ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 will be released to the general public on Tuesday, but everyone who pre-purchased the game has early access to the servers today and for the next two days. I’ll be spending a lot of time in the virtual world of Tyria as a result.
If you happen to be in-game, my main character name is Raphia Naon and I’m on the Darkhaven server.
Update: My first day’s gaming report is now posted at GuildMag.
Update the second: The next day’s activity is rounded up here.
“I want to say one word to you. Just one word.” Antibiotics.
We aren’t single individuals, but colonies of trillions. Our bodies, and our guts in particular, are home to vast swarms of bacteria and other microbes. This “microbiota” helps us to harvest energy from our food by breaking down the complex molecules that our own cells cannot cope with. They build vitamins that we cannot manufacture. They ‘talk to’ our immune system to ensure that it develops correctly, and they prevent invasions from other more harmful microbes. They’re our partners in life.
What happens when we kill them?
Farmers have been doing that experiment in animals for more than 50 years. By feeding low doses of antibiotics to healthy farm animals, they’ve found that they could fatten up their livestock by as much as 15 percent. You can put the antibiotics in their feed or in their water. You can give the drugs to cows, sheep, pigs or chickens. You can try penicillins, or tetracyclines, or many other classes of antibiotics. The effect is the same: more weight.
It seems reasonable to assume that this effect is also true for humans. And we dose ourselves with antibiotics far more than we should (often for things that do not respond to antibiotics at all … a twist on the placebo effect). In addition, many of the animals we raise for meat are regularly dosed with antibiotics.
For now, two things are clear. First, antibiotics have done a huge amount of good in treating bacterial infections and if we’re even talking about reducing their use, it’s because we have the luxury of health that they have provided. Second, they are clearly overused: prescribed for illnesses that they have no power over, and used to fatten livestock that aren’t sick. Currently, on average, every American child gets a course of antibiotics ever year.
The overuse of antibiotics has fuelled the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but their impact on our beneficial bacteria could be equally detrimental. Blaser has been vociferously banging on this drum for years. As he wrote in a comment piece for Nature, “Antibiotics kill the bacteria we do want, as well as those we don’t… Overuse of antibiotics could be fuelling the dramatic increase in conditions such as obesity, type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, allergies and asthma… We must make use of the available technology to protect and study our bacterial benefactors before it is too late.”
Wargames have been used to plan real wars for more than a century, but in at least one instance, a commercial wargame was a significant planning tool for a real war:
By the end of the Cold War, American military planners had contingencies and plans for just about every conceivable crisis – Latin American counterinsurgencies, confrontations on the Korean Peninsula, a full out Warsaw Pact onslaught against NATO. But on August 2, 1990, when Iraqi tanks surprised the world and rolled into the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Kuwait, decision makers in the Pentagon had virtually no plans on the shelf for the defeating the world’s fourth largest army. Out of desperation, someone in the American military nerve-centre reached for a copy of a hobby store military board game entitled Gulf Strike. Designed in the late 1980s by a subsidiary of the commercial war game company Avalon Hill, Gulf Strike allowed civilian hobbyists to battle through a series of hypothetical wars involving the U.S., Soviet Union, Iraq and Iran on a hexagonal-grid map of the Gulf region. According to a 1994 Military History article on war games by Peter Perla, before lunch on the day of the invasion, the Pentagon had the game’s designer, Mark Herman, on the phone. By mid afternoon, he was on the military’s payroll. And by day’s end, Herman and a group of senior officers had already successfully played out a shorthand version of what in five months would go down in history as Operation Desert Storm.
Of course, the results of wargames can’t predict with great accuracy: the level of abstraction is too high and the “fog of war” quickly introduces far more uncertainty than any simulation can dispell in advance. However, disregarding the data from wargaming a battle or campaign has resulted in disaster at least once: the Japanese navy wargamed the attack on Midway Island in 1942. the wargame showed that the Japanese would lose at least one aircraft carrier from the attacking forces. The admirals, suffering as a group from what was known as “victory disease”, disregarded the game result and ordered the sunken ship “refloated” and the exercise continued.
In the real world, of course, the IJN lost not one but four aircraft carriers and the majority of their combat-trained pilots and crew. It was the turning point of the war in the Pacific.
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