Dailydave mailing list archives
Re: Mosquito Based "Science"
From: William Arbaugh <warbaugh () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2012 22:10:19 -0400
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 -- INFILTRATE - the world's best offensive information security conference. April 2013 in Miami Beach www.infiltratecon.com _______________________________________________ Dailydave mailing list Dailydave () lists immunityinc com https://lists.immunityinc.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave
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Current thread:
- Mosquito Based "Science" Dave Aitel (Jul 16)
- Re: Mosquito Based "Science" William Arbaugh (Jul 18)
- Re: Mosquito Based "Science" allison nixon (Jul 18)
- Re: Mosquito Based "Science" dan (Jul 19)
- Re: Mosquito Based "Science" William Arbaugh (Jul 19)
- Re: Mosquito Based "Science" dan (Jul 19)