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Nanotech Protests Begin
ByteWoopy wrote to mention a Wire.com story discussing the danger of nanotechnology, and the beginning of a backlash against the branch of technology. From the article: "...environmental activists sauntered into the Eddie Bauer store on Michigan Avenue, headed to the broad storefront windows opening out on the Magnificent Mile and proceeded to take off their clothes. The strip show aimed to expose more than skin: Activists hoped to lay bare growing allegations of the toxic dangers of nanotechnology. The demonstrators bore the message in slogans painted on their bodies, proclaiming 'Eddie Bauer hazard' and 'Expose the truth about nanotech,' among other things, in light of the clothing company's embrace of nanotech in its recent line of stain-resistant nanopants."
Nano bad.. let's get naked!
I've got several pairs of those nanotech khakis. They don't stain at all, even with coffee spilled on them. It doesn't seem to be "real" nanotech, though, just some kind of nylon polymer treatment for the material that makes it water-resistant.
Eddie Bauer makes some nice jeans too. Levis always seem to feel better, but I get a lot more compliments when I'm wearing my Eddie Bauer jeans.
I'm not sure what they are trying to protest. Maybe they can get some mites rolling around naked in the store or something. That ought to give them something "nano" to worry abuot.
Believe me, we all know that there are people that SHOULD wear clothes. And these were probably them.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
So sad, grey goo is unlikey to come from this... But we could still get cancer!
The problem with nanotechnology is that we don't really understand why much of it works, and we don't have any idea how the special properties it has will affect our bodies. Nano-whiskers? Great - I'm sure they help keep stains from getting on clothes. But what the *hell* are they going to do in my lungs?
As we've seen time and again, what we don't know really can hurt us...
--LWM
Yeah, and people weren't scared of wall paneling either, when it contained asbestos.
--LWM
NSFW? That's NSFVAA = Not Safe For Viewing At Anytime
No sig for you!!
Merits and dangers of technology aside, activists seem more and more stupid these days. Yeah, shock value gets you *attention* -- but not credibility. MLK had protestors dress up in their sunday best, looking dignified. If they'd run through the streets nude and shouting, it would have been a fine spectacle, but we'd probably still have seperate water fountains.
So yeah. Fight the man. Spark debate over nanotech, GM food, war, whatever. Just do it with some sense, OK? Protest is already in danger of becoming dead as a vector for social change. Turning it into an easy parody of itself isn't helping.
Tweet, tweet.
I wear nano-pants... These particular pairs are known as Dockers "Stain Defenders (tm or something)" and really do , uh... defend against stains. Case in point: I was in a restaurant, and someone moved a plate which moved a cup which moved a soup bowl into my lap. I stood up, brushed my hand down my pant leg once to flick the soup off, and sat down again. The table took more cleaning than this amazing material did. I love 'em and swear by them. (wrinkle-resistant too, as a bonus!)
--
There's really very little difference between radical environmentalists and religious fundamentalists.
Both want to control what everyone else does and thinks based on their own unreasonable and unprovable beliefs. "The end of the world is nigh" indeed.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
Oops! Well, at least now I know what NSFW means -- "Not Suitable For Work." Anybody know of any firms that are hiring software developers in the Portland, Oregon area?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I hope I'm not the only one who sees something wrong with a person who believes that a cable channel's website is reason enough to hate me.
First off, let me preface this by saying that I'm a huge nanotech fan. The sort of leap-forward potential that nanotech provides in superconductors, photovoltaics, betavoltaics, computing, LEDs, medical tracers, antibiotics, genetics, materials, rocketry, and just about everything that you can think of are of such a huge scale, it's hard to even picture.
However, it would be wrong of us to pretend that there aren't serious risks. And, no, I'm not talking about dumb "grey goo" scenarios. Look at CNTs, for example. Very stable, aerosolizable in some situations, and very easily penetrates cells. Add various functional groups onto them (like many projects are doing) that might damage cell internals, and it sounds like a ready-made health nightmare. The problem with many nanoparticles is that they're very small, and thus able to get to places that their non-soluable relatives couldn't. They often tend to be either very stable or very reactive in comparison to their large-scale relatives.
Oh, and before all of the poorly thought out "nanoparticles like CNTs occur in nature in candle soot!", that's like arguing that since cyanide occurs in many fruits, we shouldn't worry about pure cyanide.
We shouldn't hold up research; far from it, the varying fields of nanotech really look to be the next leap forward in almost every scientific arena. But we also need to put them under great scrutiny, or we'll have another DDT on our hands.
Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
would be nonstick cookware, which is where most people's daily encounter with teflon is. Obviously the easiest route to ingestion would be food cooked on it, compared to wearing pants. Especially if you use a metal utinsel to stir the food and accidentally scratch the pan, releasing the teflon.
So why arent they protesting sellers of kitchenware?
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Many bird owners are aware of the dangers of Teflon. Cooking with Teflon cookware will kill your birds. Not cooking their food, but any food. Teflon delaminates from the cookware and gets into the air. This isn't from crazy environmentalists; it's a real danger.
signature pending slashdot approval
While I do think that protesting is a valuable tool, I think there are too many people who get into it without sufficient knowledge and then refuse outright to change their positions. It becomes more about winning and less about wanting to do some good.
Let me give you a quick example. At my university, there was a large number of people protesting against coke (the cola). Boiled down to the basics, and skipping some important details, basically, they argued we shouldn't drink coke becuase of their business practices in columbia...they were endagering and/or killing (depending on who you talk to) workers and being anti-union. Since I'm an avid coke drinker, the possibility of loss of coke disturbed me, but I felt I should learn a bit about it. I went to talk to one of the protesters and ask some questions. One of my questins was along the lines of "do you know that the columbian government investigated this and found coke not guilty? Do you also know that they have the highest union rates in the country even though you're accusing them of being anti-union?" Her response was that the columbian gov't couldn't be trusted, and coke should still have more union workers even though they have the most per capita already. I forgot about the union thing and asked who would be able to provide objective evidence to convince her that coke was innocent. The columbian gov't couldn't, so who could? Her reply? No one. No one could ever convince her. So I asked if she really though that her opinion was more informed than every legal body in the world, despite the fact that she didn't have access to the facts presented to the courts. She told me engineering students were morons who should keep out of social issues.
I don't have an opinion on the coke issue really. I don't know for sure what happened down there, but I continue to drink coke. Maybe I'm a bad person, who knows. But the point is that both sides of these types of arguments need to step back and evaluate the merits of the other side, and determine what level of confidence they have in their positions, what evidence they have backing them, and what type of evidence would convince them not necessarily to change their mind, but to at least re-evaulate their positions. In the case of a protest against something, this is hard since it's impossible to prove conclusively that something is safe, but at some point the benefits outweigh the risks. At the point where you are saying that no amount of reasonable evidence contrary to your position will cause you to change your mind, this should serve as a realization that you are being irrational. And while everyone has their irrational issues, it's not these people who should be leading and articulating the views of their side of the argument, since a that point it is not fact being argued, but irrational opinion. It's a pipe dream that this will actually happen, I know, and I'm far from innocent on this matter, but it's something to consider.
...no two people are not on fire.
Because you're not wearing your kitchenware in the form of tiny teflon fibers.
By the way, Teflon pans are deadly to birds when overheated. A gas is formed which can kill your pet in a matter of minutes. Does it affect humans? Dunno. You can read DuPont's assessment of the danger to birds here.
I'd like to find out exactly what the hazards of Teflon are, especially since we just bought a Teflon-treated couch. The fabric is awesome and inexpensive, but I want an objective assessment of the health risks.
Please don't let your distrust of activitists and love of the acronym FUD obscure the issue. The signal-noise ratio on slashdot is bad enough as it is.
Not that I post on slashdot or anything.