Re: Tyson and Espy?

Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@gambetta.ICS.uci.edu)
Fri, 02 Jan 1998 13:15:56 -0800


I keep thinking of the guy at MIT doing his thesis on
carpet bombing remote deforrested areas with 'tree bombs'. Do
you know him? I can't find the link offhand. Rather than mechanical
I would go for something bio. Time is on your side. In the Asian
countries you can plant bamboo, it grows like wildfire and the roots
will dig them up in about a year. The only problem is that you
would have to deploy it in known mine fields. For the French
countrysides, probably carpet bombing some sort of brush.

Anywyas, have you ever read Preston's 'The Hot Zone'? I read
it when it first came out, completely by coincidence on the
airplane to Reston, Virginia. I kept asking people about it
and their collective response was the 'Oh the stuff in Africa'.
I went and sightsaw the school, but they had torn the monkey house
down. Rotting meat may just be the primordial soup that spawns the next
supervirus. They were showing pictures today of dogs picking
at the dead and viral chicken corpses. The government says that
bird flu hasn't jumped species......at least not yet.

Greg

Fascinating.

> dangerous stuff --- rotting CJD-infested meat --- which will be taken
> away by predators, insects and fungi in a year, making a lot of them
> and some humans really sick) as being a good trade for the old problem
> (a field full of dangerous stuff --- land mines --- which will blow
> people up for as long as they last, which is basically forever).
>
> That said, it seems better to come up with something more mechanical
> which will blow up into less dangerous pieces; I heard something on
> the BBC a few weeks ago about a gizmo put together from metal tubing
> and caster wheels called the "dervish" which was designed to be
> affordable even on a third-world-government budget...
>
> rst