The last time I saw Oleg Kiselev was when we'd gone to LA and grabbed him and Monica and headed up to Santa Barbara We were going to look at orchid nurseries. Oleg wanted to stop at a cactus place "on the way". "On the way" like Florida is on the way to palm springs and never did get to the orchid place. But the cactus place was cool, it was in Carpinteria or some damn thing and looked like this picture. It was the biggest plant place I'd ever seen, about 6 or 8 football fields in size, 90 degrees and they simply had nearly every species. And for each species they had tons of them and they were all in bloom and looked just like this photo. you take a few steps and you'd see the same thing but in yellow. They must have had 1000 of each species and 1000 species.

We bought a box of cool looking plants mostly succulents mostly exotic look Euphorbia and spent about $80 or so. Fucking Oleg dropped $300 on what looked like a box of dead twigs covered in rose thorns. It looked more like a set from a Tim Burton movie done in shades of purple and brown than anything you'd expect to be a plant; most are green for one thing. This was about 91 or 92. Call me a liar, they came up to visit in 97 and brought their sprog, Rae Rae. Looks just like Oleg. Imagine a two year old Oleg running around gibbering madly. Those of you who've read his posts won't have a hard time imagining that. It's nice that he's still alive, so many of is didn't make it to the age of rockshop companies and selfie sticks.

The only reason I knew Oleg was Greg Laskin insisted I meet this Russian fish guy he knew; he'd found greg in the uucp maps and got a feed and asked Greg is there were any fish people. Greg rolled his eyes.

I'd worked for Greg twice and this was the first time. He was an arrogant prick but got way with it because he knew more than nearly everybody about hardware and software, self taught he had read everything and was in a class with dmr and djb; I've talked to all three and know them by their code and Greg was one of them.

Greg had put the first pc on the net by actually getting Xenix to work. He had a heart attack in early 1991 and by November of that year had passed away quietly; he'd gone out to dinner the night before with his boss and he'd called at 11 that night saying his blood sugar was off the scale and he was scared. I said go to the hospital then but I'm sure you'll be fine. He died in his sleep.

Officially he died of cardiomyopathy, or an enlarged heart. Usually it's a thick compact muscle but several things can cause it to be paper thin and enlarged. Greg was on a list for a transplant but he was a big guy and chain smoked so had to lose 100 pounds and did and quit smoking.

When he was in hospital the first time I lied and said I was his brother. I claim the defence of greater necessity on that one, he had no family and it didn't feel like a lie when I said it. Big guy, bad heart - Greg was no health food freak rest assured of that so nobody was surprised. I said so and the doctor said "that's not it. He had a virus".

o_O

"Dafuq kind of virus just does that to your heart?"

He implied a few did and that was it.

---

Well he didn't know he was it's just the way it worked out. Jon worked up the road from me in the marina. The American Killifish Association had it's convention in 1991 next door to the USC/ISI building in the marina. Small world; I'd moved there the year before and stood there that day on Pacific Coast Highway sun at my back* staring at these two buildings with the Pacific ocean in the background thinking by the holy claws of Klortho it is indeed a fine afternoon.

A decade later in what can only be described as a series of Forest Gump like coincidences it came to pass that Greg got a TCP connection to NASA/JPL (who'd named the machine Elroy not Feynman. What the hell was wrong with you people?) and one of us, greg or I had to go talk to the ISI people soon Greg had some ideas about DNS which has been out for oh, 4 years now and had something to do with the reason we had a connection to NASA.

But that idea and those plans died with greg and LA had a robust network now and I left Los Angeles. Six years later I'm on the phone trying to explain to a banker type that no the government doesn't run the domain name stuff actually an old neighbor of mine does here let's call him and he can tell you. Banker looked like somebody beams a dea rat into his mouth; I puled up some RFC pointe doubt to th guy the name and address, got the number, called and john answered and explained to Howard Finkelstein that yeah it sorta ended up that I run it and used to be on a piece of paper on my desk but now it's on a laptop but the root stops here.

I don't often win an argument (mostly because he has the good sense to not argue with me) but when I do I gloat and his reaction was worse: they will if they don't know no matter what he thinks. Such arrogance I thought. But he might be right I thought as well. So the domain mess was no surprise really and we can and have what-if'd that to death.

I saw Jon again in Geneva at IFWP and as Dan Stenberg pointed out he didn't look well, he looked exhausted and sounded tired. We'd been walking all over Geneva all day and it's in the fucing Alps and is anything but flat; we walked from the zoo to the water to downtown past Patek Philippe and back to the holiday inn which in geneva means "versaille" not the beer soak chap place in Torrance where the give you the key to an occupied room at 1 am and so sorry ma'am, sir get back to whatever in the name of all that's holy it is that you are doing, and scarred for life you get the right key - that doesn't work, but take heart, third time lucky. No it wasn't like that the Holiday Inn in Geneva is like, um, Versailles, or Hearst Castle, but twice as expensive, home of the $15 cokes and this was fifteen years ago.

we were a little sore and a little tired but not exhausted. Jon had been in meetings all day and looked like he's climbed the Matterhorn. Breathing hard like he'd ran a race, his pot belly was huge now, everyone thought he did not look like a well man.

Jon died of a heart attack between the time he was supposed to have been put in charge of ICANN and the time ICANN began. He was out hiking in the desert.

Scuse me, the Jon I saw 6 months prior didn't look like he was in any shape to go hiking down to the lake to the restaurant Rutkowski insisted we all try (he was so right, anyone have photos from there, I can't find mine any more, dead drived) and in fact he was about the only one not there.

wtf was Jon dong hiking in the fucking desert by himself 6 months later? Somebody needs to explain to me how this makes any sense. But no matter, he's dead, heart attack.

Greg's plan was killing everyone in its path so far. It had one more to go though, Tressa died of a failed hearti the emerg entrance at BGH across the road one morning in the wee hours. She never met Jon but knew who he was; she's been around and a certain ITI guy still owes her a carton of Davidoff's from a certain bet they made in a bar in DC one night. Good times. She died five years ago.

These were not particularly unhealthy people, all died of heart out of nowhere. Granted cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the #1 killer of Americans (cancer is second, the medical system is third) but I gotta say I don't actually know anybody that died of cancer and three of the most significant people I know each progressively closer to me died of heart.

Numerically that's odd and the law of large numbers says that's probably happening to more than me.

*Poetic license, the sun is over the water in California.

I found an article yesterday that hit me in the face. The viral disease that took out Greg's hears is not so misunderstood at all.

Around the time we developed the technology to do so we were able to find out what molecules were in our blood. There are maybe 50,000 chemicals in the body and some are obvious: iron, it's in the blood and all sorts of other stuff. Most are big stupid names and are organic (carbon containing) molecules, they're special because we're carbon based life forms on this planet, it's the chemical commonality that binds all life on earth. Then we have the metals which can be divided into three categories: 1) stuff like iron, we need it and will die without it, 2) aluminum which has no use in the body anywhere, not even one molecule and each molecule of f is infinitesimally harmful and 3) stuff like cobalt which is toxic as fuck but you can't have vitamin b12 without it and without that, you die (after you go insane first)

Meet our new friend Selenium. It wasn't until about the 1950s we took it out of the "wtf is THIS?" pile and dropped it in the "essential in trace quantities" pile and we began to look at what it does. It's implicated in the worst viral disease and in the early nineties on usenet early research reports were posted about it. The words I read yesterday were rather shocking and I'm paraphrasing here: "selenium prevents that viral disease that causes cardiomyopathy". Oh, Greg. Maybe Jon. Who knows who else?

We know this stuff?

Try to convince me anybody is actually in charge of health in the United states, I dare you. Seems like y'all are very good at the prescription industry but I gotta say, these people would have been better off with leeches and bloodletting than the care and attention these people received.

Some of these chemicals in the body occur in very tiny amounts. But if they're absent, death. If the're low, illness. We can only measure a few. Those tricorder things on star trek are needed in ways we can begin to comprehend.

Here's the kicker. What is heart disease so bad in the LA area (it is).

Smog. Here's how: selenium is very reactive which is why it's useful to us. Normal plants use trace amounts from the soil, we eat that and get the microgram or two we need to make selenized versions of various human amino acids. There's cysteine but there's also selenocysteine. A lot of the amino acids have selenized versions. There molecules are catalysts that make other compounds many of which are not optional parts of the human biochemical machine.

That's what's supposed to happen. Instead, chemicals in the air from smog, mostly sulphuric and nitric oxides, and we're talking parts per trillion here, react with selenium and it's no longer available to the plant this it has less ans we get less. This has been going on for decades. Finland in the 60s amended all the soil in the country to boost health and this phenomenon of smog making selenium unavailable is one of the ways pollution kills 7 million annually according to the BBC.

Although smog did not cause the HIV and EBOV outbreaks in Africa it does make them worse, selenium is essential to recovery from these two diseases that were first discovered at the beginning of the US automobile golden age of the late fifties and on.

The expansion of the Belgian congo as it was known at the time by rail and car proved invaluable later on. Exhumation of corpses of ebola victims revealed they had been all over the congo and had followed the rail. This all came from one person who ate dinner that wasn't cooked quite right and had the ebola virus in it a very ancient and rare virus found only in small pockets specifically in deep jungle. It is absolutely a jungle disease for reasons that are too complicated to go into here. But at one point it jumped from primate (or bat or antelope) to man to a man that was a few molecules short of enough selenium to protect him from the virus, an event that occurred nearly a dozen times again. Is it possible without the smog we brought into the ebola breeding grounds depleted it enough that it lowered serum selenium to the point where it's just over the edge and not enough to work any more? Impossible to say, but it's not impossible.

Nature always exists in a balance under great tension; ecological pressures are the strongest forces in nature. When you start spraying chemical soup into an area the ecosystem will mount a defense.

The ebola virus is ancient, it predates nearly all life on earth, is barely a virus, is unlike all other 1100 families in kingdom viridae and if you told me it didn't originate on earth I'd have no trouble believing it. The signs of life we found on Mars ae closed to normal earth life, they're in salmon and breast milk and algae. Ebola is like a bad experiment on wrong in Darth Vader's lab and it got out. It's my opinion given enough time a virus like that could wipe out the universe. What it does and the way it works is unique and is about as pure as a weapon as you could design, it's just brilliantly efficient.

Because this filovirus has picked up a 21st century human gene which it uses against us which is what makes it to lethal. We didn't cause this normally benign virus to become pathogenic, it did that on its own, but most viruses steal your DNA or mRNA.

It's a good thing our flirtation with burning fossil fuels is winding down, it's turning this planet into Deathworld.

I have a really big problem with people dying because they have something not too different from scurvy. When millionths of a gram of a cheap chemical are he difference between life and death and the best we can do is say the big push in iraq is going well there's something very very very wrong.

The first mandats of any government is the health and safety of the people and the omens and homeland especially second Israel sows the former are the most important the latte is fungible and replaceable.

We have a big list of minimum levels of various things we check for. Either it's wrong or it's not being used. End of story.

I can't point to any great medical progress other than surgery in my lifetime and to realize so many deaths are trivially preventable is frankly rather painful.

Our obsession with naming anenemy they convincing th country he's evil and all is lost is now perpetual as is a standing army; from Julius Caesar to George Washington to Eisenhower all warning against what we're doing now and America is now crumbling i the way those three said it would.

Commensurate with this is the decline of the brick and mortar store, we just don't need as many any more and jobs have to move into less physical and more virtuals realms to stay current. And from these ashes a new 21st century will rise, phoenix like.

But the mandate is still "protect the heath and safety of the people and the homeland" and we have an over etching department of homeland security that's never actually done a fucking thing ever and we have a medical system that is the third leading cause of death.

I have to say that on paper that does not comport well with the idea the health of the people is important. We actually pay people to kill us unnecessarily.

Diabetics are used to testing their blood. In the future we'll wear transducers of some sort so you can pull p an app and see what your settings are today. You might notice for example magnesium is low so you choose an avocado over an orange at breakfast.

Or something. We gotta do something, we ow them that.

The best and the brightest and most beloved of us are taken early by things we learned to prevent decades prior.

That's complete and utter failure by any objective criteria and as Klensin said of telcos once: those of us with the greatest capacity to solve the problem have the least incentive to do so."

Fine. Tear them down then.

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