Root Privileges – Science, culture, and complexity

What Hannibal’s crossing cost

That thermodynamics has so very many applications is as fascinating as what it so often illuminates. Its tools and methods can be brought to bear on everything from celestial bodies and industrial machines to cellular biology and human endurance. The simple reason is that energy is the fundamental currency of the physical world: no physical process can occur without transferring or transforming it. Thus the laws of thermodynamics provide a near-universal framework to understand the limits and possibilities of any system in motion.

In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on July 6, researchers from Germany and the UK used the principles of thermodynamics to say which route the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca might have taken through the Alps. Hannibal’s crossing, with an army of 46,000 men, 7,000 horses, and 37 North African elephants, during the Second Punic War is one of the great events of military history. However, the precise route he took has been unclear. From the paper:

Scholars have long debated which route Hannibal followed, weighing each possibility based on historical, logistical, and topographical considerations. In his Histories, Polybius records his own attempt to retrace Hannibal’s route based on a contemporary account by Silenus, now lost. Polybius reports how Hannibal crossed the Rhône river and established a supply line near present-day Orange. From there, Hannibal marched North for about 80 km to Livron-sur-Drôme, from where he headed East into the Alps. After that, Polybius’s record is unclear, leaving it to interpretations to suggest that Hannibal chose between two possible routes across the Alps: One route passes through Grenoble and Aiton, peaks at the Col du Clapier, and reaches the Po Valley via Susa. An alternative route passes through the Col de Grimone and Gap, peaks at the Col de la Traversette, and descends into the Po Valley at Pian del Re.

In their study, the researchers found that the Col de la Traversette route would have been more energy-efficient: taking this route, they estimated the army would have expended 5.42 trillion joules of energy — about as much chemical energy released by blowing up 1,000 tonnes of TNT. On the other hand, the researchers estimated the Col du Clapier would have consumed 6.28 trillion joules. They also evaluated two other routes: Col de Montgenèvre, 6.02 trillion joules; and Col du Mont Cenis, 6.45 trillion joules.

The study also found that the elephants were energy-wise better suited for climbing than humans thanks to their large reserves of fat and what the researchers called “four-wheel-drive” movement. (According to a 2010 study, the labour of an elephant’s limbs aren’t divided the way they are in most other four-legged animals. Rather than the forelimbs acting as brakes and the hindlimbs as motors, all four limbs are capable of braking and propulsion, like a 4WD car. Thus elephants distribute the work of moving their weight evenly. The cost they pay is some energy-efficiency: every now and then their limbs also burn energy to produce opposing forces that cancel out.) On the Col du Clapier route, the elephants were estimated to have lost only 4% of their fat whereas the men may have lost up to 19%.

At the end of the march, which spanned roughly a thousand kilometres from Spain, Hannibal and his army reached Rome and waged war for 14 years. But all but one of the elephants died in the first winter itself: the army couldn’t find food for them in the enemy territory.

Previous attempts to determine Hannibal’s route used historical accounts, archaeology, philology, and even geology. It’s tempting to believe the new study now adds bioenergetics to the mix, as an independent new line of evidence, but let’s pause for a moment and ask two: (i) Was Hannibal aware of the availability of two or four paths? (ii) Did he really optimise for energy alone?

The answers to both questions are discouraging. On the second: Hannibal would have also considered the presence of enemy units on a path, local weather conditions, the availability of water, how easily certain segments of a path could be traversed, the risk of rockfalls, political alliances with local tribes, and — crucially — how easily the moving army could defend itself at various points. On the first question: Hannibal took the help of local guides and incomplete (at the time) maps to find his way to Rome.

Thus the study’s methods could complement historical and archaeological evidence rather in and of themselves be dispositive. That said, if we set aside the intention to use thermodynamics to shed light on which route Hannibal and his army might have taken, we still have usable estimates of the energy cost of each route and an opportunity to inform historical records of the army’s health and potency based on them.

Featured image: An illustration of Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps, by Heinrich Leutemann, 1866. Credit: Public domain.

Walk through chaos

Daily writing prompt

Is a little chaos actually good for us?

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I’m just going to invert that question a little and ask: Is a little order good for us? I’m doing this because the question “Is a little chaos good for us?” assumes that chaos can be pippetted into our lives in “little” quantities, that at all other times things are completely predictable. I learnt from navigating what is at most times a chaotic newsroom that a good life is less about learning how to exert control and more about responding to situations, whether or not we control them. Granted, the question “Is a little order good for us?” is equally susceptible to that argument, but I’d also like to use it to illustrate something cool, something I think has helped me work more efficiently, too. It’s called a random walk. It’s more of a concept than a walk you take — although you could try it in the real world and see how it goes. In a random walk, a person walks on a grid of square cells, like a chessboard. If the person is standing in one cell, they take the next step by tossing a coin. If it’s heads, they take one step left; if it’s tails they take one step right. So each step is random and the odds of you being able to correctly predict which way the person will move next is 50%. However, the few rules that a random walk does have to follow means that as the person takes thousands of steps over time, the walking pattern they follow will start to show some strong patterns. For example, after the person has taken N steps, their distance from the starting position will be around N^1/2. Put another way, just a little order, consistently applied, can lead to predictable outcomes — including ones that we desire. I realise this metaphor is thin but I’ve found it to be a useful way to think about unpredictability. So much can go one way or the other and we try to take as much as we can in stride just as much as some small good habits can build up to something great.

Gyroscopes

As silly as it sounds, as a student of mechanical engineering, I am partial to technologies that make use of mechanical forces. Today they are harder to come by because the solutions to the problems they solved were replaced by electronic components from the mid-20th century on. Today, newer technologies based on quantum physics are beginning to displace electronic devices, at least in specific use cases.

In the landscape of electronic technologies, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are among a few honorable exceptions. As the name indicates, these technologies combine both electronic and mechanical components to solve specific problems.

And among them, a tool called a gyroscope has been particularly fascinating: both mechanical and MEMS versions coexist today depending on the setting. And even though scientists and engineers are devising newer ways move beyond them to even more advanced forms, they are also finding ways to significantly improve the existing ones.

Recently, scientists from China and Japan reported in Nature that they had found a way to boost the sensitivity of chip-based gyroscopes by three orders of magnitude.

If you rapidly spin a large wheel and then try to change its axis, the wheel will resist. This is the working principle of a gyroscope, a device used to determine the orientation of the container it is fixed in. For example, ships use gyroscopes to know which way they are pointing and satellites use gyroscopes to alert their computers to when they start to drift from their intended orbit.

As the wheel spins and you try to change its axis of rotation, it will respond by moving in a new direction that is perpendicular to the direction of change and to its original axis. The wheel is said to experience the Coriolis force and physicists call this phenomenon gyroscopic precession.

A computer can use it to figure out the object’s orientation and, if necessary, which way the change is arising and counteract it.

These days, your smartphone has a gyroscope, too, but it works slightly differently. For starters, it is microscopic. There is a tuning fork that a small battery vibrates at a fixed frequency. When you rotate the phone, the axis of vibrations will change. The fork will resist this with gyroscopic precession: it will curve ever so slightly.

This setup is placed between two parallel plates, forming a capacitor. The plates are connected to each other via a circuit. When the fork curves, the voltage between the plates will change, which a circuit component will measure and relay to the computer. Finally, the computer will use this signal to determine the change in orientation.

Because this gyroscope design is so small and involves both electrical and mechanical components to work, it is an example of a MEMS technology.

It is not perfect because no sensors are perfect. For example, if the gyroscope is off by just 0.05° per second, after 20 seconds the orientation reading will be off by 1°. This is called drift — and a computer can correct for it by also using readings from an accelerometer (which sense gravity to say which way ‘down’ is) and a magnetometer (it can say which way north is, among other readings).

MEMS gyroscopes exist in an engineering sweet spot. They are an example of miniaturisation in electronics but because its components involve mechanical forces as well, shrinking them even further is nearly impossible. Rather, you can’t shrink them without significantly degrading their performance.

A larger gyroscope is heavier, so its moving part is harder to rotate or vibrate. But they are also much more precise than MEMS gyroscopes and are thus used onboard ships and satellites. On the other hand, it is infeasible to have a sufficiently large rotating object inside a smartphone.

But because the extent of gyroscopic precession depends on the mass of the tuning fork, beyond a point it becomes too weak to measure. Similarly, the signal from the capacitor becomes too faint if the moving structure has less area, and smartphone gyroscopes these days are already dealing with a few attofarads.

(1 attofarad is 10^-16% of 1 farad. Put another way, if 1 farad is all the water in an Olympic swimming pool, 1 attofarad is the amount of water in a single human cell.)

Second, if you make the fork too small, the thermal energy of its atoms will start to dominate its motion, setting it vibrating randomly due to very small changes in temperature. MEMS gyroscopes are thus usually tens to hundreds of micrometres wide because the competing forces balance out at this scale.

Of course, there are many applications (or certainly valuable ones) that are still looking for smaller gyroscopes that are also more precise. So engineers have switched the technology platform — from MEMS to optomechanical systems that measure changes in direction based on changes in a light signal, atomic gyroscopes that use the wave nature of atoms, and of course emerging opportunities based on quantum physics.

But in the new Nature study, the scientists made the gyroscope’s output frequency up to 1,010-times more sensitive to the Coriolis force. This translated to a 253-fold improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio and a 297-fold improvement in the measurement precision.

In a MEMS gyroscope, the tuning fork can vibrate in two ways: one when it is set vibrating by the setup and the other when the smartphone rotates and the Coriolis force is acting on the fork.

Let’s say in the first instance, the fork vibrates left-right and in the second, top-down. These two modes are independent: when it is vibrating left-right, it does not also vibrate top-down unless it is forced to. When you rotate your phone, the Coriolis force applies this force, causing the fork to vibrate in a mix of the two modes and the capacitor measures the extent of that mix.

In the study, in a MEMS gyroscope, the scientists coupled the two modes in a variable way so that the usual amount of Coriolis force produced an extraordinarily large change in the frequency of vibrations.

Because this way did not amplify the Coriolis force itself, only one part of the fork’s response got amplified; the noise did not. If a rotation normally changed the resonator’s frequency by 0.01 Hz, now it could change by 10.1 Hz. Thus, the authors wrote:

For the first time to our knowledge, we have demonstrated how to generate ultrasensitive responses with sublinear scaling of the Coriolis effect… [This advances] the previous understanding that the CVG [Coriolis vibratory gyroscope] output is always proportional to the rotation input. Through this singular Coriolis effect, we have broken the physical limit of the CVG sensitivity imposed by the intrinsic Coriolis factor. We have shown that this discovery can lead to large improvements in sensitivity, precision and signal-to-noise ratio of a CVG. Our findings open up fundamentally new avenues to regulating CVGs and other systems involving the Coriolis effect.”

And so, a mechanical technology lives on.

Orphan blocks on bitcoin network waste 16 GW

A new PNAS Nexus paper has shed light on a major source of hidden energy waste on the bitcoin network. Here, miners compete to solve a complex mathematical puzzle. The miner that solves a puzzle first is rewarded by the network with a block: new bitcoins plus transaction fees.

An accidental fork occurs when two different miners solve the puzzle at almost exactly the same time. Because it takes a few seconds for a winning block to be announced to the rest of the network (called the propagation delay), a second miner might successfully mine the same block before they find out someone else has already won it. Eventually, the network chooses one block to keep and discards the other, which is called an orphan. The energy used to mine that orphan block is essentially wasted because it doesn’t contribute to the security or the history of the network’s official ledger.

As part of the study, the researchers developed a model to calculate how often these forks happen based on the number of miners, how concentrated their power is, and how fast they communicate. They estimated that in the “most recent year”, this wasted mining power amounted to roughly 16,000 MW — “equivalent to half of the power generated in the United Kingdom”.

Note: A difficulty epoch refers to the period of time in which the mining power required to crack the mathematical puzzle is roughly the same. After every 2,016 blocks released, the network adjusts the difficulty depending on the computational power brought to bear in the previous epoch. The researchers calculated their parameters from multiple difficulty epochs and found that the wastage due to orphan blocks in the latest epoch — beginning March 2025 — was 16 GW. It is not necessarily the power ‘lost’ throughout 2025. In short, in the difficulty epoch that began in March 2025, the mining power wasted due to orphan blocks was 16 GW.

That translates to an annualised consumption of roughly 140.1 TWh. According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, this same figure was 125.1 TWh in February 2022 and is 159.9 TWh today.

Crypto: Climate change means new tech has less time today to prove itself

The team also found that when mining power is concentrated in just a few large pools, the number of forks actually decreases because these mining conglomerates often communicate with each other faster than the rest of the network does, reducing the chances of creating orphan blocks. On the flip side, if only three or four pools control most of the network — which has been the trend recently — the network becomes more vulnerable to censorship or attacks and more susceptible to collusion.

Developers are currently working on solutions to this problem, including compact blocks, which cut the amount of data that needs to be transmitted by 95%; the ‘Falcon’ relay network, high-speed data highways where the nodes begin transmitting block data before they’re aware of the block’s full contents; the Stratum V2 protocol, where miners plan their mining tasks beforehand to avoid conflicts; and preconsensus mechanisms, where miners signal what they are going to mine well before the risk of an accidental fork arises.

However, these solutions only illustrate the classic broken window fallacy: the talent and power expended to reduce the 16 GW of waste could have been spent on productive advances. The world is effectively paying the glazier to repair a digital window that, even when it was in perfect working order, provided no gainful service to the real economy.

Featured image credit: Image created with ChatGPT 5.2.

Down with Vader, down with the empire

Daily writing prompt

Emperor Palpatine has announced open elections for a new Emperor — and he’s nominated Darth Vader. You get to nominate one challenger.

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Even against his long career of deception, Sheev Palpatine announcing an open election for the seat of galactic emperor sounds particularly cynical. In response to this farce, I nominate Mon Mothma of Chandrila. However, I do not nominate her to be the next emperor. We do not need a better emperor. We need to altogether dissolve the imperial office and in its place install a constitutional democracy.

Just consider the legacy of Palpatine’s New Order. The emperor had argued that democracy had become “bloated” and “ineffective”, that only a strong hand could bring peace. But under the empire, we have had peace the way a graveyard has its silence. By centralising power, Palpatine has removed the restorative impulses of a free society. There was no legislative body to demand accountability for the Ghorman Massacre, only a Senate that had, as Padmé Amidala lamented, by then been reduced to a “hollowed-out chamber of applause”. The imperial economy has become a brood of parasites fuelled by the sweat and blood of enslaved non-human species and the strip-mining of entire worlds like Ilum.

Vader’s nomination is the zenith of this failure. A Vader-led imperium will be a state of permanent martial law. His fondness for summary execution will ensure immediate compliance as much as guarantee long-term instability. Even now, the empire is a house of cards held together by fear, and the wind of rebellion will inevitably blow it down. We must reject both Palpatine and Vader and instead foster a democratic uprising. It is our moral imperative.

A constitutional democracy is the only system capable of handling a galaxy of 20 million sentient species. In particular, the goal of our uprising must be to install a galactic federation of free worlds, governed by a charter that enshrines the fundamental rights of all these species. Unlike the Old Republic, a new constitutional democracy must separate its powers to prevent any future chancellor from accruing emergency powers indefinitely, the very loophole Palpatine used to dismantle the republic from within.

“The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil,” Mon Mothma noted in her famous denunciation of the emperor. In the same spirit, a new democracy must focus on restoring a free HoloNet, independent of imperial propaganda, to ensure imperial atrocities are laid bare. To avoid the bias in favour of the core worlds that fanned the Separatist crisis, the new democracy should have rotating capitals. By moving the seat of government between worlds, the government will know that it exists foremost at the galaxy’s invitation.

Finally, a constitutional democracy must follow the lead of Princess Leia Organa’s efforts to decentralise the military into planetary defense forces, plus a small, specialised federal fleet tasked with peacekeeping and anti-piracy.

We already have a model for such a government in the actions of the leaders of the Rebel Alliance. Fighters like Bail Organa fought the imperium with X-wings as much as diplomacy, building clandestine cells that worked as small democracies even under the shadow of Star Destroyers. They proved that collective action, with sentient species of all backgrounds working towards a common good, will always trump the will of a Sith Lord, no matter how singular.

By nominating Mon Mothma, I choose the podium over the lightsaber. The open election is obviously a trap but we can turn it into a revolution. Let us rally behind a challenger who represents the restoration of the Senate and the rule of law, and thus force the empire to reveal its true face. If it refuses to honour a democratic result, it will prove it is a common tyranny. If it allows the vote, it will sign its own death warrant.

Against the idea of building loyal subscribers

Daily writing prompt

How do you build loyal subscribers?

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I’ve always found that a somewhat strange thing to aim for. I understand there are several thousand people worldwide working to build a loyal subscriber base (“building loyal subscribers” makes one sound like Dr. Frankenstein). And whatever their reasons are, I’m sure at least one of them is “to build community” or “to make money”. Those are perfectly legitimate things to do. But insofar as the question of a loyal subscriber base is raised with regards to writing, I don’t have an answer. Before I became a journalist in 2012, I’d been a blogger for four years, writing about physics and an intellectual life centered on that topic. After I became a journalist, I began to write on science, health, environment, spaceflight, higher education, science policy and administration, research fraud, and many other things that caught my fancy. And I continued blogging. Over time, I realised a few things:

(i) I write because I have something to say, rather than because someone wanted something specific to read or even because someone might find what I say useful.

Follow-up: I’ve found that by making of myself a better person every day, in as many of the infinite ways in which a life can be lived as possible, in steps marginally small or revolutionarily big, I can still ensure the number of people who find what I have to say engaging, entertaining or even useful is non-zero. That is, I believe good people have good things to say. I’m not there yet but I hope to be. As a corollary, my writing at various times has only mirrored me at various times, opening windows into my own psyche that might otherwise have taken me years of mental probing.

(ii) I attach a great deal of importance to writing something just because one needs to say it, or more broadly to communicate per se, rather than keep it to oneself. No self-censoring (with reasonable limits).

Follow-up: Writing has its own merits. The more you write, the better you write and the clearer you think. Importantly, these relationships are entirely independent of whether someone is reading your words. (To be sure, audiences are not redundant. Having one will also train you in the peculiarities of public sensibilities, social norms, satire, the virtues of dialogue, and what a difference writing when you’re angry makes, among other things.)

(iii) The internet has increased by leaps and bounds a person’s ability to seek out, find, and consistently access new information. This includes both loitering over the internet, jumping from one website (or Wikipedia page) to the next, and staying in ‘touch’ using bookmarks, RSS feeds, email subscriptions, and other forms of notifications.

(iv) Frankly, I care little for a loyal subscriber base. I care much more for having a place to write, for more people to write, and for you to find whatever kind of writing you’re looking for. (This is why my fondness for WordPress.com persists: the cost of getting started is just a little time, and not even any money.)

(v) If there is something you won’t say because your subscribers might disagree and/or unsubscribe — I’ll be disappointed but not surprised. Such is the world. But if you won’t say something because your subscribers won’t be interested, you should drop the subscribers and keep the writing habit. If you can’t, you should admit that you’re being dishonest.

Follow-up: Point (v) might do a good job of tempting you into believing that I’m really repudiating my readers (such as they are) before they can repudiate me, but in my defence… I don’t care.

Granted in the first instance: applying these same ideas over and over while maintaining a fixed presence online — e.g. at the same domain name or the same account on a platform — is what leads to loyal subscribers. However, these days, you’ll agree such a base also demands that the writer, or content-producer more broadly, focus on a fixed set of themes, ideas, peeves or what-have-you. I don’t think I could ever promise such a thing. All I can promise is that I will think about the contents of a post to the best of my ability on that particular day before publishing it. This together with point no. (iv) means that if I write about bananas one day, I expect banana-reader to be able to discover it, and if I write about chillies the next day, I expect chilli-reader to be able to discover it.

Granted in the second: my professional identity as a journalist is bound up with this kind of thinking. I’ve always only worked for publications that had a daily readership of at least a million. Each of my articles has been read by at least a few thousand people, but often by many more, and on some rare occasions by more people than the number that reads my blog in a whole year. You’ll have to trust me when I say I don’t take this readership for granted, and in return I will admit that it also allows me to adopt that laid-back but sincere policy towards my blog. If you won’t do something even when you’re suitably privileged, you suck.

Writing with WordPress Write

I’m writing this post on Write, the new text composer/editor on WordPress.com. According to the official blog post, Write is a response to last year’s Creators survey, where “‘simplify the editor’ was the single most-requested improvement from the people already publishing on WordPress.com”. The tool itself was originally created by WordPress developer Jamie Marsland, with the WordPress.com team then adopting/adapting it. According to Marsland:

WordPress is extraordinary software. But when you sit down to write a blog post, you’re greeted by a dashboard, a sidebar, an admin bar, a block inserter, a settings panel, and dozens of options that have nothing to do with the words you’re about to put down. For writers — especially those who aren’t developers — it’s a lot of visual noise between you and a blank page. Write strips all of that away.

So far, Write looks good to me. WordPress.com ruined the writing experience when it introduced Gutenberg. Many bloggers have already commented that WordPress.com should just have brought back the Classic editor, i.e. the TinyMCE editor. I don’t think the Classic editor produces blocks when you publish, so it can’t benefit from the advantages of the block editor, such as they are.

However, I also don’t think WordPress.com needs to go that far back to restore a good writing experience. Calypso, the WordPress.com front-end before Gutenberg, was remarkably smooth and conducive to writing. WordPress.com has been bloated for a long time; the “you’re greeted by a dashboard, a sidebar, an admin bar, a block inserter, a settings panel, and dozens of options” was as true of Gutenberg as it was of prior versions. What changed was the additional bloat of Gutenberg, which made the writing experience unwieldy and unsupportive of the speed of thinking, as it were.

Since the launch of Gutenberg with WordPress 5.0 (and then Full-Site Editing with v5.9), I’ve considered the editor that shipped with Ghost.org, Koenig, to be the gold standard. To be clear, I’m restricting myself to editors that ship along with publishing platforms, rather than including standalone editors (in that case, my current favourite is Sublime Text). Ghost built Koenig on the Lexical framework and ever since its launch in 2018, it has been damn smooth.

Koenig and Gutenberg both allow the writer (composer) to invoke blocks in the writing area. In Gutenberg alone, however, the view-port would jump back and forth depending on which paragraph the cursor was on, the cursor wouldn’t move in an intuitive war, the font in the composing area would change depending on the site theme, and there would be a noticeable lag when invoking a block or moving between paragraphs on a long article (1,000+ words across 5-6+ paragraphs).

If Write is to stay good, it needs to beat Koenig (although hosting with WordPress remains a lot cheaper than hosting with Ghost, so there’s that). That means making Write easy to find, introducing and harmonising keyboard shortcuts — even now, Ctrl+S sometimes saves the post, sometimes asks to save the webpage —, supporting Markdown, and removing all of the clunk that belaboured Gutenberg.

Most of all, as more and more writers use Write in different ways, the people at WordPress.com should streamline the feedback and changes that arise in a way that doesn’t compromise the raison d’être of Write. Losing track of that spirit was what gave us the Gutenberg writing experience in the first place.

Featured image: A preview of the new Write editor. Credit: WordPress.com.

State and crime

From ‘The Sulur horror story of child sexual assault and murder’, The Hindu, May 31, 2026:

The abduction, sexual assault, and murder of the girl sent shock waves across Tamil Nadu, coming as it did immediately after the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) came to power with C. Joseph Vijay as the Chief Minister. The heinous crime also became a dark spot in the early days of the TVK government as Mr. Vijay had targeted the previous DMK government vehemently during his election campaign over crimes against women and children.

Mr. Vijay, who sent Director-General of Police Sandeep Rai Rathore and Additional DGP (Law and Order) Maheshwar Dayal to Coimbatore after the crime, said the murder had caused immense pain and shock. …

Leader of the Opposition Udhayanidhi Stalin alleged that 30 major incidents of crime, including the murder of the girl, were reported within 12 days of Mr. Vijay assuming office, casting serious doubts about the State’s law and order situation. AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K. Palaniswami accused the government of not taking swift action after receiving a complaint about the girl’s disappearance.

Udhayanidhi’s criticism seems misguided. A single murder, however horrific, is not a good basis on which to judge the State’s overall law and order situation or the safety of women and girls. Whether a crime occurred says nothing about law and order because serious crimes occur in every society, including those with highly capable police forces and governments. The more meaningful questions are whether crime rates are falling, whether the State can prevent foreseeable risks, how quickly it responds when a serious crime does occur, how effectively it investigates them, and whether the perpetrators are punished. A good law and order apparatus could never promise to prevent crime.

It is even more absurd that Tamil Nadu’s law and order situation deteriorated within 12 days of a new government taking office — when it will have had little time to review and institute changes (as necessary) to policing, prosecution, the administration of criminal justice, urban planning, social services, and the many other factors that influence crime. In fact, one crime committed shortly after an election almost certainly originated in conditions that predated that government. In fact, the risk of sexual violence — as at Sulur — at large also depends on several factors, including the offender’s behaviour, family and neighbourhood networks, policing practices, urban design, alcohol use, social norms, reporting rates, court effectiveness, school systems, and — like it or not — sheer chance.

No chief minister who has been in power for just under a fortnight can directly control these factors on a daily basis. This individual can effectively influence how the State reacts to crime, much less so whether a particular crime occurs. But over five years, a State government — like the one Udhayanidhi was until recently part of — can matter substantially because they can hire more police officers, improve the State’s forensic capacity, expand CCTV coverage, redesign unsafe public spaces, strengthen survivor support services, accelerate trials, improve conviction rates, regulate alcohol sales, improve public transport safety, and invest in education and social welfare.

Yet again, even if these changes can alter the probability that such crimes occur and the likelihood that offenders are caught and punished, these changes will not eliminate crimes against women and girls with certainty. But even more: a government should be judged less by a handful of shocking cases than by long-term trends. If crimes against women, child sexual offences, murder rates, conviction rates, response times, and public perceptions of safety improve (or do not) over several years, then it is reasonable to attribute some responsibility to the government. Otherwise, it is just bickering.

Featured image credit: Joshua Coleman/Unsplash.

People, place, animal, disease

In an article published in The Hindu this morning about the difficulties of developing an ebolavirus vaccine, I wrote:

Many NTDs [neglected tropical diseases] are caused by eukaryotic parasites, i.e. worms and protozoa, which develop in multiple stages across multiple hosts, complicating researchers’ efforts to identify a stable antigen for vaccines to target. The immune system also struggles to confer lasting protection against infections by these organisms, making them categorically harder to vaccinate against than, say, measles.

On a second reading, a particular point caught my eye. NTDs are prevalent in the world’s tropical and the subtropical areas. Most of the world’s poor people are also located in this belt (and/or a few degrees above/below). Their poverty can be traced back to colonial-era exploits and plunder and the unstable governments that followed since their independence. The disease-causing pathogens in these regions also seem more complicated, developing in stages and whatnot. Is it coincidental that both realities — more ‘complicated’ pathogens to vaccinate against and more poverty/poorer countries — share a geographic area?

On the one hand, eukaryotic parasites have multi-stage, multi-host life cycles because tropical areas are highly biodiverse. (I believe why that is has yet to be settled, although scientists have evidence that the tropics have had a stable climate for longer stretches of geological time, their ecosystems occupy larger areas on the ground, the warmer weather speeds up metabolism and mutations, the more sunlight received supports more biomass, and their ecological niches are often narrower.) That means more host species to ‘choose’ from, more ecological niches to occupy, and more pressure to evolve in complex ways. At the same time, it is not a good idea for a pathogen’s survival to depend on multiple hosts — unless the hosts are reliably available. And the conditions in the tropic, but especially the weather changing relatively minimally between seasons, ensure this availability. In the temperate zones and beyond, the weather changes more drastically, forcing many species to proliferate or not depending on the time of year.

On the other hand, poverty is a risk factor for exposure to pathogens. When a community lacks good sanitation and has to defecate in the open, hookworm larvae can be deposited in the soil, where they hatch and become infectious. For another example, snails shed Schistosoma cercariae larvae, which can come in contact with human skin through dirty water. Malnutrition also reduces immune function. If a poor person develops a chronic disease, their chances of escaping poverty can drop further. For instance, schistosomiasis causes liver fibrosis and cognitive impairment in children while hookworm causes anaemia and stunts development. Put another way, economic development and the disease environment go hand in hand, instead of one causing the other.

Further, colonialism created and sustained living conditions that made it harder for people to escape being affected by dangerous pathogens. Colonial economies were for the most part extractive; even tropical medicine, such as it was, took shape as a discipline for doctors to attend to British (or European) administrators and soldiers, rather than the native population. And the end of colonialism did not spell the end of this neglect: it continued in the capitalist world-system by acting through purchasing power, neglecting those who lack it.

In sum, the disease environment influenced the colonists’ strategies (they wanted to extract and leave more than settle down and develop), those strategies produced the institutional deficit that drove poverty (ignoring the infrastructure and institutions that could have laid the groundwork for self-sustaining economies after they left), and poverty sustained the disease environment (this does not mean “poverty causes disease” but that poverty helps sustain disease transmission and severity if certain pathogens are already present). To round things off, today, the impulses of colonialism have been replaced with those of market-driven exclusion.

Featured image credit: Jordan Opel/Unsplash.