We went to the Hoes Down Harvest Festival the first weekend in October. It’s held at Full Belly Farm, a 400-acre organic farm that’s been in business for more than 40 years. We ate some good food, heard lots of good music, watched some sheep shearing, and even bought a little stuff.
There were also some workshops and tours. One of the workshops I went to was called a “meditation” on tools and was a wide-ranging discussion of when to adopt new tools, particularly in farming. I thought it might be about computerized tools, but it was actually more thorough than that. I mean, they started with the shovel and when it was the best tool and when it might not be.
So the speakers and members of the audience had lots of thoughts about the balance between the greater ease that comes with a tool contrasted with the things the tool can’t do or can’t do well.
It got me to thinking about new tools that come along in our lives. In the past few years, there have been two tools in particular that have had universal attention.
One of those is the use of mRNA in vaccines and other medical treatments. This is a major breakthrough. Among other things, it can be used to make flu vaccines very quickly, which means they can be manufactured more closely to the time they’re needed and therefore more closely match the current flu outbreaks.
This method is also useful in cancer treatment and, now that effective ways of working with mRNA have been developed, appears to have possible uses in many medical situations.
Obviously, that technology was the reason we got Covid vaccines so quickly, and while those vaccines did not prevent transmission, they did substantially reduce the dangers from the virus. (Unfortunately, research into vaccines that actually block transmission seems to have come to a standstill.)
This is an amazing new technology that has led to creation of very useful tools indeed. Continue reading “Some Thoughts on Tools”…