[Dailydave] Mosquito Based "Science"

[William Arbaugh]

This reminds of the guy who built a squirrel cannon using Python and a few other things

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPgqfnKG_T4

Looks like Myhrvold's talk was in 2010 so the squirrel cannon may be infringing! ;)

On Jul 16, 2012, at 5:02 PM, Dave Aitel wrote:

> http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_zap_malaria.html
> 
> So there's a number of reasons to hate this TED video, and only some of
> them relate to the sweater. But to start off: some context. I live in
> Miami, next to the Everglades. You can buy, for basically pennies, a
> fairly effective insecticide that will kill whitefly, butterflies,
> mosquitoes - just really anything. You spray it around while trying not
> to breath, and your yard is a plant paradise for a few weeks. After a
> while all your lizards die off, and then the local stray cats die, etc.
> But for a while you are mosquito free. I never do this because it seems
> like a hugely bad idea to hang out in a place full of poison and a yard
> without thousands of lizards and live things to look at seems super
> boring, but to each their own. That means I have mosquitoes.
> 
> Now, our dear friends in the TED talk above (who work for the world's
> biggest Patent Troll company) think that they are the only people who
> could ever think up the idea of lasering mosquitoes, which is the
> obvious fantasy to anyone who's ever sat in a dark yard getting bit. But
> I think there's something hilarious when they start out saying they are
> trying to help the world, especially the world that has intermittent
> power, and then move to a system for killing mosquitoes that requires
> quite a lot of power. How do we know this?
> 
> One year for Christmas every Immunity employee got a 1 Watt Blue Arctic
> WickedLaser. You can't use it without special glasses or you'll
> inadvertently blind yourself. So, laying around under a mosquitoe net, I
> spent some time trying to kill mosquitoes with it. The bugs were at
> best, mildly annoyed. In theory they should be blinded, but it didn't
> seem to effect them in any particular way. I'm not sure what power
> lasers they use in their demo to blow the wings off a mosquito, but
> let's just say it has to be quite a bit greater than 1 W, and if it
> shines anywhere near a human eyeball, you're going to be in lawsuit heaven.
> 
> Of course, there's a host of other issues with their "technology" they
> could learn about if they spent some time in Florida. For example,
> moquitoes rarely hang out on nice white backgrounds. They're covered in
> camouflage and fly in a pattern designed to confuse visual (and I bet
> sonar) sensors and when they land, it's on a dark or mottled background.
> 
> Also, it's unclear if killing mosquitoes, even a large quantity of them,
> has any impact on their population size (in fact, their own data would
> probably counter-indicate this, as they model mosquito population based
> on breeding locations, not by predation).
> 
> -dave
> 
> 
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