Atomic Nerds

This is Major. Today she’s about nine and a half weeks old, and she’s the remaining puppy from Kang’s last (most recent and really last, I plan to spay her as soon as her milk finishes drying up) litter.

The reason Major is still here, and why she’s getting a post here as opposed to having been the first or second puppy sold, is that she has a congenital heart condition. If it had been something straightforward like a PDA, I would have ponied up for the corrective surgery and sold her once she had recovered; unfortunately, the consultation I had with a veterinary cardiologist revealed what she’s actually got is pulmonic stenosis, a different and much less common (the cardiologist commented she’d simply never seen it in an Akita before now) issue. We do not yet know how severe the stenosis is- she was too young at the time to get a good picture- but the cardiologist suggested it wasn’t likely to be mild. We’ll know when she is old enough to have another, clearer ultrasound done in another month or two. She also has a defect in the wall between her ventricles, which the cardiologist said may either be making things worse or actually helping; apparently they often occur together and the treatment for THAT defect on its own is giving the patient an artificial case of stenosis. Apparently Major is very medically interesting! I could have done with boring, personally.

Major has no clinical signs that there is anything wrong with her heart. She was diagnosed as young as she was (around five weeks) because she had a loud heart murmur (stenosis apparently produces very dramatic murmurs) and I wanted to know what was going on. Depending on how severe it is she is increasingly likely to show such signs the bigger she gets. Right now she is a very active and exploratory puppy who appears normal in all respects unless you have a stethoscope.

Depending on how severe the stenosis turns out to be and what the topography of her heart is, there are options for treatment and prognosis. At the least she is very likely to need beta blockers, ACE inhibitors, and yearly cardiac ultrasounds for the rest of her life. Depending on how things shake out she may be a good candidate for surgery. The surgery only helps, it does not cure; it has a success rate, with success being defined as “successfully turned a severe or moderate stenosis into a moderate or mild one”, of about 75%. (Apparently some patients simply heal back the way they were.) Like pretty much all cardiac surgeries for dogs, it would require a veterinary cardiologist with some specialized equipment and cost somewhere in the range of 3-5k. The outcomes for severe stenosis vary all over the map; anywhere from death at around a year of age to living into their teens and dying of something completely unrelated to their heart. Prognosis and outcomes get significantly better with treatment and surgery, but a dog diagnosed as such will always have a risk of early death, the more severe the stenosis the bigger the risk.

Because of all this I’m looking to place little Major without taking money for her, unless said money is for transport expenses. If treated as I believe appropriate she will be far from a “free” dog, though exactly what the costs will be is pretty variable and hard to predict now. I am not willing to euthanize a pup with a perfectly lovely temperament who is as likely to life a full life as an abbreviated one; she will stay here as long as it takes for us to find the right home for her. While she is here she will receive whatever treatment is appropriate for her at the time and be raised and trained as a normal puppy. We do not want to keep her; three Akitas is more than enough Akita, and four would be doing a disservice to her, us, and the other dogs, but I’m aware it may take me awhile to find that home.

If it were not for her heart condition she would have been the first puppy placed; she was first pick by temperament for more than one person or family waiting for a pup out of this litter. She is confident, friendly and social even when stressed (she has been very sweet with all the veterinary personnel she has met so far), fearless, and very bright. She is easy to handle, talkative (she has some sort of comment about nearly everything, though she is not barky), and was the big explorer of the litter- she was always the first to dive into anything new and was the first to escape the whelping box as well. She is as well on her way to housebroken (she is a house puppy, just like every other pup raised here) as it’s possible for a nine week old pup to be, and while she is here she will learn everything I consider mandatory for a civilized housedog to learn- come, sit, down, leave it, mine (the response to back away from anything on the floor that a human moves purposefully toward). She will also be crate trained and will be some degree into learning to walk nicely on a leash, depending on how old she is when she is placed.

Heart condition or no, she is an Akita, and will come with every plus and minus that breed normally has. She was the smallest pup in the litter and while she did do some catching up in size to her siblings once transitioned to solid food, that was only up to a point and I now suspect she will always be a smaller bitch- in which “smaller” means likely to finish up at 70-80 pounds instead of 90-100 like her mother is and her sisters are likely to be. Still most people’s definition of a Big Damn Dog. Her mother, brother, and a distant cousin all coexist happily in a mixed group that includes one intact female and one mature intact male (i.e. our little pack here), so she comes from a line that is really quite good with other dogs by Akita standards- but she is still an Akita, which means she’s likely to be relatively dominant with other dogs even when well socialized. (Her mother is THE alpha bitch- I worry less about the young intact male when it comes to strange dogs.) She is also likely to come with prey drive- and the longer she stays here, the more likely it is that Kang will teach her to be a ruthless hunter, which is either a plus or a minus depending on your point of view. (Minus if your neighbor has cats that roam; plus if you want every varmint that comes within your property lines eliminated, which is what Kang does.) She is pretty biddable- again by Akita standards. If you want a dog that lives to please you, this is not the breed for you.

She will grow up to be a guard dog. She is social enough she won’t eat strangers on sight, but as she matures she will start to be suspicious of them and she will need socialization and guidance to channel those instincts productively and install good Identify Friend/Foe software. If she is like her mother in some other respects she will also be a pretty decent ad-hoc therapy dog, seeking out the sick and hurting- but THAT won’t be apparent until she is fully mature. She has had lots of early socialization and exposure to new people and new kinds of sights and noises and other novelties, but like any pup she will continue to need it as she grows to develop into a stable adult. Her parents both like children, but lacking any of my own and any belonging to close friends and relations, she has not met any yet.

So far several people have been interested, but everyone interested so far has either lacked the financial resources or the emotional resources to deal with the potential realities and costs of her heart condition, or else with the part where she’s an Akita and even a healthy Akita is still a pretty big undertaking. (It has been a pretty even split which was the deal-breaker.) Thus I am widening the net. If you are interested in little Major please contact us at the blog e-mail (nerdsatomic at gmail dot com), which I promise will actually be checked; I am happy to chat more about the breed, her parents, her condition, or her.

…but I think I found the lost recipe for Original Bear Fucker. On a shopping list tucked in a drawer I was cleaning out of all places. Those of you who know what that means, cross your fingers. I’ll brew it shortly and confirm. Those of you who don’t… well, just take my word for it that the world got a little brighter (and possibly blurrier, later on) today.

Via Tam, an essay by John Ringo (of modern-day pulp science fiction fame) on, apparently, the coming zombie apocalypse and how it’s apparently going to be precipitated by bitter geeky men with kitchen-table biochemistry kits engineering homemade viruses to turn women (specifically blonde women with big tits) into their sex slaves. If you wish to read for context you should probably read the whole thing. As Ringo tends to be, it’s pretty highly readable.

When I read it initially I was pretty sure this was a troll, and an entertaining one, but I am assured by others he is either serious or may as well be as the distinction is without meaningful difference. The basic premise is pretty sound- the idea that biochemistry and nanotechnology are advancing to the point where homemade and tailor-designed superbugs may well represent a serious threat, one that is more likely to come from the bored, antisocial, and too intelligent for everyone else’s good individual rather than from state-sponsored or radical religious or political entities.

The problem with the article is where he goes with it next. Excerpted, at some length:

The general trend will go like this. Professor Doktor Herr Apocalyptica will invent a virus that can do something to humans. (Well, in fact, it does it to rats. But humans just happen to have the same brain chemistry.) Not just kill them, do something to them. It may, for example, combining the fields of neurology, psychology and virology, cure depression. No more need for Aderol or NoDepressol or whatever. Your neurology is now reset to perfect normal. There will be others that can do other things. Make you smarter, more socially able, less nervous, shy, crowd phobic, what have you. Make you need almost no sleep. (I’d love that one.)

Then some grad student trying to get their masters or doctorate will create a new virus (as many will be created because when you have a breakthrough like that it creates all sorts of easy, for values of easy, graduate projects) that, just for a laugh, makes any girl who is infected fall in love (or at least lust although love is possible as well.) with him. If you DON’T think a biology geek won’t write that one, you don’t understand male bio geeks.

How does that work? you ask, sceptically.

One proven aspect of male/female sexual interaction, especially (at least so far) for women, is pheromones. All people emit them and they have various effects most of which researchers are still trying to sort out. The geek identifies his specific suite of ‘love’ (lust because they are alot more about reproduction than permanence) pheromones. Then writes a virus that does a series of actions. First it only affects women. (He can, of course, narrow this down if he’s good enough. Only ‘hot’ babes for values of ‘hot.’ And I’m assuming, possibly a bad assumption, that the grad student is a he.) Second it does a series of things. It rewrites them to ‘like’ his pheromones. When sensing his pheromones their libido is enhanced. If he’s smart, their capacity for long-term critical decisionmaking is degraded (as it is in males by sexual cues.) If he really wants to fuck with them (not just…) it triggers massive release of oxytocin and vassopressin (look them up.)

So when a woman gets a whiff of the guy, they can’t get enough. They act like twilight fans seeing a sparkly vampire. Sex must occur and they must have him FOR ALL TIME.

OK. There’s more explanation of how this scenario is meant to work, with a lot more background detail of genetics research*, but given that arguing with a science fiction author about the plausibility and accuracy of future technology is like arguing with an impressionist painter about color fidelity, it’s not really worth picking at. The big, glaring, plaid elephant in the living room here is pheromones, whose use in this piece really demand a Morbo.

The only aspect of human pheromone research that is “proven” is that they have been proven to affect the vomeronasal organ in humans (but not the olfactory tissues- we really are relatively smell-blind, at least to effects that subtle), and some of them have been proven to have gender-specific effects. (My personal favorite one is the male pheromone that gets other men, but not women who remain oblivious, to avoid particular restroom stalls.) There’s a pretty good, and pretty exhaustive, review of the literature on human pheromones and sexual attraction here; if you are interested in the subject I highly recommend it, as it’s a good primer on what’s been done so far and what the strengths and weaknesses of the obtained results are. The upshot is that some strong evidence of pheromone effect on menstrual regulation has been found, but the sexual attraction results are either negative, inconclusive, or positive but riddled with methodological issues. If one were to apply the same tactics to researching the arousal potential of Nora Ephron movies, one would likely find a similar or stronger correlation.

The thing of it is, though, that if human pheromones really worked like Ringo seems to think they do, it would not be an even slightly mysterious phenomenon or a recent discovery. This would be a gross, obvious effect that everyone had known about since the beginning of recorded history. The only animals that pheromones actually work this way on- provoking strong, reliable sexual attraction that produces an immediate behavioral effect- are, for the most part, insects. If humans worked like butterflies and flies do Ringo’s scenario would be tantalizingly plausible; but they simply don’t, and we know this not because of the research that’s been done on pheromones so far, but because no known humans actually act like this, nor have they ever that anyone’s ever reliably witnessed. Even mammals for whom definite and strong pheromonal signaling effects are known don’t work like this; for mammals, pheromones seem to play a strong role in estrous and menstrual cycles (and indeed, that’s the only effect in humans that convincing and reliably reproducible evidence seems to come for), but not so much in direct sexual attraction and mating.

Boringly, it just doesn’t make any evolutionary sense for a mammal to work like this, especially not a mammal like humans that lives with lots of other members of the same species and has a wide pool of mates to choose from at any given time, and whose true reproductive bottleneck isn’t mate availability or quality but the sheer amount of resources that must go into raising each and every offspring. When your reproductively mature life stage lasts only days or even hours, it makes sense for mating to be a powerful overriding drive that completely hijacks all of your behavior and is controlled primarily by chemical signaling; the life history of insects that work like this is driven by very brief periods of frantic activity with the nearest available mates that result in big population booms of which only a few will survive, by good luck, to reproduce themselves. If you invest years of your own life and massive amounts of energy and nutrition merely to raise a single offspring to reproductive maturity, it makes no sense at all to be chemically compelled to fling yourself at the nearest correctly-smelling mate- especially if you are surrounded at nearly all times with a wide variety of perfectly workable options. This isn’t a barrier that Moore’s law can overcome; in order for increasingly precise and powerful technology to be viable, the underlying structure that it works on has to exist in the first place. Ringo’s scenario is no more plausible than the idea that it’s possible to engineer lobsters into an army of coordinated stealth underwater computer hackers.

What’s worse, the only thing individual about pheromones that we’ve really found is the major histocompatibility complex; even if one were to target that in their “love virus”, the only thing it would actually accomplish is making the targets particularly interested OR particularly DISinterested in you depending on their current phase in menstrual cycle and whether or not they were on hormonal birth control at the time.

It’s a fun scenario. Given that Ringo tends to be infectiously readable, and he’s right enough about the nature of male biogeeks (which is why there’s two to three times as much research on the response of women to male pheromones as the other way round, even though the research on men that’s been done has shown as much measurable effect), I’d probably read it, though maybe not pay money for it. But as a “I’m totally not kidding, this is how the zombie apocalypse will happen” scenario… sorry John, blonde cheerleader sex zombies are no more plausible now than they were in seventies exploitation drive-ins.

*Although the one human genetics researcher of my actual “I can just ring you up and explain my latest wild hair” acquaintance ranted for several minutes on the subject of RACIAL GROUP GENETICS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! as well how pretty much everything Ringo’s describing as target traits are massively polygenic affairs that simply can’t be targeted that way or any other remotely plausible virus-engineering way. So, you know. Take with an entire pillar of salt.

Spider lives inside woman’s ear for five days.

I would name mine Carl and take him to stare at the light above the sign at Arby’s, and howl at the sky in terror and awe.

“I have a gun you know.”
“Well lah-dee-dah.”
“A?”

Of the 2013 KTKC beer raffle is…. Maureen V! Thank you deeply to all of you who kicked in on the beer production. We didn’t quite hit the discount goal, so LabRat will remain searching for her muse un-hobbled, and last seen with a flashlight, a pick-axe, and a bag of thermite somewhere in Northern Saskatchewan. Maureen, check your inbox this afternoon and we’ll start designing your tipple.