terrorist group infects yeast headed to the U.S with a lethal, undiscovered (by the Americans) virus. Hero works from the inside of the group to find the vaccine to the virus.
And the hero works undercover at the Coors brewery.
In other words, it would make a lot more sense to "infect" imported oil, steel, or perhaps furniture.
I remember thinking it was a shame they ruined it with that gratuitous urination gag.
P.S. We own a packet of fancy champagne yeast. Also, San Francisco sourdough starter apparently has to be imported regularly. After about 6 weeks, the local yeast overwhelms it.
[This message has been edited by franc li (edited December 07, 2006).]
quote:
The virus was reconstructed from tissues of victims from 1918. Besides the Public Health Agency of Canada’s lab in Winnipeg, it exists only at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Why humans do some of the things we do is really remarkable. I never had a plausabilty problem with Jurassic Park . If we could clone and reproduce Dinosaurs some idiot WOULD and then scratch his head and wonder why they were trying to feed on humans.
What I found more troubling was the report a few days ago about genetic engineering for "defects." The case at hand was a couple with dwarfism who wanted to ensure that any offspring would be physically simliar to them. While it raises an interesting discussion about "normal" the whole genetic enginerring concept makes my skin crawl. Sure, we'd lose serious birth defects but we'd also lose Einstein, Mozart and quite possibly what makes us human.
Global warming, if you believe the threory, isn't going to kill us. We are.
Oops, ranting. Never mind. . .
Yes, and the implictions of it would make a great story.
...um, I mean 
Yeah.
Because nobody knew WHY that flu killed so many. Understanding the virus could help in preventing a future flue pandemic.
I think that some scientists just like the rush of handling something that could wipe out millions of people. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Science is cool
The story would start with a convention, in which a group of people who have no direct connection with each other are brought together by a guy who hired them all, individually, to do various things. Some people were software designers, others were data records collectors, programmers, hackers, communications specialists and others.
The guy who hired all of them had brought them together to announce that the project was finished. What he showed them was a program that displayed and contained every transaction over a thousand US dollars being made at that very moment. It also contained the records of every transaction made in the last six years. With it, someone could see every detail of where any individual, institution or government was spending money. The whole story should revolve around the implications of that kind of knowledge, where corporate and government morality is made crystal clear, and how dirty they all actually look.
Well?
I mean, obviously the people gathered together are hardly some kind of blushing innocents, right? So are they planning to release this data somehow? How are they going to give it credibility without simply handing themselves over to the authorities for the commission of the crimes involved in getting this info? And so what? How many people in this world are unaware of the nature of money?
Or are you going to paint an entirely fictional accusation against a specific group? It's easy enough to write a story in which all your political enemies are funded by satanist diamond tycoons or whatever, which is the entire reason for the fourth question I asked.
My thought is that if you were to really trace every transaction of over a thousand dollars, you'd very rapidly discover that the data is so complex as to be meaningless in it's raw form.
No insult intended, it just struck me funny as I read down through the posts.
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited January 30, 2007).]
quote:I thought it was the in that book written by the woman whose name was almost but not quite Pina Colada.
it's obvious from the death statistics
I'm not sure if the virus is that safe in the two labs when the book described exactly how and where to get your own sample. Maybe Global Warming will save us from all the frozen corpses carrying the 1918 flu in the arctic.
Of course, it's possible that the virus they managed to synthesize is actually more deadly than the original. The 1918 flu didn't kill a lot of people with less robust immune systems, but apparently the synthetic version can kill even without the overactive immune response. Using a mild immunosuppressant only delays death and shifts the cause from immune response to out of control viral levels.
The premise is that of all the people who have had some involvement in the project, only a few people are aware of how many people have contributed, what they contributed, and what kind of scale this project encompasses.
It allows for a genuine, clear look on motivation, without any filters besides what a human mind brings to it.
The point comes from the implications of being able to quantitatively surmise the motives of an organization or a country based on its spending. What it truly is, and the moral implications of knowing it.
Do they make it public? Does the knowledge alter their perception of the world they live in? Do they act on that knowledge, is this knowledge that countries or organizations want to be known? Is there a dramatic difference between presented ideals and spending habits?
quote:
"Like Robin Hood, we steal from the rich and give to the poor.""Who were you going to give that money too?"
"Us. We're poor."
Most governments, bureaucracies, and corporations already know how to make their large scale spending look like it's on the up and up. You have to dig out specific instances of abuse, like the money for "fundraising efforts" that has been used to buy an enormous mansion with a ballroom for the CEO. Even huge abuses like that are difficult to spot just from looking at financial records. After all, if the CEO has the property in the name of the foundation, and the only connection on paper (or in the database) is that the property manager happens to be hired at the discretion of that CEO's administrative assistant, then what have you got?
Bubcus, that's what. Er, "Bubcus" is the nick of one of the demons that works "outre gluttony and deceit", in case you don't know
The IRS is regularly checking the returns of these people for any hint that they've screwed up enough to be prosecuted. Sure, they're shifty bureaucrats themselves, but they're also pros and they look like heroes if they can bust someone for this kind of thing. But the accountants and management on the other side are also pros.