131–140 of 181 posts
Sorry for going completely off-topic, but I'm slightly annoyed at the overuse of adverbs like "hauntingly" and "wildly". "Hauntingly" might be tolerated here even if it is very hyperbolic, but "wildly low-cost"? What does that even mean?! Why can't the headline just be "Beautiful, Low-cost Solution to Clearing Afghan Landmines"? Oh, and another one that has been popping up a lot around here lately is "vanishingly" (I…
It is depressing to me that a community as smart as this is so congratulatory of such inch-deep stuff. Oooh, landmines! Design! Shiny! But a fast perusal of the comments shows that this approach is at best problematic. And a deeper reading of the comments suggests this might very well be a dangerous anti-pattern. People, you are some of the brightest and cleverest people walking the earth. And the earth has some nast…
Oh, please. It's exactly this kind of self-congratulatory bullshit that produces this community's inch-deep intellectual culture.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are people supposed to shear those sheep, or take care of them during lambing/when they're sick, or to feed or water them, if they can't actually enter the pen? It seems to me that sheep penned in a land mine field would either be useless, because you couldn't go near them, or worse than useless, because they'd be a temptation to enter the dangerous area.
Turns out sheep's will run toward whoever takes care of them.
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Better sheep than the children who get blown up in the absence of sheep.
Only very slightly. Also, it suffers from the same problem as the Mine Kafon, in that it's a more-or-less random walk and you won't know whether the whole area is cleared.
A GPS chip built into the centre of the Mine Sweeper tracks
the device back to a website to chart a safe course.
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The difference is this costs 40 € and can clear a couple of mines for that money. Afghanistan is not exactly rolling in cash, so any cheap improvement is a valuable addition to the toolbox - it provides a way for poor communities to do something while they're waiting for America to donate enough money to clean up their mess. My guess is that demining NGOs will be using something like this soon enough if it proves eff…
The mine roller looked to be made of three parts: the black core (expensive); the plastic plates (very cheap); and the bamboo poles (cheap as shit). Provided the weight came mostly from the core and the core never itself got blown up, I'd saw it can clear more than a couple of land mines for the money. Perhaps, a land mine per plastic plate, and if an NGO is paying for Afghani wages, you can roll that baby all day. B…
Does it matter if you blow some mines, if you don't make a single square feet of guarantee mine-free soil?
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The actual figure is 99.6%.[0] That's the statistical confidence level for clearance required of contractors and to declare an area safe, because it's impossible to prove beyond any doubt that there is no longer a single mine left in an area. Demining teams still aim for 100% though. For instance, Mechem's sniffer dogs have displayed a 90% success rate on target filters, so statistically having three dogs per team pe…
>For instance, Mechem's sniffer dogs have displayed a 90% success rate on target filters, so statistically having three dogs per team perform cross-checking paths on the field should produce the 99.6% confidence level for the type of mines the dogs can detect. I know nothing at all about this area, but presumably this only works if the 10% failure rate is random rather than based on some quality of the undetected min…
But of course that isn't true in reality. There will be properties of the mines (burial depth, ground cover, degree of leakage of sniffable explosive material) that affect its chance of being found by all dogs searching for a mine.
If you wanted the parent poster's statistical chance, you'd want three 90% ways of detecting mines that are truly independent. Perhaps a dog, and infrared imaging sensitive enough to detect the explosive material (I have no idea if that's possible), and this article's mechanism.
It is depressing to me that a community as smart as this is so congratulatory of such inch-deep stuff. Oooh, landmines! Design! Shiny! But a fast perusal of the comments shows that this approach is at best problematic. And a deeper reading of the comments suggests this might very well be a dangerous anti-pattern. People, you are some of the brightest and cleverest people walking the earth. And the earth has some nast…
I think you're vastly overestimating this board's power & influence.
I find the story touching. Unexploded ordnance is a problem mainly for children in former war zones. Imagine if the park / playground / vacant land where you played as a child was mined and you witnessed others, perhaps your friends getting killed or severely maimed there. Such an issue would weigh heavily on you for a lifetime. While we can't seem to ban war, many countries have joined a treaty banning landmines. Th…
The ones that should join that treaty have not.
My country should not have joined. I'm from Finland. All that treaty ever did was to get rid of foot mines that we're designed to be planted around a heavy tank mine to make the whole deal difficult to disassemble. Now as our mines are easily disassembled, it just kind makes attacking here easier. So completely opposite outcome is very probable than what was intended.
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Both involve sentient beings. This is not about valuing children less. This is about valuing sheep more. This might be an uncomfortable world view, taking how much we depend on non-human abuse in our civilization, but it's not the only case where we built it on abuse of others, human or not.
You do realize these sheep are not pets and are not treated as such in Afghanistan, right? They will be used for milk, wool, and some will be slaughtered for meat. This makes sense for the people who live there- the dessert is not an easy place to grow crops and a multi-purpose animal is very valuable for survival purposes. Animal rights is a tough sell in a place like this. It seems like an ineffective non-systemati…