Author: Brian Carnell

Bionic Hands a Reality

The other day I was having a conversation with a fellow computer geek about the amazing pace of change in computer power, and he agreed but added somewhat dejectedly, “I wish medical science could keep up.”

I hold the opposite view — in many ways, medical science is accelerating far faster than computers (and in large part by piggybacking onto the computer revolution). Anyone who doubts this need only compare survival rates for premature infants in the United States — infants who in the 1970s would have had literally no chance at survival today routinely survive and go on to live productive lives.

Or consider this BBC report of bionic hands designed for toddlers. Who would have thought bionic arms and legs would ever be anything but a plot line for a bad ’70s television show?

One of the incredible things about the last 30 years is how quickly ideas have gone from speculative fiction to marketed product. Previous generations have had to live with the fact that human beings don’t live in floating cities or drive rocket cars, but those of us born in the late 1960s and early 1970s keep waking up to find that what was once reserved for comic books, television shows, and science fiction stories can now be bought at Best Buy.

Not that everything has or will make it, although I’m still hoping to be able to expose myself to enough gamma radiation to tell people “Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” and be able to back it up. Barring that I’ll settle for bionic arms that can bend steel bars. Come on, it could happen!

I Say Tomato, You Say … It’s a Vote for Gore

Attorney Dennis Newman is currently leading the Gore team responsible for handling legal challenges to votes in Florida. Among the efforts Newman is spearheading is a lawsuit aimed at forcing some counties to consider so-called “dimpled” ballots — where there is a slight indentation on the ballot — as actual votes.

The Palm Beach Post reports, however, that in 1996 Newman represented Democrat Philip Johnston who was declared the winner in a Boston race on election day by 266 votes, only to end up losing the election by 108 votes after a recount. Amazingly enough, when it became clear that counting dimpled ballots favored the Republican candidate, Newman argued that considering such ballots was wrong and that the so-called chads might fall out on their own from repeated handling.

Ah, the fresh smell of hypocrisy wafting through the land.

This Friday: Protest Nothing Day!

This Thanksgiving, Adbusters is once again touting its Buy Nothing Day. Instead, why don’t we all get together and have a Protest Nothing Day.

Okay, I’m stealing the idea from PCU which hilariously chronicles life on today’s campuses and ends with students gathering with signs and chanting “We’re not gonna protest,” but it’s still a good idea.

Somebody else will have to lead the protest, though — I’ll be shopping thank you very much.

Rehabilitating Machiavelli

Salon’s Minna Proctor is not impressed with Maurizio Viroli’s new biography of Niccolo Machiavelli, Niccolo’s Smile. Like most people who comment on Machiavelli, the only work of his Machiavelli’s that Proctor mentions is The Prince.

An excellent revisionist look at Machiavelli is Sebastian De Graza’s Machiavelli in Hell which does a very good job of placing The Prince in its proper context within Machiavelli’s larger view of political philosophy.

No, Machiavelli doesn’t emerge as anything like a classical liberal, but at the same time he was neither a moral relativist nor a simple apologist for state-sponsored violence.

Global Warming, DDT, and Malaria

After making significant progress against Malaria in the 1950s and 1960s, the disease is back and, in fact, rates of malaria incidence are increasing in many developing countries. Why?

One answer that has been increasingly common is that global warming is responsible for the rise in malaria. Some scientists have suggested that not only is climate change response for the current upswing but that continued warming temperatures could lead to a resurgence of malaria outside of the tropics. Fortunately such claims don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Although malaria today is thought of as a specifically tropical disease, in fact malaria used to be present pretty much everywhere in the world — as entomologist Paul Reiter told the BBC in September, the first major reported outbreak of malaria in the world occurred in Philadelphia, of all places, in the 1780s. As recently as the 1880s, malaria was a serious problem throughout all of North America and was present as far north as Finland.

Improvements in public health monitoring as well as increases in population density helped largely eliminate the threat of the disease toward the last decade of the 19th century. Thus it’s not too surprising to see malaria increases in cooler, highland countries of Africa such as Rwanda and Kenya. This is especially true when one takes into account the increased efforts at diagnosing and reporting malaria cases in countries such as Rwanda — UNICEF spent millions of dollars in the mid to late 1980s to improve Rwanda’s ability to track malaria cases, and its hardly surprising that Rwanda’s health authorities as a result found more cases of malaria.

The really sad thing about the vector-borne disease/global warming link is just how ill-informed the so-called experts were who made this claim in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 1996 report. As Reiter told the BBC, “The bibliographies of the nine lead authors of the health section show that between them they had only published six research papers on vector-borne diseases.”

Meanwhile, the Save the Children from Malaria Campaign fears that an ongoing anti-DDT campaign by environmental activists is discouraging the use of that pesticide to control malaria. Some countries have stopped using DDT altogether, and those nations have experience increases in malaria according to tropic disease expert Donald Roberts. Roberts notes that in Guyana, for example, malaria incidence increased 12-fold from 1984 to 1991 when that nation reduced its DDT spraying.

While much of the environmentalist fears about DDT are overblown, neither is DDT a magic bullet as disastrous and counter-productive government application of DDT proved in the 1950s and 1960s. DDT is an important tool, but to rid the world of malaria will require governments and non-governmental organizations to use the pesticide wisely.

Source:

Malaria rising as DDT use falls, scientist says. Reuters, November 22, 2000.

Warming ‘not spreading malaria’. The BBC, September 21, 2000.