotic.