Monday, July 17, 2006

From the Department of Everything You Know is Wrong: Cortez and his legion didn't bring the microbes that kiilled the Aztecs by the tens of millions. Megadeath in Mexico: Epidemics followed the Spanish arrival in the New World, but the worst killer may have been a shadowy native—a killer that could still be out there. By Bruce Stutz, in Discover magazine. When Hernando Cortés and his Spanish army of fewer than a thousand men stormed into Mexico in 1519, the native population numbered about 22 million. By the end of the century, following a series of devastating epidemics, only 2 million people remained. Even compared with the casualties of the Black Death, the mortality rate was extraordinarily high. Mexican epidemiologist Rodolfo Acuña-Soto refers to it as the time of "megadeath." The toll forever altered the culture of Mesoamerica and branded the Spanish as the worst kind of conquerors, those from foreign lands who kill with their microbes as well as their swords. The notion that European colonialists brought sickness when they came to the New World was well established by the 16th century. Native populations in the Americas lacked immunities to common European diseases like smallpox, measles, and mumps. Within 20 years of Columbus's arrival, smallpox had wiped out at least half the people of the West Indies and had begun to spread to the South American mainland. In 1565 a Spanish royal judge who had investigated his country's colony in Mexico wrote: It is certain that from the day that D. Hernando Cortés, the Marquis del Valle, entered this land, in the seven years, more or less, that he conquered and governed it, the natives suffered many deaths, and many terrible dealings, robberies and oppressions were inflicted on them, taking advantage of their persons and their lands, without order, weight nor measure; . . . the people diminished in great number, as much due to excessive taxes and mistreatment, as to illness and smallpox, such that now a very great and notable fraction of the people are gone. . . . There seemed little reason to debate the nature of the plague: Even the Spanish admitted that European smallpox was the disease that devastated the conquered Aztec empire. Case closed. Then, four centuries later, Acuña-Soto improbably decided to reopen the investigation. Some key pieces of information—details that had been sitting, ignored, in the archives—just didn't add up. His studies of ancient documents revealed that the Aztecs were familiar with smallpox, perhaps even before Cortés arrived. They called it zahuatl. Spanish colonists wrote at the time that outbreaks of zahuatl occurred in 1520 and 1531 and, typical of smallpox, lasted about a year. As many as 8 million people died from those outbreaks. But the epidemic that appeared in 1545, followed by another in 1576, seemed to be another disease altogether. The Aztecs called those outbreaks by a separate name, cocolitzli. "For them, cocolitzli was something completely different and far more virulent," Acuña-Soto says. "Cocolitzli brought incomparable devastation that passed readily from one region to the next and killed quickly." After 12 years of research, Acuña-Soto has come to agree with the Aztecs: The cocolitzli plagues of the mid-16th century probably had nothing to do with smallpox. In fact, they probably had little to do with the Spanish invasion. But they probably did have an origin that is worth knowing about in 2006. 4:41:16 PM    comment []

Michael Geist: VIDEO AND THE INTERNET AN EXPLOSIVE MIX My weekly Law Bytes column examines the enormous success of a video mixing Diet Coke and Mentos, which has generated millions of viewers and $30,000 in revenue for the creators. I argue that the Mentos success story may sound like a fluke, it is better understood as part of a growing trend toward innovative online video distribution models, the majority of which operate outside traditional broadcast regulation. Toronto Star version at http://geistmentoscolumn.notlong.com Homepage version at http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id28 That last url is likely to break in transit. It should read (but all put together): http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php ? option = com_content & task = view & id = 1328 (Let's see how that works.) 10:38:48 AM    comment []

Has Skype been cracked? By David Meyer, ZDNet UK. Skype has moved quickly to try and scotch rumours of an imminent clone a development which would threaten the VoIP client's business model by introducing interoperability with its rivals Skype's model of being a communications island could be under threat, if reports that its voice and instant messaging client has been successfully reverse engineered are true. According to Charlie Paglee, the chief executive of a Chinese-American Internet telephony (VoIP) company called Vozin Communications, engineers from a small Chinese startup have managed to crack Skype's protocol. . . . Skype itself reacted to the news with a statement on Friday, saying it had "no evidence to suggest that this is true". "Even if it was possible to do this, the software code would lack the feature set and reliability of Skype which is enjoyed by over 100 million users today. Moreover, no amount of reverse engineering would threaten Skype's cryptographic security or integrity," Skype continued. 9:01:20 AM    comment []