Thursday, April 27, 2006

Compare and Contrast Carnivals

The Carnival of Satire is up, and looks good (more later), as does the Skeptics Circle (this time done in the form of a scientific paper, furthering host Coturnix's attempt to blur the lines between blogging and scientific publishing)

And, just for fun, I'm going to look at the Carnival of Liberty (Libertarian) and the Carnival of the Liberated (Iraqi and Afghani anglo-bloggers) later.

Non Sequitur: I have no opinion on anything written in Sports Illustrated, but he's right about mosquito nets. My only complaint is that this shouldn't be a matter of private charity: this should be public policy, and the fact it isn't is gruesome.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Regarding Mosquito nets, by all means get them to the people. However:

DDT is the weapon of choice against Malaria. Unfortunately, for some people the alleged preservation of birds is more important than human life, especially if the people in question have brown skin and live in third-world countries.

Ahistoricality said...

My understanding is that DDT, used in conjunction with netting, is very effective with minimal collateral damage, and there are a number of programs in place distributing materials and educating users. But attempts to wipe out mosquitos by broad-based chemical warfare is more costly and damaging (ultimately, to human life as well as animal life) than it is effective.

I have higher hopes for attempts to introduce competing non-malarial mosquitos and the use of hormonal anti-breeding treatments.