February 16, 2016 at 02:26AM

Today I Learned: 1) Guinea worm is a terrible, awful disease, and it's probably going to be the second disease intentionally eradicated by humankind (after smallpox). Over the last thirty years, the number of cases of guinea worm has been brought down from about 3.5 megapeople per year to 22 per year. 22! The striking thing about the program to eradicate guinea worm is that it involves no new technology and essentially no treatments, because there are no treatments for guinea worm. The eradication program works pretty much entirely by convincing people to filter their drinking water and keeping infected persons away from other people's drinking water. And that works (though it's a lot of effort). Also, the person most singly responsible for wiping out guinea worm? Jimmy Carter, via the Carter Foundation, which leads a bunch of other organizations you've probably heard of in the campaign to wipe out guinea worm. Quote from Carter, while sick with cancer: "I would like the last guinea worm to die before I do". Hardcore, Jimmy, hardcore. 2) The Stokes(-Einstein) radius of a molecule is the radius that a perfectly spherical molecule would have to have to diffuse at the same rate as that molecule. Along with this definition comes an interesting revelation -- at least for practical purposes, even a molecule with a complex shape behaves as though it were a sphere of some radius for the purpose of diffusion. Yeah, Anders Knight gets this one. 3) It is SOMETIMES possible to boot a computer that fails an fsck due to a mismatch in partition sizes according to different sources by telling it to ignore the error. It feels pretty dirty, but it worked for us this time....