What Some Of Us Will Be Talking About Monday Morning -- October 12, 2014

The big question is what the CNN headline will be Monday morning: ISIS or Ebola?

WTI futures are solidly below $85 Sunday night. What will they be Monday?

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But back to Ebola. The headline was: "Breach of protocol results in second American Ebola patient." That seemed pretty straight forward -- a breach of protocol resulted in a nurse testing positive for Ebola virus. But the reasoning turns out to be circular: the CDC seems to be saying that the protocol established to prevent Ebola infection is so ironclad that to have contracted Ebola, there had to have been a break in protocol. But, no break in protocol has been found, so far. (Of course they will find the break in protocol. They just have to get their story straight before coming out with a statement.)

However, that is not the issue. This is the issue. If the CDC protocol cannot protect American nurses in American isolation rooms in modern American hospitals from contracting Ebola even when the patient is known to be high risk; the nurse is wearing HAZMAT protection; the nurse is highly educated (four years college/nursing school following high school); the nurse was given additional training in HAZMAT protection before administering to the patient; if no obvious break in protocol has been found several days after the even occurred ... after all of that, how in the world can we expect the US military to be protected in Ebolaland? But even worse, how can we expect these third world countries in west Africa to control this epidemic? I think we were told that it was not easy to contract Ebola except through close contact with an infected patient.

I still think Ebola outbreak in the US is very, very unlikely. The real risk is a case or two of Ebola in Mexico resulting in widespread panic. OPEN BORDERS/OPEN ARMS.

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But back to ISIS. Apparently ISIS is "infiltrating" the city of Baghdad. It's hard to imagine many alternate endings to this movie.

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The Wall Street Journal

It sounds like one of our Mideast allies -- Qatar -- might not be helping much in the war against ISIS. And shaking up the "coalition" in the process.

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Two years ago I read two books on lobsters including  Trevor Corson's 2005 The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean. That book explained why restrictions on the size of lobster that were allowed to be kept were critical if the lobsters were to be saved from extinction. It turns out that the "battle" is not over. The WSJ is reporting that Canadian fishermen are unhappy with the size restrictions.

Fishermen in the provinces of Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick are at loggerheads over how big a lobster’s carapace must be for a lobster to be harvested.

Fishermen in Prince Edward Island are fighting to keep the minimum carapace at 72 millimeters, or about 2.8 inches, while their counterparts in New Brunswick would like to see fishing restricted to lobsters with larger shell sizes—as much as 10 millimeters longer. That is .39 inch.

At stake is tiny Prince Edward Island’s lock on the global market for so-called canner lobsters, younger and smaller lobsters that are prized for their sweeter taste and sought after by major customers, including casinos and cruise ships. The lobster market is worth about $130 million a year to the province, which has a population of just 145,000. Across the Northumberland Strait in New Brunswick, lobster catchers say tastes have changed and that most customers prefer larger, older lobsters. Those bigger lobsters currently bring in around C$3.75 a pound—or 50 Canadian cents more than canners. Processors in their province also like them larger, in part because bigger tails mean bigger profits.

I'm sure something will be worked out.

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This is cool. A Brazilian researcher has pioneered a faster, more accurate way to count brain cells.

The standard technique for the postmortem analysis of brain tissue is stereology.

Scientists thinly slice the brainstain the tissue and examine samples under a microscope to determine the presence of cells. The method is valuable, as it preserves the structure of the cells and brain. But analyzing a single mouse brain in this way takes several days. Examining 10 mouse brains would take 10 times as long. And larger brains are even more daunting.

Ms. Herculano-Houzel’s technique is drastically different. Rather than slicing the brain into sections, she divides it into its major regions and dissolves pieces weighing about three grams each in detergent to produce a liquid that contains free-floating nuclei. She then agitates the liquid to evenly distribute the nuclei and counts the units in four samples under a microscope.

Cells aren’t evenly distributed in intact brain tissue, and this homogeneous “soup” makes counting easier. She averages the counts and extrapolates the total number of cells in the volume of fluid, repeating until the entire brain is processed. The estimates are combined to yield the total number of neurons in the brain, with a margin of error of about 10%. The larger the brain, the longer it takes to process. One person can estimate the number of neurons in a mouse brain in four hours. A human brain takes one to two months if four people share the work. An elephant brain takes six months with four people.

On the campaign trail, Obama is hard to find.

The creator of the Arctic apple -- a genetically modified breed of apple that doesn't brown when when cut is seeking approval for sale in the US. Now that's cool. 

I think we heard this earlier: a bumper crop of corn and soybean predicted this year; prices falling.

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The Los Angeles Times

The top five news stories are on Ebola.

Darwin at work: two women and two men were hit by train; one person killed. The four were standing on a trestle, taking pictures of the sunset when the train came 'round a corner.

Big travel article on Pike Place Market -- Seattle market which has been a hit with locals and tourists since 1907. Where first Starbucks is located. It's called Pike Place Roast. Not Pike's Place roast.