Awkward eclipse
Carole Stott describes the case of a schoolteacher who did not tell his class that there was going to be a total eclipse of the Moon as he did not want to reveal that he did not understand the mechanism of such eclipses (Review 19 November).
This recalls the recent television programme (the second in The Longest Walk series) showing a crescent-shaped setting Sun, which made no mention of the fact that an eclipse was taking place. This would have been the eclipse of last May, whose zone of annularity passed just south of Spain where the action was taking place.
One imagines the producer telling the director and camera crew off for being so incompetent as to be unable to choose a time for their film when there wasn’t an eclipse taking place, but deciding that he would use it despite the “blemish” and hope that no one would notice anything unusual.
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Dolphin friendly
In response to the article on dolphins by Ian Anderson (This Week, 15 October), the dolphins at Monkey Mia have associated with people and boats for over 100 years and have been handfed from the beach for over 30 years 鈥� one of the longest ongoing associations found in the world.
In 1986, in the face of increasing numbers of visitors, a decision was made to allow that interaction to continue but to actively manage it based on the premise that:
The numbers of dolphins was small (usually between 5 and 10) compared with a total in the adjacent study area estimated at somewhere between 300 and 400; if properly managed the detrimental effects would be minimal; large numbers of people would be able to experience these mammals in a natural setting; it would enhance public appreciation of these and other marine mammals and thereby enhance conservation efforts for these species.
Therefore, the Dolphin Information Centre was created to develop management strategies and educational facilities 鈥� not to encourage tourists as Anderson states.
Yes, there have been problems. As these have been recognised they have been addressed. The problems have been recognised because the data has become available from 12 years of ongoing scientific research. This research makes the dolphins of Monkey Mia among the most closely studied groups in the world.
The key factor in maintaining the interaction of people and dolphins at Monkey Mia is undoubtedly provisioning, but a major problem was the uncontrolled feeding of dolphins from private fishing boats offshore 鈥� not the small regulated amounts fed from shore, supervised by rangers.
Only one dolphin has been described as becoming dependent on handouts for survival. The boat feeding problem has been addressed 鈥� not by policing, but by education and peer pressure, that is public cooperation 鈥� and has ceased.
The report by the Department of Conservation and Land Management outlines some of the possible reasons for the lower survival rate of juveniles born to dolphins which visit the beach compared with those that don’t. One of these possibilities is polluted waters. After a pollution event in the summer of 1988/89, the problem was rectified by the new owners of the old caravan park, now Monkey Mia Dolphin Resort. The problem has not reoccurred.
If humans are ever to appreciate and live in harmony with the wild creatures of this planet then we must successfully bring together the general public, private enterprise, government and scientists in an open forum where we can learn. Such a situation exists at Monkey Mia.
Mind control
Susan Blackmore states: “Suddenly, prospects of magnetic mind control seem an awful lot worse than the idea of being abducted by imaginary aliens”. The history of Michael Persinger, the scientist around whose work her article is based (“Alien abduction: The inside story”, 19 November) bears this out.
Persinger was employed by the US national security establishment to develop behaviour-modifying electromagnetic weapons under project “Sleeping Beauty”. He came to the attention of the defence industry after he published a paper entitled “Possible cardiac driving by an external rotating magnetic field” in 1973. Captain Paul Tyler, the Director of the US Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, wrote in 1986 of a technique employed by the national security establishment to disrupt “the electrical signal in cardiac muscle”, to produce “complete asystole with a resultant fatal outcome”.
With knowledge of Persinger’s involvement in this field, his role in “alien abduction” research could perhaps be assessed in a different light.
It’s worth adding that weapons of the kind Persinger worked on and other so-called nonlethal weapons are now being openly promoted as a means to reduce the human suffering and infrastructure damage wrought by conventional arms. But the fact is, they are neither humane nor necessarily nonlethal. It’s high time that politicians, scientist, journalists and the public alike take a much more intense interest in assessing just where this new class of weapons is threatening to lead us and respond accordingly.
Fractal paradigm
As an amateur follower of cosmology I was most interested to read the suggestion from Andrei Linde that our Universe may be represented by a fractal (New 杏吧原创, Science, 12 November). Andrei Linde goes further in Scientific American (November 1994, p 32) by using a fractal model to explain inflation and suggest that multiple universes are connected by wormholes. Other cosmologists have suggested that multiple universes may be connected to ours by black holes. I have for some years been toying with the concept that the Universe may be described by a fractal. This possibility may have struck many people because of the commonly noted similarity between the structure of the atom and the solar system. The similarity does not stop there. The Milky Way, itself rotating, is surrounded by orbiting spinning satellite galaxies. At the other end of the scale the atom is made up of spinning and orbiting particles (neutrons, protons and electrons) which in turn are made of spinning sub-particles (quarks, gluons, muons etc.) and these (and everything) according to present theory are made up of superstring. At all levels there is an echoing of the solar system model. The observations are clearly similar to the increasing complexities of fractal patterns as displayed on a computer.
If the space-time continuum is considered as a fractal, of which the solar system is a typical part, several predictions can be made:
The large galaxy clusters should echo the planetary structure and be shown to orbit other clusters; the Universe will either orbit another universe or satellite universes will orbit our universe perhaps interconnected by wormholes or within black holes; superstring should be arranged in a spinning, orbiting pattern; as methods become available to investigate any level of complexity, further complexity should be manifest.
The fractal nature of the model implies that, rather than 4 dimensional or multidimensional as in most other models, in this paradigm the Universe is 4 plus (or minus) a fractional dimension (or multidimensional plus a fraction).
The fractional dimension may explain Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. As we force the measurements into 4 dimensions by closely examining them, the required fractional dimension is manifested as uncertainty. A fractional dimension would have some but not all of the features of full dimensions. The dimension to which the fractional dimension is closely associated is likely to be time.
Movement within and measurement of the three spatial dimensions is straightforward and symmetrical but movement within time, although possible by mathematical theory, in practice is not attainable due to the “arrow of time” as manifested by the second law of thermodynamics and time therefore appears to be asymmetrical.
In summary I would like to suggest that the fractal model of the Universe should be further developed. This may explain many of the presently observed phenomena and allow predictions to be made and tested.
Sudden stops
Dan Thisdell reported on an electronic system that detects when a driver is trying to make an emergency stop and automatically applies maximum possible servo boost to the brakes (Technology, 5 November). This electronic actuation system (EAS), allied to antilock braking (ABS), is reputed to halve the stopping distance of the average driver/car combination.
Laudable as these and many other “drive by wire” advances are, they nevertheless engender a false sense of security to those drivers lucky enough to be cocooned in the high tech, leather clad, soporifically silent isolation of today’s luxury cars.
For the rest of us, incapable of stopping within the distances envisaged, the prospects of driving behind EAS/ABS fitted cars, are quite alarming. There can be little solace for either party (or indeed their insurance companies) to know that while the ensuing accident resulted in two people in traction and repair bills for many thousands of pounds, the hedgehog, at least, was spared.
Typecast
In Ted Nield’s review of Louie Psihoyos’s book on dinosaurs (19 November) it was stated that E. Drinker Cope’s bones had been proposed as the lectotype of the human species. However, there is an earlier proposal for a lectotype in W T. Stearn’s Appendix to Wilfred Blunt’s The Complete Naturalist, published in 1971. In this he proposes Carl Linnaeus, whose bones lie in Uppsala Cathedral beneath a stone slab inscribed “Ossa Caroli a Linne”, as the lectotype.
As Professor Stearn points out, “the specimen of a species most carefully studied and recorded by the author must be chosen as the lectotype”. Linnaeus studied himself to the extent of writing his autobiography five times, and thus is the ideal choice as a lectotype. On the other hand it is impossible that Cope, who was born many years after Linnaeus’s death, can have been studied by the great man.
All this is of course complete pedantry; it is of no practical importance whatsoever to have a lectotype for humankind.
Future proof
Your article asking “Is your PC future proof?” (Technology, 19 November) was quite clear in its message that current PCs are fraught with hardware clashes and that a purchaser of new computer peripherals will have to put up with fiddling around with the autoexec.bat and win.ini files in order to get the new hardware to work. The article went on to speak of the coming revolution in hardware standards that would allow users to buy new add-ons for their PCs and get instant performance with no hassles.
We would like to point out that those of us who use Apple Macintoshes have had this facility ever since the Mac was invented 10 years ago. Every peripheral I can think of will plug into any Mac built since 1986 and work first time, every time. I have installed a host of software and peripherals on a large number of Macintoshes and never once hit a problem. I have never once had to fiddle around with anything remotely resembling an autoexec.bat file.
With the coming of Mac clones, this system will see it’s real test and it is very probable that it will still come up smelling of roses. So in answer to your question: “Yeah, my PC is future proof 鈥� just as it was in 1986.”
Fuzzy elections
While economists often receive a bad press, it is satisfying to find the discipline well ahead of other scientists in some areas. Arturo Sangalli’s Forum article on voting with “fuzzy logic” (12 November) covers one aspect of the science of voting which economists (and other social scientists) have traversed for over five decades (for example, D. C. Mueller, Public Choice, 1979).
Sangalli’s idea of “fuzzy ballots” reflects economists’ concerns about voters being able to express “intensity of preferences” in voting. But Sangalli misses key issues well traversed in the economics literature. In his “fuzzy ballot”, should the line linking “yes” and “no” options be linear or nonlinear (for example, logarithmic)? Would one person’s “0.75 yes” be equal to another’s “0.75 yes” in a “fuzzy ballot” (interpersonal comparisons of utility)? Can voters express intensity of preference in nonvoting ways (for example, by participating in political parties)?
What implications do the costs of obtaining information for voting have on voter behaviour, and their ability or wish to express intensity of preference? What benefits does an individual voter obtain from voting, how do benefits compare with the costs, and what implications does this comparison have for voter behaviour (does it, for example, help explain low voter turnouts where voting is noncompulsory)? For what kinds of political decision making does voting provide an efficient outcome)?
Should voting or referendums only permit binary choices? Or, in voting for parliamentary representatives, are multi-member constituencies preferable to single member ones? Do most referendums pose false dilemmas by demanding yes/no outcomes? In deciding to move to “fuzzy logic” voting, would an antecedent referendum be necessary?