The way I heard it, it meant that one in ten of your soldiers were killed in action. But upon reflection, I guess that's where I got the idea that it meant 1 in 10 survived.
I guess I've been corrected on this, but I'm appalled that anyone would execute one out of ten of their _own_ people.
Nonsense. The most famous use of decimation was after the Roman rout at the battle of Cannae. From "Cannae" by Gregory Daly:
"Cowardice in battle was unacceptable in the Roman army, individuals who threw away their arms being punished by being beaten to death by their fellows (Polybius 6.37.13). Furthermore, if entire maniples deserted their posts under pressure they would be subejct to 'decimation', where approximately 10 percent of the offenders would be chosen by lot to be beaten to death, the remaining troops being given barley instead of wheat as rations and having to camp in an exposed spot outside the main camp (Polybius 6.38). It is significant that these punishments were inflicted by the army as a whole, as the offenders' cowardice had endangered other soldiers; crimes against the unit were punished by the unit."
As near as anyone can figure, the virus survived just fine, but people developed an immunity to it (at least to that particular strain). Part of the reason that infectious disease folks get all het up about swine flu is because the 1918 virus apparently mutated itself into pigs and stayed there ever since.
The worry isn't that the 1918 flu will come back; the worry is that some _other_ strain, to which we are equally unprepared, will come raging through.
This is a kinda-good book on the subject (the first half is really good, but the middle gets kinda boring):
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They talk about the swine flu 'epidemic' in the late '70s and bird flu, and why it causes consternation over at CDC.
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Sure! It's the third horseman of the pork lips - Death has been around since forever; famine has been rampant around the world for centuries; now all we need is some pestilence and we're pretty much done! ;-D
BTW, when they say, "the end of the World", I personally believe that it will be the end of the World the way the butterfly is the end of the caterpillar. ;-)
I took you're "nonsense" as disputing that the soldiers weren't Romans.
The executions may have been carried out by the soldiers, but the decision would have been made by the (Roman) commanders. If a unit didn't carry out the order, they would all have been killed.
By whom? Either by adopting the same strategy at one level up (ordering the remaining units to kill the non-compliant ones), or failing that by another legion of another race.
The whole essence of the way that a small nation (Rome) could control a vast empire lay in their ability to use one subject people against another.
Immunity's partly a numbers-game, Dad said. There's a race between the pathogen's ability to multiply and attack you, and your immune system's ability to manufacture antibodies to it.
If you get hit with a few virus particles and your immune system responds quickly, you'll get ahead in the race, beat it quickly, and have a minor case. If someone coughs a load of virus in your face, you're cooked.
I've always wondered why exposure to a single critter doesn't always result in exponential growth and ultimate death. For bacteria at least, some threshold number of critters are usually needed to cause an infection; they clump and help one another out or something. Or maybe each one has a low probability of starting a successful attack.
Or maybe, as you say, the body can quickly recognize a very few invaders and start a large-scale immune response before they multiply enough to kill the immune system itself. That sounds mathematically tricky to me.
If you can make and deliver antibodies faster than the invader can multiply (or damage critical tissues), you live. Otherwise, you die.
There are several starting scenarios: - the invader gets in and immediately bumps into an immune cell, which recognizes & kills it. - the invader invades a cell, which expresses a flag on its membrane that alerts your immune system to destroy the infected cell. - the invader hijacks a cell, procreates, then disseminates copies, which then attack more cells. Game on.
If you're pre-primed by previous exposure then you've got zillions of factories ready for activation, pre-tooled for the exact proteins needed to beat the invaders. That saves time.
Mathematically it comes to how quickly you can recognize the invader, how many factories you can mobilize, and how quickly.
One of my speculations is that gentle exercise early on improves your odds--immune cells work by contact, and circulating them greatly increases the chance for favorable collisions.
Most pathogens don't target immune cells--that's AIDs' awful secret.
Just heard an interesting statistic... 19 people die _daily_ in the US from _ordinary_ flu.
So this "pandemic" is just another of Obama's distractions.
...Jim Thompson
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I have it; great book, must-read for anyone interested in molecular biochemistry and evolution. But I don't recall him getting into the dynamics of infection.
He make a tough case that many cellular machanisms couldn't have evolved incrementally. That they maybe couldn't have evolved at all.
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