Science – Page 10 – Wis[s]e Words

How capitalism aids swine flu

Published on April 28, 20092 Comments

Mike Davis has an article in the Socialist Worker (US) about the swine flu, specifically how several profit driven business practises aid and abet the creation of virulent forms of swine flu and retard the fight against the threatened pandemic:

But the mythology of bold, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the U.S. and Britain, which prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot Lines, rather than dramatically increase aid to epidemic frontlines overseas–as well as to Big Pharma, which has battled Third World demands for the generic, public manufacture of critical antivirals like Roche’s Tamiflu.

[…]

Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political will to monitor livestock diseases and their public health impacts, but the situation is hardly better north of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals.

Similarly, a decade of urgent warnings by scientists in the field has failed to ensure the transfer of sophisticated viral assay technology to the countries in the direct path of likely pandemics. Mexico has world-famous disease experts, but it had to send swabs to a laboratory in Winnipeg (which has less than 3 percent of the population of Mexico City) in order to identify the strain’s genome. Almost a week was lost as a consequence.

[…]

This has been a transition, in essence, from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, unprecedented in nature, containing tens, even hundreds of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems, suffocating in heat and manure, while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates and pathetic progenies.

[…]

Last year, a distinguished commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a landmark report on “industrial farm animal production” underscoring the acute danger that “the continual cycling of viruses…in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human-to-human transmission.”

The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (a cheaper alternative to sewer systems or humane environments) was causing the rise of resistant Staph infections, while sewage spills were producing nightmare E. coli outbreaks and Pfisteria blooms (the doomsday protozoan that has killed more than 1 billion fish in the Carolina estuaries and sickened dozens of fishermen).

I was somewhat surprised at the wall to wall hysteria about that outbreak of swine flu on display in the free newspapers here this morning. SARS and bird flu has us primed for worry about any novel flu epidemic, but is there really any reason to get so panicky about it? Especially when so far there haven’t been any Dutch cases whatsoever, nor all that many in Europe. So much tosh is talked about these “pandemics”, when the death rates even in Mexico are barely hitting three figures. It’s just embarassing how quickly we get paniced by these stories.

Some people may have ulterior motives for getting all het up about swine flu though, a certain kind of science fiction fan for example. Let Dr Elmo explain:

It is anthropologically interesting that SF fans are among the most eager hand-wringers. I think this is probably because it’s the kind of thing that allows an SF fan to demonstrate how Heinleinian they are–how prepared they are, how authoritative their flu kit is, how they reduce their chance of catching it, how exemplary is their (self!) treatment when they do catch it, compared to the mundanes, who are ignorant and incompetent.

Space is big

Published on March 30, 2009

artistic impression of Pluto and Charon. From the New Horizons website

It’s hard to believe how far we are from anything else created by humankind. Except for our own, now-derelict third stage, nothing made by people or from the Earth — nothing — is within more than a billion miles of New Horizons.

From the latest news update of the New Horizons Project, NASA’s attempt to reach Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The latter being the belt of Pluto sized planetoids at the edge of the classical Solar System. It’s some 30 to 55 Astronomical Units away; one AU being the distance from the Sun to the Earth, or about eight light minutes, or some 8 x 60 x 300,000 kilometres. Space is big, as Douglas Adams already noticed.

Space is not just big in distances, but also in time:

But you won’t have to wait another three years for our next significant distance and flight-time milestones — they come next year, when we cross the halfway point! But whenever quoting such milestones, I have to be careful about the meaning. So when will our spacecraft be halfway to Pluto? Well, that depends on which halfway you mean. (No, I am not kidding.)

If one asks, when have we traveled half the flight time to reach Pluto? That halfway milestone occurs on October 17, 2010.

But if one asks, when will we be half as far from the Sun as Pluto will be at the time of our encounter on July 14, 2015? That occurs somewhat earlier, on April 20, 2010.

And if one asks, when will we have traveled half the heliocentric distance to Pluto from our launch at Earth? That milestone occurs even earlier, on February 25, 2010.

So, as you can see, the answer to the halfway question depends on precisely what it means to be halfway. In fact, you could even ask when the halfway day was from New Horizons project inception on December 20, 2000, to Pluto arrival on July 14, 2015 — that was April 4, 2008. Or one could ask about the halfway day from when we began our push for a Pluto mission on May 4, 1989 (when we had our first meeting with NASA officials) until Pluto encounter — that was on June 9, 2002. So in some ways we’re already halfway there, and in other ways, we have well over a year to go to reach the halfway point.

In other words, any big deep space mission consumes a significant chunk of somebody’s career. Sure, a trip to Pluto is an extreme example, but even missions to our planetary neighbours like Mars or Venus require years of planning, preparation and monitoring.

Science fiction is too often impatient with these distances, zooming around the Galaxy through Hyperspace or Warp speed or whatever. It’s all so easy that real life space travel just seems unnecesarilly complex and difficult. Now I like a good space opera as much as the next guy, but I would like to see more attention paid to our own Solar System, because it is vastly more complex and big as Golden Age Science Fiction ever suspected. Surely it must be possible to write a good, exciting novel taking into account the realities of space travel rather than resorting yet again to shortcuts?

(Paul McAuley, from whose blog I plucked this link, has done his bit with The Quiet War, which makes full use of the latest research results on what our solar system actually looks like.)

Evolutionary psychologist is just another word for loon

Published on March 13, 2008

Two years ago I blogged about Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist who argued that Asians cannot make basic contributions to science, despite being, well, you know. Now if that wasn’t enough to completely destroy the already dodgy reputation of evolutionary biology, he’s upping his game this year. Not content with just slandering whole races, he’s now blogging on how much better the war on terror would’ve gone with president Coulter in charge:

Both World War I and World War II lasted for four years. We fought vast empires with organized armies and navies with tanks, airplanes, and submarines, yet it took us only four years to defeat them. … World War III, which began on September 11, 2001, has been going on for nearly seven years now, but there is no end in sight. There are no clear signs that we are winning the war, or even leading in the game. … Why isn’t this a slam dunk? It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. We don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us. They are consumed in pure and intense hatred of us, while we appear to have PC’ed hatred out of our lexicon and emotional repertoire. We are not even allowed to call our enemies for who they are, and must instead use euphemisms like “terrorists.” … Hatred of enemies has always been a proximate emotional motive for war throughout human evolutionary history. Until now.

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.

Is Satoshi Kanazawa for real?

Published on November 7, 2006

Via Pharyngula comes this frankly bizarre, racist research paper, the abstract of which is below (emphasis mine):

Abstract: For cultural, social, and institutional reasons, Asians cannot make original contributions to basic science. I therefore doubt Miller’s prediction for the Asian future of evolutionary psychology. I believe that its future will continue to be in the United States and Europe.

Now since the author, Satoshi Kanazawa seems to be of Asian descent himself, it may be that this is some sort of weird April Fools joke or something, but he seems deadly serious. Looking at the list of publications in his biography, (as well as the original paper P.Z. Myers discovered) and it seems clear Kanazawa has his own agenda: to “prove” that differences in intelligence, health and income are determined by evolution and builtin differences between races/genders rather than the product of societal pressures. I may be doing Kanazawa a disfavour, but I don’t think so.

Thoughts?