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 > [email protected] > https://lists.immunityinc.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave _______________________________________________ Dailydave mailing list [email protected] https://lists.immunityinc.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave
