It's Monday, 1/7/2008, 14:19 and this Web page is finally finished. This is largely an analog version of Back of the Book! We managed to get through the program without printouts from the computer, just notes hand written in pencil and fountain pen on loose leaf paper. Gosh, how amazing. I've finally gotten the edited version of the audio that we played of the big Finance Committee posted below.

Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of many of the WBAI LSB meetings? Well, I do.

There's a regular LSB meeting scheduled for December 27^th at 7:00 PM, location to be announced.

WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.

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WBAI has an official Web stream of what's on the air at any time! You can go here and pick which type of stream you want! If this stream isn't working let me know. It was working all right at 9:44 PM last night.

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WBAI is archiving the programs! Just go here and you'll be able to listen to the program any time for the next couple of weeks. Unfortunately, Back of the Book is not one of the programs that you can download, you can only listen to it on line. But maybe someone will change that at some point. NOTE: The archives have not always been behaved properly. We can't guarantee their condition. If this Back of the Book program isn't archived I'll post an archive myself.

I'm glad to announce that with a new person doing the archives Back of the Book and Carrier Wave are sometimes properly named in the archive, and if they're not then there's a note about it. Of course I'd recommend that you just listen to both programs in this time slot!

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This will be a mostly analog radio program tonight. My computer won't see the printer anymore so I can't print things out. My video card died the other day, and I was lucky to scrounge one out of a junked computer that someone else was throwing out. But that video card is producing horizontal gray lines across the screen, which I know from experience means that the chips have been thermally stressed, and that video card is not going to last long at all. So the hunt for a cheap video card is on this coming week.

All of this means that I'm going to be doing this program with more reliance on hand written notes. We'll see how the program goes.

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For a hundred years or more scientists and medical doctors have wondered about the seasonality of influenza. Well, now some scientists have come up with a description of what happens that fits with experience.

The question is: why is the influenza virus so prevalent in the Winter months?

Scientists from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York have found that the influenza virus is more stable, and more able to hang around in the air where people can breathe it in and be infected by it, in the Winter months because it's colder and less humid then!

They were able to study hamsters, because they'd read that hamsters had died in the 1918 flu pandemic. It turns out that hamsters are one of the few animals other than humans that can be infected with influenza. So they were able to use hamsters to test the conditions under which influenza spread most effectively.

It turns out that a temperature of 41° F. influenza is very stable. And if it's also dry, a 20% relative humidity favors the virus the most, the virus can float about where it can be breathed in for a longer period of time, making it more likely that people will in fact breathe it in and become infected.

At 80% relative humidity the virus apparently can't propagate at all. The extra moisture in the air starts to condense on the virus particle and it falls to the ground.

So maybe this new information can be used to fight the influenza bug that hits every year.

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We're also going to talk about some WBAI related stuff on the air tonight. Oh, the finances are not at all good. And if you're expecting a premium, it may be delayed.

There was an important meeting of the Pacifica National Board's Finance Committee on December 10, 2007. At that meeting there was a report from the WBAI working group, which is working on dealing with WBAI's financial crisis. Click here to go to the page with a short audio clip of that working group's report along with a roundup of what else happened at that meeting.

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The Winter Solstice occurred at 1:08 AM (ET) on Saturday, December 22, 2007. For more seasonal dates click here.

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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even now that the gag rule has been lifted. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.

Probably the most popular list that's sprung up is the “NewPacifica” mailing list. This one is very lively and currently includes over 400 subscribers coast to coast.

Being lively, of course, it sometimes also gets a bit nasty. All sorts of things are happening on this list and official announcements are frequently posted there.

You can look at the NewPacifica list here, and you can join the list from that Web page too. If you subscribe to the “NewPacifica” mailing list you will receive, via E-mail, all of the messages which are sent to that list.

There is the option to receive a “digest” version of the list, which means that a bunch of messages are bundled into one E-mail and sent to you at regular intervals, this cuts down on the number of E-mails you get from the list. You will also be able to send messages to the list.

This list also has a Web based interface where you can read messages and from which you can post your own messages.

There is also the more WBAI specific “Goodlight” Web based message board. It is sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as “the bleepin' blue board,” owing to the blue background used on its Web pages. This one has many people posting anonymously and there's also an ancillary “WBAI people” board that's just totally out of hand.

When the computer in Master Control is working we sometimes have live interaction with people posting on the “Goodlight Board” during the program.

Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Carrier Wave alternates with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.

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