Atomic Nerds

After doing a Morbo imitation at a commenter elsewhere making a series of false assumptions about vaccinations, it occurred to me that maybe the exact details of how vaccines do work is maybe not such general knowledge as I thought. Sure, my high school biology teacher thought it was the perfect structure to frame the chapter about the immune system around, but probably that’s not standard curriculum nationwide. So, How Stuff Works: Vaccines and You.

The most important thing to realize, and the one which most people seem to have, is that vaccines don’t contain any immunity-inducing properties of their own; their entire function is based on spurring the body’s immune system to develop specific recognition capabilities for pathogens before encountering the pathogen in question. Normally immune adaptation is acquired partly from one’s mother during nursing (this fades in 6-12 months), and partly from a learn-as-you go approach to finding and destroying hostile invaders as they come. The learn-as-you-go portion isn’t particularly pleasant, and sometimes has unfortunate side effects such as permanent injury or death, so finding ways around this has been historically viewed as a social good.

The way the immune system actually recognizes anything is by its “appearance”; anything that can provoke an immune response is called an antigen, and while some toxins fill this role, most antigens are proteins and most of the immune system’s recognition task is in making friend-or-foe identifications by protein coat. When innocuous substances are slotted into the “foe” category, these reactions are defined as allergic; when the body’s own cells are accidentally thrown into the “foe” category, this is an autoimmune reaction. Both friendly and neutral microorganisms as well as a handful of particularly well-adapted pathogens also have the capacity to get themselves flagged “friend” and ignored by the immune system. As any adaptive system theoretically capable of learning and responding in a massive number of ways is, the immune system includes these kinds of potentials for error as a consequence of its own flexibility, but it also provides a way for the humans to directly game the system.

Most of the body’s resistance to invasion is surface-based; skin basically exists in the first place to be a physical barrier composed of material indigestible to bacteria. The mucous membranes where tough skin can’t be are either covered in saliva or tears, which are full of enzymes designed to terminate proteins with extreme prejudice, or mucus, which is designed to simply trap invaders in place. Internally, the body is patrolled by macrophages, which devour everything in their path; dead cellular debris, foreign bodies, and foreign bodies that are pathogens. Macrophages display portions of the pathogens that they devour on their own coating; these antigens are then recognized by helper T cells, whose basic role in the immune system is “cellular terror alert level”.

At this point a truly accurate explanation of helper T cells, macrophages, and immune response and regulation would involve a great deal of biochemistry and an intimate and delicate dance involving the exchange of signals and careful up and down regulation of both the white cells themselves and every other aspect of immune response, but this would not only take a great deal of time, it wouldn’t actually add much to a basic explanation of how vaccines work except to help some student pass his MCAT somewhere. So for purposes of serving the task and accomplishing the explanation while also making it clear that I AM grossly simplifying, I will say that the role of helper T cells is first to recognize that the macrophage is going around with the heads of the enemy dangling off its metaphorical fender and then to run through the body screaming “THE BRITISH ARE COMING!”.

Somewhat less metaphorically, they multiply themselves, stimulate the production of killer T cells that destroy the body’s own cells that are infected by the invader*, and importantly for the purposes of vaccination, it interacts with B cells. B cells are produced by the bone marrow in ways that vary by the millions; each one has a slightly different receptor protein on its surface. When the B cell encounters an antigen that matches its own receptor, and is stimulated by the helper T cells shrieking about the redcoats, it immediately begins rapid and prolific division and production of new B cells. A few of them become memory B cells that will exist from then on out to hasten immune response to that antigen again, but most of them become plasma B cells whose job is to pump out antibodies to the antigen. Antibodies attach to the antigen and make it easier for macrophages to destroy it; a crude but useful-for-our-purposes analogy would be that of attaching handles to an awkwardly-shaped object to make it easier to pick up. For obvious reasons pathogens do not wish to be consumed, and a great many of them are very resistant to the process; antibodies make them less resistant.

Over the course of the infection, helper T cells gradually subdivide themselves into effector T cells, whose job is essentially to maintain the alarm effect and general up-regulation of the immune system, memory T cells that are antigen-specific and will hang around long after as the memory B cells will, and regulatory T cells whose job is to call the whole thing off**. When the memory T cells encounter their antigen again, they will rapidly divide and produce effector T cells to ramp up the alarm system again, much as their B counterparts will start producing antibodies again.

The original discovery of the principle of vaccination was made by Edward Jenner, who observed that milkmaids rarely got smallpox. At the time, the basic idea of inoculation- which vaccination is a safe variant of- was known; if you wanted to protect someone against smallpox, you got some material from a victim and gave the intended beneficiary a bit of it, hoping for a light and nonfatal infection that conferred later immunity. Cowpox, on the other hand, was something that milkmaids tended to pick up from infected cows that did nothing in particular that harmful to humans other than a few blisters; Jenner’s idea was that the milkmaids were being inoculated with a less risky disease, a theory he proved by using the pus from a local milkmaid’s cowpox infection to inoculate his gardener’s son, then later inoculating him with material from a smallpox blister in the usual fashion and producing a total lack of reaction***. 23 subjects later, he had demonstrated that cowpox inoculation produced smallpox immunity sufficiently to get the attention of the Royal Society.

Jenner’s time lacked a germ theory of disease, but now we know that the cowpox worked because cowpox and smallpox are closely related viruses; their antigens are close enough that an immune response to cowpox will produce an effective immune response to smallpox. Later smallpox vaccines were derived from neither, but rather from the again closely related Vaccinia, which is even more innocuous to humans and whose etymological implications are obvious.

The basic principle of vaccination is this: introduce an antigen in a way that will elicit a full-blown immune response, specific to the disease of interest, and sufficient to create a healthy crop of memory B and T cells that will respond appropriately if they ever encounter that pathogen. This can be a live microbe that is sufficiently related to the pathogen to provide a specific response to that pathogen (but represents a major risk to the immunocompromised for whom the experience is not so innocuous), as in the case of Vaccinia, a live microbe that has been deliberately bred or engineered to remove its virulence (referred to as live attenuated- the measles-mumps-rubella contains three live attenuated bugs), just bits and pieces of the bug to provide a selection of antigens, or a toxoid vaccine in which the antigen is actually an altered-for-safety version of whatever toxins the bug produces that cause the real problem for the host. Tetanus and diphtheria are toxoid vaccines, and the hepatitis A and B shots are component vaccines; all of them are different means to the same end, which is finding a way to safely introduce an antigen that will be reliably associated with a particular harmful pathogen and get a complete immune response.

Where the process of producing vaccines becomes complicated is that pathogens have a number of tricks to evade detection and capture by the immune system, which can make acquired immunity to the pathogen acquired the straightforward way difficult, let alone induced immunity from a vaccine. The easiest way for viruses to evade the immune system is simply to mutate very rapidly; their antigens simply don’t remain stable enough for the memory cells to be able to produce effective recognition and effective antibodies. This is one of several reasons that a childhood vaccines may last but a flu vaccine must be applied once a year and may not even be effective- there are multiple different strains and all of them mutate very rapidly, so any given year’s vaccine is a best-guess as to which strain is going to be dominant that year. HIV has been a bear to produce a vaccine for for the same basic reason; it doesn’t share influenza’s strength in infecting multiple host species and having that be a driver of variation, but it still mutates fast enough for there to be multiple strains and for those strains to mutate fast enough that an HIV victim taking no precautions can become infected with multiple different strains, some of them more or less resistant to treatment than others.

Protist pathogens, or single-celled eukaryotic organisms that have become specialized as parasites, have some more sophisticated tricks at their disposal. Malaria has been resistant to both vaccination and effective treatment because the bugs in question simply change their entire protein coat repeatedly, so that it can take up to five years before the immune system is even exposed to all the different versions of antigens that the single infecting Plasmodium strain can present. This may not even matter much, because it also partially disables the immune response, so that the helper T cells are sluggish and don’t properly signal B cells. Giardia protists share the same coat-swapping trick, which can make them tricky to even diagnose, since the symptoms of infection are so general and blood tests for the presence of most diseases relies on being able to find either the antigen or the antibodies produced in response- and fecal floats rely on a certain amount of luck of the draw in even getting a protist to show up in an opportune way.

Other pathogens subvert various components of the immune system (animal parasites are particularly good at this), bunker up in specialized structures within tissues and evade the strongest part of the immune response and re-emerge and begin breeding again when this has passed or the immune system is weaker in general, or somehow display a false-flag “friend” signal to the immune system. Like the number of human ailments easily defeatable with simple antibiotics, the number of pathogens easy to create and deploy a vaccine against is actually a minority of pathogens overall, and we are fortunate in that so many of our most lethal ones were among them.

Finally, the important thing to remember about vaccines is that they rely entirely on the memory T and B cells in order to produce immunity. The body isn’t truly immunized in the sense of being invulnerable to that disease, it merely has a much faster antibody response against pathogens- which in most cases is more than sufficient to overwhelm the invaders before they establish the numbers to out-breed the immune system. “Booster” vaccinations are given to up the population of memory cells so that it remains artificially high; someone who had childhood vaccinations but no boosters will still have some memory cells, but still be more vulnerable to infection than someone whose repeated artificial exposure means a well-reinforced garrison.

The principle of “community immunty” or “herd immunity” rests, essentially, on math; the more individuals a pathogen can’t get an effective foothold to breed in, the fewer chances an individual who can’t be or wasn’t vaccinated (and the most common cause of “can’t be” is a compromised immune system that isn’t strong enough to function in the ways the vaccine normally provokes) has to be exposed and successfully infected. If enough of the community is vaccinated, outbreaks simply have no chance to get rolling and produce dominating numbers of pathogen.

The reverse case- a few vaccinated individuals in a vulnerable community- is, of course, also true. It does not matter if you’ve constructed a truly great wall and fortified it with a well-armed garrison; if sixty million armed Mongolians show up on the other side rather than six thousand, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going down.

*Or cancerous, or otherwise “ain’t right”. This is flagged by the compromised cell displaying the wrong protein coat, resulting from having to process foreign substances. More or less. Please do not try to pass biochemistry with this. Either way, it’s sort of like flying an upside-down flag.

**I actually can’t get all that more specific here, because the current state of immunology regarding them is “yes, they exist, and yes this is what they do”. How exactly they do it and what mechanism prompts a regulatory T cell response to dominate over THE BRITISH ARE COMING is still rather foggy.

***The practice of just trying stuff on random victims and seeing what came out well was rather common for Enlightenment era medicine, thus demonstrating that House, M.D. would be praised for its gritty realism had they merely set the series in the eighteenth century.

Vicious Circle

In which we somehow manage not to scare off the Canadian chick that wandered into #gbc awhile back and hasn’t wandered back out again, I attempt to explain what OCD is (and for the record I went and looked it up and the rates of OCD between genders are about the same but tend to express differently), we discuss road rage and favored curses, the first rule is dragged through the mud, and other pleasant time-wasting.

Vine says he sent Matt G home from Nebraska with 18 hours of this shit. I’d ask if anyone’s checked on Matt lately, but he seems to be discussing how to revive an unconscious person.

Last night we watched the independent film Cashback, which is perhaps best summarized as “A British Fight Club except the narrator is a useless streak of piss”. There is no fighting, but there is 1.5x the narcissistic self-absorption. Lots of creep factor that this audience was unsure if it was meant to come off as wholesome artiness or a deeply creepy Chester-Molestor thing the narrator believed to be artiness.

In any case, we wound up watching it all the way through because there were a few neat things being done and more than we hated every single character on the screen, we wanted to see where, if anywhere, they were taking it.

Spoiler, but one you want to keep that hundred minutes of your life intact: nowhere, and the lone potentially interesting plot point is dropped like a radioactive porcupine. You’re welcome.

*lack of ideas*

*depression*

*tentative idea*

*fleshing out of idea*

“Hey, could you come help me with this?”

“Sure.”

*help*

*do some other stuff while I’m there*

*tinker with some stuff I had meant to do anyway*

“Okay, time to get down to it.”

*is mysteriously dinnertime*

“God damn it.”

*is Vicious Circle time*

“I can’t write this drunk and distracted. It wouldn’t even be funny.”

I’ll try to get some posting done on the weekend to make up for the relative lack. Mister Wizard style posts tend to go better when I do have more time anyway. (No, Blunt, I’m not doing CNS fatigue and adaptation. At least not now.)

Sorry for the lack of content lately; I’d blame allergies, but they’ve been better lately for the most part. I’d blame lack of time, but I have it. Stingray has had his nose buried in Monster Hunter Vendetta the last few days, and I’ve been just flat uninspired and haven’t found a damn thing to write about.

If this site ever ticks over the one million hit marker, I’m totally commissioning Larry Correia to write the announcement.

Congrats, Larry!

Via Alan, a link to an article reporting on research that alleges writing longhand makes kids more intelligent and typing leaves them cognitively impoverished. Let’s take a look.

Here’s a look at how the brain and penmanship interact:

Writing by hand can get ideas out faster
University of Wisconsin psychologist Virginia Berninger tested students in grades 2, 4, and 6, and found that they not only wrote faster by hand than by keyboard — but also generated more ideas when composing essays in longhand.

I’m sure Marko would agree, as I do recall him expressing similar sentiments. His handwriting is beautiful, at that. What I would regard as the missing piece in this particular bit of data is the question of how good the kids’ typing skills were and what sort of teaching or training they’d had in typing; while the researcher and both articles lament that only an hour a week is spent on penmanship (an amount I would agree is inadequate if you’re making penmanship any kind of goal), they don’t state how much, if any time is spent on teaching typing as opposed to assuming the children pick it up through osmosis via that crazy technology generation.

I’m a member of that awkward generation that was primarily educated when handwriting was still the major means of getting ideas down and typing was that dreary phase in between that you put yourself through in order to present a paper acceptable to the teachers. I learned penmanship in grades 1-4 and it was decent if not exceptional, and I’d say I spent most of my efforts at writing in longhand until the latter half of middle school. My handwriting was legible, if not exceptional. By the time I got to college I spent almost all my time at actual idea generation and communication in typing, and handwriting had become a single-purpose skill- taking notes in lecture. (At the time laptops were still too big and heavy to be convenient in classrooms.) Over the course of four years, some spent with lecturers bent on fitting an hour and a half worth of content into fifty minutes, my penmanship devolved into a hasty scrawl decipherable by me and professional cryptologists, while my typing skills advanced to a speed and accuracy that would have gotten me a nice secretarial job thirty years ago. I need not devote any consciousness whatsoever to the physical process of typing these days; I think, and my hands transcribe.

Now? The only time I hand-write anything is postcards and phone messages. When I want to turn ideas into script, I sit down at the WordPress composition screen and turn on music, which shifts my mental mode from internet-browsing distractability to composition in this tab and using any other browser tabs for research, spellchecking, citation, and chasing down memories and facts. Functionally speaking, it works exactly like sitting in the library with a spiral notebook did when I was in the fifth grade, except much better, because I’ve been refining the process of research and writing for years. I cannot form or express ideas very well in longhand, because it takes me too long and too much of my brain is tied up with a relatively unfamiliar motor activity.

Option A: early childhood training in penmanship gave me the cognitive abilities to pick up typing as a skill and I would be better off than I am handwriting everything because tracing out letters rather than hitting corresponding symbol keys in a fashion that requires just as much fine motor skill and hand-eye coordination but does not involve the direct visual representation.

Option B: The brain becomes skilled at whatever you use it to do, and my brain has simply trained itself very well in the practice of whatever I was doing the most of at the time, which these days is typing.

In other research, Berninger shows that the sequential finger movements required to write by hand activate brain regions involved with thought, language, and short-term memory.

I’m considering devoting an entire blog category to the sheer volume of tautological brain-imaging research parasitizing scholarly journals.

A recent Indiana University study had one group of children practice printing letters by hand while a second group just looked at examples of A’s, B’s, and C’s. Then, both groups of kids entered a functional MRI (disguised as a “spaceship”) that scanned their brains as the researchers showed them letters. The neural activity in the first group was far more advanced and “adult-like,” researchers found.

“Participating in an activity generates more brain activity than passively watching things”. Why did they contrast making letters to looking at letters rather than active composition in handwriting versus active composition in typing using subjects with roughly equivalent skill levels?

Handwriting also affects other people’s perceptions of adults and children. Several studies have shown that the same mediocre essay will score much higher if written with good penmanship and much lower if written out in poor handwriting, says Vanderbilt University education professor Steve Graham. “There is a reader effect that is insidious,” he says. “People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting.” And the consequences are real: On standardized tests with handwritten sections, like the SAT, an essay deemed illegible gets a big zero.

I like how he refers to the legibility of ideas reflecting on their quality as “insidious”. If I were to transcribe the entire works of Shakespeare into Wingdings it would go from being moving and meaningful plays into gibberish. It’s well and good to have high-quality ideas, but the purpose of communication necessarily involves intelligibility to someone other than you. In other news, people will judge your typed communications poorly if you eschew paragraph breaks, TYPE IN ALL CAPS, use bright green characters on a hot pink background, or otherwise interfere with a reader’s ability to decipher you. Clarity counts.

Chinese and Japanese youths are suffering from “character amnesia,” says AFP’s Judith Evans. They can’t remember how to create letters, thanks to computers and text messaging. In China, the problem is so prevalent, there’s a word for it: “Tibiwangzi”, or “take pen, forget character.” “It’s like you’re forgetting your culture,” says Zeng Ming, 22. So closely are Chinese writing and reading linked in the brain, says Hong Kong University linguist Siok Wai Ting, that China’s reading ability as a nation could suffer.

Yeah, I can see how this would be a much bigger problem for an ideogram-based language in which the symbols themselves represent ideas rather than phonemes making up words that stand for ideas. This article and its WSJ companion aren’t entirely without a point; representing images and concepts by tracing them out by hand is a distinct cognitive skill and one that will deteriorate if not used. What I’m questioning is whether it’s a stand-in for the ability to have, express, and articulate ideas at all rather than one of multiple methods of doing so. It’s been observed before in rather more interesting (if you ask me) research demonstrating that speakers and writers of ideogram-based language have significantly different neural structuring of language than speakers and writers of alphabet-based languages do.

Again: the brain will wire itself around what you do. The choice is in what the final structure is and what it excels at doing, not development versus no development.

New touch-screen phones and tablets, like the iPhone and iPad, are providing a countervailing force, translating handwriting into digital letter forms or making writing practice fun (a $1.99 iPhone app called “abc PocketPhonics” rewards kids with “cheering pencils”). In Japan, an iPhone game called kanji kentei — a character quiz with 12 levels — has become a hit with all age groups.

An excellent example of “the brain will come to excel at what you do with it”. I went through typing classes, often with computer games, multiple times at points in my education, including years of requirement of papers being typewritten rather than handwritten. I would at all times have preferred to handwrite my papers because I was better at it, and at all points of enforced education my typing remained terrible. (I was the last student to fail the freshman typing class before passing it became required for the next class of freshmen.) Then my dad got us Air Warrior, an early online multiplayer game, and my ability to coordinate with my squad was dependent on my ability to type quickly and accurately. I went from hunt-and-peck to fluid touch-typing within weeks. (This was before the advent of text-speak as understood widely enough to be effective- had to be English or nothing.) After that came America Online, and I figured out that there was a universe of people who would take me for an adult as long as I wrote well- and after that the link between clear expression and typing was forever cemented for me.

Science may just be catching up with common sense
Heather Horn in The Atlantic Wire says that while all this research is fascinating, it mostly shows that “scientists are finally beginning to explore what writers have long suspected.” She notes a 1985 article in the Paris Review in which the interviewer asks novelist Robert Stone if he mostly types his manuscripts. His reply: “Yes, until something becomes elusive. Then I write in longhand in order to be precise. On a typewriter or word processor you can rush something that shouldn’t be rushed — you can lose nuance, richness, lucidity. The pen compels lucidity.”

Again, see Marko, but I regard this as something personally idiosyncratic and again related to what you train yourself to do. A great many writers would find my writing process to render concentration impossible, but it works excellently for me; I need music to occupy that corner of my brain that seems to have nothing better to do than disrupt my thought process unless given something to amuse, but it distracts Stingray and he makes me turn it off when he has to concentrate. I only use the multiple browser tabs to fact-check and clarify points I’m fuzzy on, but it easily distracts others and indeed they spend most of my day distracting me when I’ve not shifted into “composition” mindset. For me the process of generating ideas and arranging them into a coherent form is literally impossible without writing; I cannot produce outlines because I never know what the final shape of things will be until I’m at least halfway through writing it out.

Human brains are plastic, and the massive degree to which they can reorganize themselves to take advantage (or cut corners) of our environment is a species strength. By all means teach children penmanship- and for that matter basic drawing skills to use the hands to represent things in a more direct fashion. Stimulate them! Just don’t pretend that forming letters or characters by hand, in and of itself is required to produce an intelligent human, rather than giving them one set of tools to practice and express that intelligence.

In life, many people have conflicts, and many people are assholes. However, you have to achieve spectacular levels of asshole in order for your mundane douchebaggery to become worthy of time on the national news, but the Petkovs of Trenton, Michigan have achieved such heights of pointless personal unpleasantness.

How did they manage the feat of managing to legally behave like such epically elephantine pricks that Fox News became involved? Well, it seems they have something of an ongoing feud with the neighbors, whose origins are murky but apparently involved “things that were said” and escalated into police personal protection orders and domestic disturbance calls. This would not even rate as an episode of Cops, if it weren’t for the exact situation at hand and how they chose to provoke the offending neighbors.

The person whom they have the actual dispute with is apparently the mother of a woman who died at 24 from Huntington’s disease, and the grandmother of the seven-year-old child now living with this family, who is now also in the process of dying from Huntington’s disease, an inheritable and degenerative brain disease. There is no treatment and the disease itself involves slow brain death, which is unpleasant for the victim, to put it mildly. The Petkovs have chosen to advance their cause against the child’s grandmother by painting their truck with tombstones and putting a coffin in the back, as well as posting Facebook pictures of the dead woman in the arms of the grim reaper with her dying child’s faced superimposed over a crossbones. Jennifer Petkov then went on record saying she wasn’t sorry and did it “because it rubs her (grandmother of the dying child) ass raw”.

Many people asked if charges have been filed yet, as though it were a crime to merely be such a miserable cunt. This is America, and freedom of speech includes being a miserable pusbucket as long as you’re not actually harming anybody, with “traumatizing a dying child” still not falling under the definition of harm. While in times and places where civilization still operates inside the monkeysphere these people would most likely be quietly nudged off an iceberg, part of accepting a nation of laws includes accepting such antisociality so long as no laws are actually violated.

However, freedom of speech applies not solely to the Petkovs but also to every other person, which includes Anonymous. Anonymous isn’t a person or a group so much as it is the internet collective of misanthropic people with too much time on their hands, mainly concentrated in the /b/ section of 4chan. Sane people usually avoid /b/, but it’s such a force of gravity on the internet that anybody who has ever spent any time on said internet probably has over 9000 memes picked up from it, often without even being aware of the origin of the catchphrase or image. During the 5% of its time not spent exchanging porn and playing with MS Paint, Anonymous likes to find people or things to direct itself at. Occasionally this becomes awesome, sometimes just hilarious in a facepalm-inducing sort of way.

For whatever reason- most likely the lulz- the Petkovs are now in the crosshairs, with their address, full names, contact details, and a link to Jennifer’s place to employment happily disseminated to whatever inviduals would like to know them.

The Petkovs have issued a public apology and taken down the Facebook page. Their neighbors may forgive them, God may forgive them, and in a week almost all of the outraged will have forgotten them, but I suspect /b/ never will. There are more ways to ruin your own life than just legally.

We spent most of the day running around in Santa Fe on errands, and Vicious Circle is taking a night off for Phlegmmy’s birthday bash.

In other news, from here on out it is forbidden to use the song “Solsbury Hill” in a movie trailer. Now that it has been used to render The Shining a heartwarming family film, thus demonstrating that it can make any piece of crap look wholesome and heartwarming in a trailer, it is now retired.

Punishment will be carried out via public beating with a dead wombat. And yes, I intend to track down the makers of Life As We Know It, as soon as I’ve laid hands on that wombat.

Seeing as both New Mexico Senators are weak-willed pirate supporters, and Congressman Ben Ray Lujan wouldn’t approve of a cost-cutting measure even if it came with a bonus tax hike and a 300% increase in nanny-state programs, my Letter of Marque seems to have, ah, gotten lost in the mail.

I’ve decided it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.

Why? Because the pirates are now floating on a “Mothership from Hell”. Not only are they on a floating base larger than an aircraft carrier, but if I’m reading the article correctly, it contains $190,000,000 worth of crude oil. And is in a reasonably well-known location.

Senators, Congressman, y’all done fucked up. While trying to coax that letter out, I even offered to pay taxes on the spoils at least as well as a treasury secretary does, and still you turned up your nose. $190 million dollars, guarded by reactive targets. Those of you who commented when I sent the initial request for the letter than you had boats you were putting at my disposal, send pictures. Grab your ammo and rum, laddies, and let’s go get paid!