Noteworthy Developments

Well, now.

Say hello to Eugenics again! A hell of a lot easier to do this than perform operations on people, especially if they're not keen on it. Sadly the article doesn't go into the really practical and urgent details like "can we make a portable, mass-effect version of this?" and "can we turn it into something to carpet-bomb overpopulated African countries with?" and "if we quietly set up ultrasound transmitters in ghettos, how long till people notice?" (Financially, of course, the big question is "how many of these can we sell to China?") Rich Western attempts to get third-worlders to use more contraception has so far been largely voluntary so far, but China's one-child policy and all the barbarism involved gets enough muted sympathy from Westerners to show the nature of it: we just don't want to do the dirty work; 3rd-world family planning clinics allow us to help thin out the teeming masses while passing it off as helping people rather than forcing them. Sooner or later, though, Westerners - particularly environmentally concerned ones - will become a little more forceful in demanding that the 3rd world curb its birthrates, or that someone do it for them. Or maybe environmentalist terrorists will get there first, taking the measures we don't want to.

And I admit part of me wants the teeming masses of poor people in other places to go away as well - partly from desire for a neater, more comfortable, less crowded Earth, for all that irritating poverty to go away; partly the same desire for the economy to crash, for the war to come, for society to disintegrate. Contemptible enough, I grant, and utterly stupid; and, thankfully, easy enough not to act on - no-one's asking me to help build a sterilisation bomb and drop it on Ethiopia. (Yet.)

...I probably would be inhibited about saying this stuff in public, but I doubt I have enough readers to qualify this as really "public".

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In more awesome and less scary news, there is a cyborg abroad in Austria: an amputee has been fitted with a robotic prosthetic arm responsive enough to drive a car or drink beer with.

The technique used is pretty interesting: science not yet being up to the task of integrating electronics into the nervous system, surgeons took the muscle nerves for the lost limb and transplanted them into the chest muscles. Willing the lost arm to move thus causes the chest muscles to twitch. This is picked up by sensors placed on the chest and translated into information on how the arm should move.

(The thought that science might one day be able to integrate electronics into the nervous system sets my teeth on edge. I could take being fitted with a prosthesis, if necessary, but the idea of splicing wires and electrical flows into my nerves really disturbs me.)

(And yes, my nerves have electrical flows anyway. But our natures do these things differently than our devices - ion flows rather than electron flows.)