Re: Mosquito Based "Science"

[allison nixon <elsakoo () gmail com>]

The video is from 2010 and I haven't heard anything from the idea since
then.

It's probably best suited for developing countries actually, because the
sky is full of airplanes here in the US and a device like this is going to
get your house raided inside of a day, and you'll be in the news for
automating terrorism. Only in those countries do you have the freedom to
point lasers in the sky.

The company doesn't seem inteested in manufacturing the device, only coming
up with the original design, according to this wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser

An actual device made on this concept would be exactly as sexy as any
existing mosquito zapper, because the laser beam would have to be enclosed
in a box to surmount the otherwise insurmountable legal issues.

Also, in Florida mosquitoes are infinite and they do not obey laws of
physics.  They actually re-spawn like in games.

-a

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 5:02 PM, Dave Aitel <dave () immunityinc com> 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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