Good night, sleep tight.

You can be sure that all's well with the world in terms of natural disasters, humanitarian tragedies and political or diplomatic folly when the biggest item on the news this week is about a (wait for it) bed bug "epidemic". (I love the double-entendre of that Reuters title, by the way. I hope the sub-editor got a bonus for that one.)
The original article (PDF) on which all the news stories were based is naturally a little less thrilling and a lot more factual, and is interesting from an etymological point of view, as well as an entomological one. (I'll pause to allow readers to check that I have these the right way around.)

The article refers to

pest control companies ... experiencing a true worldwide bed bug pandemic.

(My italics.)
Compare this to the paraphrasing in all the news articles:

Australia is suffering a bed-bug epidemic ... The Australian outbreaks are part of a global epidemic

(My italics again.)

I can see three possible reasons for this word substitution:
1. The journalists think epidemic and pandemic are synonyms.
2. The journalists had never heard of pandemic and assumed the scientist made a mistake in his article.
3. The journalists thought that their readers would not understand what a pandemic was, or would not be sufficiently alarmed, so they chose a more recognisable and presumably scary word.

In fact the reverse is true, and, not surprisingly, the scientist was using the terms correctly, because a pandemic indicates that both the area involved and the population affected is much larger that in an epidemic. As WiseGeek helpfully puts it,

... epidemics that grow out of hand due to the nature of the disease and other factors, turn into pandemics.

As a footnote, an amusingly parochial interpretation of the term "pandemic" can be found in "The Arizona Republic", which proudly reported that

... the bugs are returning to beds throughout the country, including in Arizona.

I spy, with ...

As countless other sticky-beaks have done before me, I frittered away several hours today using Google Earth to swoop down onto all the places I've lived, or visited, or even just heard about. It is rivetting stuff, and quite addictive.
What amused me nearly as much as the vertiginous dips and dives was the apparently random nature of the resolution. Here am I, in a small, semi-rural, outer-metropolitan suburb on the unfashionable side of a vast continent, and I can clearly see my garden shed (admittedly a bit fuzzy, but still identifiable), and the paths where I walk my dogs through nearby bushland, and even the graffiti on a council water tank. Using the tilt feature, I can identify the steepest parts of my daily walk, and make a mental note not to bother exploring that other path because it looks far too difficult. All useful stuff, but surely not of great interest to whoever pays for the satellite?
But when I try to hover over friends in the SW of England, or the NW states of the USA, where the population density is almost unimaginable by Western Australian standards, I find the closest I can get is a blurry distinction between urban and rural land use. Only very large roads and rivers can be seen, and perhaps the suggestion of residential areas as distinct from industrial ones. Certainly no buildings are identifiable at all, and yet these are areas one could imagine being of greater interest, whether for boring urban planning reasons or for intriguing security ones.

Ahh. Maybe that's the answer. I live in a sufficiently peaceful and uninteresting part of the world that the images collected incidentally while on the way to somewhere more vital can be released to everyone, everywhere. Well that's fine by me, and if you tell me when you'll be dropping in, I'll make sure I have the kettle on. :-)

Birds and bird-brains

I went to a wonderful talk last weekend, by an entertaining fellow from Birds Australia, and he made one of those observations which are almost universal truths. He said that unless great self-control is exercised, when someone spots a bird (or plane, landmark, or anything requiring the use of the binoculars hanging around the neck), that person will look down at the binoculars before raising them to the eyes. In the process, of course, the object has moved or otherwise become invisible, and it often takes some time to find it again.
His point was that we know where the binoculars are, so there is absolutely no need to look down to "find" them. We should keep our eyes on the bird or whatever, and raise the binoculars to our eyes. Of course! But a quick survey of friends and acquaintances confirmed that we all look down first. This sort of self-evident fact can easily make my day.

Of course it can just as quickly be unmade by yet more proof (as if it were needed) that people have more money than sense. I was at a party last night, and one of the other guests (obviously unaware that I was a doctor) was regaling us with details of her "new" diet and health regime. Less than fascinating stuff at the best of times, but I had to snap back from my daydream when she announced derisively that "My doctor tried to tell me that I was wasting my money on these [insert phony chemical name] herbal pills and the special liquid I have to drink before each meal." I was very well behaved, and resisted the urge to shout "Hear Hear!", but fortunately someone asked her what they cost. "Oh, they're very expensive," she replied proudly. "But I think you only get what you pay for." Right.