Re: some here will find this amusing

On Sunday 18 January 2004 15:59, dep wrote:
> quoth Guillaume Laurent:
> | Off the top of my head : finding a cure for AIDS so there's a chance
> | to stop the current catastrophy in Africa ?
>
> this raises a whole new issue, which i do not especially want to go into
> because it is astonishingly complicated and contentious. suffice it to
> say that there is a body of evidence, so far unrefuted, that AIDS is an
> utterly arbitrary listing of diseases that don't have anything to do
> with each other and that share no common cause and therefore cannot
> share a cure.

I don't think I want to go into that debate either. I don't have enough 
information to establish a definitive opinion on this. However I can't help 
finding extremely unlikely that somehow the whole scientific community would 
be completely mistaken about this, only for political reasons. There are 
numerous similar theories on various matters, which all base themselves on 
the same schema (what we believe is wrong and it's upheld because that's how 
you're supposed to think, and look at all these brilliant scientists which 
were ridiculed in their own time).

The problem with this is that the scientific community has learned its lesson 
long ago and knows that a scientific theory is just something waiting to be 
proved wrong. This is a community of normal men, which can't all be 
objective, so such "political correctness" is bound to occur. I also agree 
that statistics we can get from Africa can't always be very reliable. However 
I doubt that such glaring mistakes could endure for so long.

> which is why the big noise being made, largely by the administration,
> about AIDS in africa is disingenuous. the u.s. wants to spend a lot of
> money fighting AIDS in africa. sounds very generous, doesn't it? ah,
> but here's the rub: that money would be in the form of anti-HIV drugs.
> meaning that the u.s. government would buy huge amounts of very
> expensive and ineffective drugs from u.s. companies and foist them off
> on subsaharan africa.

Hello, what these country want is the right to produce these drugs themselves. 
But that's yet another issue. And I wasn't thinking of flooding them with 
tri-therapy cocktails, which aren't a cure but merely a paliative, I was 
thinking about pursuing research for a real cure to a real virus.

> | Take blue ray laser for instance. It's been here for almost a decade,
> | and only now we're seeing it in some DVD players.
>
> somehow i don't think that progress in dvd players is much of a pressing
> technological issue.

Neither do I, the point is that the technology to make CDs with a much higher 
capacity has been available for a long time, but held because releasing it 
would have been a marketing mistake. Nothing wrong with that, the bottom line 
is : technology is hardly stagnant.

> | Do I really have to dig up the last statistics on how 3rd world
> | countries have been faring compared to industrialised ones ?
>
> yes.

http://www.worldbank.org/poverty/data/trends/income.htm

> and perhaps at the same time you could explain how this doesn't 
> mean, then, that industrialization is clearly the way to go.

I never said that, of course it's the way to go, although perhaps in a way 
less oblivious to people. It seems that industrialisation is always done at 
the expense of a lower class of workers which are put into near-slavery 
state. Hopefully this will change with things like Fair Trade...

> putting a person someplace is an order of magnitude more complicated
> than putting a robot there. it is in this area that human flight
> produces results that robotic probes do not.

So it boils down to : "We're going to go the harder way on space exploration 
in hope that the research needed to solve problems we're purposely posing to 
ourselves will yield technological advances".

> so, if i read you correctly: we should not go to the moon or mars
> because we cannot go to other solar systems. i should not go to the
> grocery store today because i lack the means to go to paris.

No, we should not go to the Moon or Mars because it's pointless and we have 
better things to do here.

> again, our history is chock full of instances involving multi-year
> voyages in cramped quarters and in which nobody went mad.

No, there is zero example in history of an uninterrupted multi-year travel in 
a closed tin can. Ask someone who's been in the Navy, or better, in 
submarines. After a few weeks in a closed environment without contact with 
solid ground, humans get mad. This is a well known fact that crews have to 
deal with. Shore leaves aren't just for getting supplies, nuclear submarines 
can remain under water for months at a time, but they never do it because the 
crew would end up slaughtering one another.

> | If I recall correctly, we stopped trying to send people further than
> | orbital space because it made very little sense, since automated
> | probes are much more fit for the job. I don't see this changing
> | anytime soon, because economics rule, and more in the US than
> | anywhere else. So I doubt that people would accept to blow resources
> | over something which is known as pointless.
>
> you do not recall correctly.

That was a documentary on the history of NASA, I think, but I can't give you 
any more precise reference. In any case, why then did we stop sending people 
out there ?

-- 
						Guillaume.
						http://www.telegraph-road.org

Kde-cafe mailing list - [email protected]
http://ofb.biz/lists/listinfo.cgi/kde-cafe

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed on this mailinglist are the personal
opinions of the author and do not represent OfB.biz: Open for Business, KDE or the author's employer.