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Wicks of old
In the article on “green” lawn mowers, the wick carburettor is claimed as “novel” and the implication is that it is a new invention (Technology, 19 August). Not so. I have a copy of The Autocar Handbook which includes a short description of this type of carburettor. The book is not dated, but on internal evidence it was probably published around 1912.
Formal demands
After reading “Why be formal” (26 August) I realised yet again why I am so happy to have retired after 24 years in computer programming.
I have had more “formal methods” thrown at me, usually as if they were pearls before swine, than Niklaus Wirth has written computer languages, and they all contained one important weakness: the users either cannot or will not give the full specification, and they cannot be persuaded to be “mere coders” like me.
What all these methods come down to is yet another high-level language plus a demand that the users do their programming in it. Fat chance.
Clever old so-and-so
Stephen Donovan missed two other points about authorship of scientific papers (Forum, 12 August, and Letters, 2 September). First, supposing Professor Soandso has an interesting idea and invites a member of his staff, a Dr Thingamy, to carry out some experiments to put his hypothesis to the test. If it does not work he graciously invites (instructs) Thingamy to write it up. It duly appears under Thingamy’s name or as Thingamy and Soandso (1995).
If, however, it does begin to work, then Professor Soandso immediately invites a Mr Whatshisname to join in. This poor passenger is there for a very good reason: the authors of the paper that follows will subsequently be referred to simply as Soandso et al.
This is the sadder side. There is, happily, a sunnier side. I will, if I may, refer to my own second paper. I was in a very lowly position in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I had made an important discovery but was too inexperienced to know how to continue. I drew this to the attention of my boss, V. B. Wigglesworth (later Sir Vincent Wigglesworth, FRS). He worked out the mechanisms involved. But, and here is the important point, he insisted on my being named as the senior author when it was finally published in Proceedings of the Royal Society on my 19th birthday in 1932. This surely is the other side of the coin.
Little white lies
Your item on lying assures mothers that their undergraduate offspring are significantly less likely to lie to them than they are to total strangers (This Week, 26 August). This surely has some counter-intuitive implications concerning mother-child relationships.
As a university tutor I recall once having to counsel a young tutee on a personal problem. The student was much troubled over what he should tell his mother and I found myself advising him to tell her a little white lie (there seemed no point in upsetting her). He was shocked by my advice.
“I couldn’t lie to my own mother!” he retorted. To which, innocently, I responded: “If you can’t lie to your own mother, who can you lie to? Strangers?” Neither the logic nor the jest of this remark appealed to him and I guess I was forever written off as a useless (or worse) personal tutor. Perhaps, despite your quoted statistics, there are still some caring offspring who value the maternal bond and are keen to keep falsehoods within the family.
Price of a life
David Pearce claims that his work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a matter of “scientific correctness versus political correctness” (This Week, 19 August). What can he mean? Pearce has chosen or was instructed to use a particular methodology to value life, namely the willingness of communities to pay to avoid risks of death. The choice of this methodology for valuing life rather than some other approach is an ethical and political judgment, not a testable scientific principle.
An economist might argue that the chosen methodology most accurately reflects the impact of lost lives on “gross world product”, but that does not mean the converse is true: that lost GWP most accurately captures the overall impact of lost lives. Other measures are possible, but an ethical perspective is required to decide which to use. For example, each lost life represents an equal deprivation of human rights. On the other hand it might be more appropriate to measure the happiness and fulfilment forgone when lives are lost. No doubt economic welfare influences happiness, but who would argue that an average American is 15 times happier and more fulfilled than an average Indian?
The debate is part of an ill-conceived attempt to trade off the costs of damage against the costs of mitigation to find some economic “optimum” level of climate change. The IPCC has apparently produced cost estimates of “1.5 to 2 per cent of GWP”. This implies that scientists and economists can know the unknowable and overcome the multiple layers of uncertainty concerning global and regional climate change decades from now, the resulting natural hazards such as storms or droughts, their interaction with human and natural systems, and the distinct possibility of chaotic or abrupt changes.
Who would believe a baseline forecast of GWP for the year 2050, let alone the effects of climate change? It is easy to ask a question about the cost of climate change, but not every question deserves a simple answer. In this case, the figures produced will be primarily an artefact of the assumptions used to mask the great uncertainties.
The only “scientifically correct” advice would be a careful exposition of the known, plausible and unknowable dangers that arise from disrupting such a fundamental natural system. The only credible response is to reorganise human affairs over the next few decades so that greenhouse gas concentrations do not continue to rise. Economists can advise how this can be done cost-effectively, but any attempt at a global cost-benefit analysis should be discarded as scientifically shallow and politically inept.
The issue of contention in the minds of some may well be the “value of life”, as Fred Pearce writes, but the IPPC chapter on the social costs of climate change is concerned with something else, the “value of a statistical life”. VOSL has nothing to do with the worth of life as such, but with people’s appreciation of a safe environment.
If 100 000 people are exposed to an increased annual risk of death of 1 in 100,000 there will, statistically, be one additional life lost per year. If the people involved are each willing to spend $10 to avoid this risk, the implied value of the statistical life saved is $1 million. It has been observed that poorer people are less willing to spend money on safety, since other expenditures are more urgent. Hence, VOSLs differ.
Of course the difference has much to do with the distribution of income, which may be unfair. However, for analytical purposes we have to accept the way income is currently distributed. To say something useful about the impacts of climate change we have to study the world we actually live in, not the one we would like to live in (which, presumably, would know neither poverty nor climate change). The chapter outlines how, in the political process that follows, estimates can be adjusted to account for inequality.
Pearce’s article quotes Aubrey Meyer, one of the main critics of the IPCC chapter. Unfortunately, both the assertions Meyer makes in the article are incorrect. The chapter does not assume that incomes in poor countries will remain low. Studying the impact that a doubling in carbon dioxide levels would have on today’s economy was a necessary first step. But the chapter does not stop there. Subsequently, income as well as population is allowed to grow, and VOSL grows with it.
Meyer compares estimates of the economic costs of a doubling in CO2 by the middle of the next century with estimates of the costs of mitigating such a rise. But the IPCC chapter explains why this intellectual shortcut is wrong (the envisaged abatement in emissions will not fully prevent a doubling in CO2 concentration) and undertakes the correct calculations.
Inflated argument
With the market awash with popular cosmology books, how can Ken Wallace have missed the answer to his simple question about black holes versus the big bang (Letters, 29 July)? The laws of gravity are symmetric in time. If matter can collapse under gravity to a singularity of infinite density, it can also expand from a singularity, in the reverse sequence of states.
The Universe avoided imploding like a black hole in its early stages because it was expanding extremely fast 鈥� too fast for its gravitating power to pull it back and crush it. Because the rate of expansion of the Universe is steadily decelerating over time, however, it may one day cease expanding and start to collapse. If it does so, then it will indeed resemble the interior of a black hole.
The problem of what started the Universe on its expansionary path from a singular origin in the first place is a question of initial conditions, not of the nature of the forces acting. It is not necessary to invoke nongravitational forces for an explanation, as Aurele Prins mistakenly assumes (Letters, 26 August). Quantum physics and the so-called inflationary Universe scenario give a plausible account of the initial conditions, that is, of how the expanding Universe originated from nothing.
We all pay
P. W. Glassborow in his letter (2 September) wonders why no one has commented on B. Bell’s letter (15 April) linking National Insurance Contributions and the NHS.
I am not convinced that Glassborow has interpreted Bell’s letter correctly, but if there is an error it is minor and does not detract from the general thrust of his/her argument.
National Insurance is a tax which, with the other taxes, goes into the government pot from which their spending, including the NHS, is funded. As we all pay taxes, those who go private are paying twice.
Junk is no help
An increase in the amount of junk DNA would not protect useful DNA by providing space for the mutations to occur harmlessly, as claimed by your correspondents (Letters, 2 September).
An organism like Escherichia coli, for example, has around 30 000 nucleotides and almost no junk DNA. The effects of most mutagens, especially radioactivity, are proportional to the size of the genome. If about 0.1 per cent of the DNA in the genome of E. coli gets damaged (a very high proportion, but it makes the numbers easier) then approximately thirty nucleotides will be affected. If the organism were to double its complement of DNA to 60 000 nucleotides then about sixty nucleotides would be damaged. However, thirty of these are likely to be in the useful regions. The status quo would therefore be unchanged.
Sourcing gold
I refer to the comments by Paul Budd and Randolph Haggerty (Letters, 12 August) concerning their doubts over our gold fingerprinting technique for identifying the source of ancient artefacts (Technology, 8 July). It must be pointed out that the article was not designed to detail the in-depth analytical protocols required to perform this kind of analysis, nor was it a detailed scientific article in its own right. We would refer all interested readers to our published work if they want the detail (Spectrochimica Acta, vol 49B, p 205).
One correct point made by Budd and Haggerty is that our analysis of the Viking ring did not provide conclusive proof that it was made from Scandinavian gold. The report did indulge in a certain amount of journalistic licence on this point. In fact, what we tried to convey was that the analysis produced a rare earth element pattern, in association with other elements, that we had seen in gold we had previously analysed from Scandinavia. We are not trying to imply that all Scandinavian gold is singly sourced or the same.
Analysing an artefact and finding the same elemental associations as those found in a source can, it is true, never definitively prove that gold came from that source. However, finding a completely different elemental signature in an artefact and source can give some very strong pointers that the gold in the article did not come from that site.
Joan Taylor, the University of Liverpool archaeologist quoted in the article, is not wrong in implying that a technique now exists to source gold artefacts, it is just that this technique is still in its infancy.
Today's diseases
Robin Oakley-Hill opens two cans of worms with one letter (Letters, 26 August).
Resistance to tuberculosis has actually declined since 1900, since we have far fewer challenges to our immune systems than a century ago. However, he is correct in saying that there is an inverse relationship between cancer and TB. When virtually all the population was exposed to Koch’s bacillus, cancer was a minority disease. Since then, cancer deaths have risen inexorably as tuberculosis has declined. Hans Eysenck got it nearly right. There seems to be a strong relationship between tubercular challenges to the immune system and cancer resistance.
Other infective processes have a less striking but still noticeable effect. For example Hodgkin’s disease favours high-income groups over low and it has been postulated that the fall in exposure to infection following the introduction of pasteurisation and the overuse of antibiotics after the Second World War were both reflected in subsequent rises in cancer deaths.
Coronary thrombosis was rare in Victorian times, first appearing at postmortems on old men late in the last century and only spreading to women as the age of onset fell. There are suspicions, supported by wartime experience, that the elimination of thrombolytic vitamin E from white flour may be a factor.
Certainly heart conditions and cancer have both advanced during this century from being minority diseases to become major killers. When we consider that cancer cells protect themselves with thrombus/fibrin envelopes when in contact with the bloodstream and that thrombolytic and fibrinolytic agents impede metastasis, the apparent coincidence is unsurprising.
Tight pants
There may be an explanation for the apparent decline in sperm counts other than the effect of chemicals (“Some of our sperm are missing”, 26 August).
The packaging of our testicles outside the main trunk, in a vulnerable and aesthetically unbecoming position, must be for some adaptive reason. Perhaps they function better at below body temperature. If so, a combination of heated buildings, heated cars and tight underpants pressing the scrotum against the body will have negated the effect of this anatomical design feature, causing the observed effect on sperm count.
Men’s testes should hang below the body so that the intricately looped vascular system covering the epididymis can function as a cooling system. Binding testes close to the body or pushing them into the inguinal canal causes sterility. It therefore seems likely that tight jocks are causing the possible decline in some men’s sperm counts. Furthermore, sexy tight jeans are also splendid garments for helping to reduce sperm counts.
As an aside, shepherds have long noticed that rams are subject to summer sterility, the increase in air temperature causing the problem. This raises the possibility that this year’s hot summer in Britain will have further accentuated the problem caused by any tight jocks. Similarly, global warming may bring about a long-term decline in spermatogenesis. As the ice caps melt, will the human race become extinct as a result of overheated scrota?
This is a popular theory. However, there is as yet no convincing evidence that it is true, which is why it was not referred to in the article 鈥� Ed.