Having had occasion recently to journey to the fair city of York I picked up a copy of New Scientist to read on the train back home, and came across a few articles that were rather interesting, so in the order in which I encountered them.
The first concerned the ethical problems for anti-addiction drugs – now obviously helping people beat an addiction is a good thing. The drugs described though are vaccines that prevent you getting a high from the drugs, and as the article observes there is the risk that this will just cause addicts to take much larger quantities to get the same high. Nestled within the article between heroin and cocaine and talk of Amy Winehouses death was that they’d also done clinical trials of a nicotine vaccine. Now I’m no scientist* and this is just a flight of fancy but surely vaccines are normally administered before you get ill as a preventative so wouldn’t the more logical use of these drugs be to give them to children to prevent them acquiring the addictions in the first place? Now that’ll be a fun arms race kids Vs the vaccines as they experiment to find out what will still get them high, followed no doubt shortly after by huge law suits when it turns out the vaccines interfere with vital medical drugs.
The next article concerned the use of smart phones to augment CCTV monitoring, the chilling subtitle on the article really says it all:
“These networks will give the government eyes and ears in a thousand places at once”
The general thrust of the article is that with so many sensors on all those smart phones why not get them to report back to the state what’s going on. The two current examples are innocuous automatic detection and reporting of pot holes and GPS jamming signals. But ti rapidly starts talking about making some level of state desired monitoring compulsory by legislation as there are “major public safety issues at stake”. Once that’s done of course requiring additional monitoring devices to be added or getting extra data back will be a terribly easy and seductive idea for most governments. Again a small suggested idea is using bluetooth and such to identify and track stolen handsets, of course an application that’s doing that could very easily also be used to track the movements of phones belonging to “people of interest” (anarchists perhaps), and another suggest again moving from public safety to individual monitoring is that maybe in future your phone could check if you’ve had too much too drink or taken drugs the Government doesn’t like. As it says unless clear principles and checks are in place mission creep will happen, I’d suggest that if we let them even start down this road mission creep will happen regardless – no doubt due to unusual or extreme circumstances as a temporary measure or some such.
The final article I think answers a question that has been puzzling LegIron, why are smoking related diseases increasing as smoking decreases. The answer global warming!
“Air pollutants emitted decades ago are coming back to haunt us. As the Arctic warms, persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, trapped in snow and ice are being re-released. This unwelcome return has been suspected for sometime but is now confirmed by 16 years’ worth of data.
POPs travel around the globe on winds, build up in food and water supplies and accumulate in animal body fat. They have also been linked to serious human health problems, including cancer and can be passed from mother to fetus….”
Now if I’ve understood previous anti-smoking “science” that article surely adds up to dangerous levels of tobacco smoke being trapped in the Arctic and now being released due to man made global warming!!(Is it global warming this week or climate change?). Which can only mean it’s going to get far far worse as we melt back through time to the days when everyone smoked everywhere and all died of cancer before they were 5. At least following LegIrons excellent lead I’ll wager you could convince an awful lot of people that that’s what’s happening.
*Actually not entirely true I’m a few retakes short of being a scientist
