Letters : . . . . .
Portadown, Northern Ireland
Might the Black Sea theory not fit the destruction of the fabled Atlantis just as well as Noah’s flood ?
If so, we could postulate that the city of Atlantis lies no deeper than 120 metres, on the fringes of the old freshwater lakes, and possibly at a great river estuary鈥攊ndeed in a region similar to that where Bill Ryan and Walt Pitman were searching.
Given that the fabled Troy was only found this century, maybe the end of the century could see another myth unearthed and revealed
Letters : Medieval beliefs
Newcastle upon Tyne
The analogies drawn by scientists who link cosmology with religion surely amount to nothing more than romantic fantasising which has no place in scientific method (“God of the quantum vacuum”, 4 October, p 28). The danger is that people begin to think this is OK, and the body of scientific knowledge which has been so painstakingly built up in recent centuries will then become suspect.
I do not mean that scientists cannot be romantics or fantasise (in their own time), but efforts to “bridge the gap” between science and theology are surely dangerous: these are entirely separate areas of human experience.
Yes, cosmology is a special case precisely because, by definition, there is only one Universe and it is therefore not possible to do experiments on controlled groups of universes. In that sense the traditional method which has proved so useful for science cannot be applied.
But that does not mean that reasoned argument has to be abandoned: we will still continue to make useful deductions from observations and our knowledge of physical laws.
If Kepler wrote that he had “wanted to become a theologian” it was merely because of the culture surrounding educated people of the time. The “intriguing interpretations” discussed in the article threaten to take us back to the medieval cosmology which preceded him.
The accuracy of such few factual statements as appear in the article is also dubious. For example, in what sense is “1 to 2 metres almost exactly halfway between 1026 metres and 10-35 metres”? If this numerological trickery were relevant we should all be only 10-5 metres tall. Or should it be 5脳1025 metres?
Letters : Not just dust
Aberdare, Mid Glamorgan
I was disappointed to see you quoting from an as yet unpublished and certainly unsubstantiated report into the impact of air pollution on breathing (This Week, 27 September, p 20).
The study in South Wales by Ronan Lyons is to report on the effect of air pollution on the respiratory health of children. Such pollutants include nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone and particulates. The study was never intended to look specifically at dust, nor to identify any specific source of the air pollution.
The suggestion that the report finds a significant association between children’s breathing problems and levels of dust is one which will undoubtedly be challenged by other members of the scientific community. But one assumes, with regret, that this rather less sensational position will attract less significant coverage in the general press.
Letters : Save us from censors
miteff@mail.acenet.co.za
I have some objections to software that blocks anything remotely suggesting pornography or sex on the Net (This week, 20 September, p 20).
Take a look at the Web site of Peacefire, an organisation of teenagers who oppose censorship on the Net (http://www.peacefire.org). It gives examples of sites that are blocked by Net censors, including Peacefire’s own Web site and those of the US National Organization for Women, International Gay and Lesbian Rights Commission, The Penal Lexicon (a British web site dedicated to raising awareness of prison conditions in Britain), Animal Rights Resource, and so on.
According to Peacefire: “Cyber Patrol blocks an atheist newsgroup, a feminist newsgroup, and the entire hierarchy of discussion groups related to journalism.”
I’m not for pornography, but I would rather see children be exposed to pornography than kept in the dark about their rights, birth control and their own sexuality.
The Net is a reflection of society. There is good and bad stuff. If children look for bad stuff in the real world, they are going to find it, no matter what you do. The same applies to cyberspace.
Letters : Dirty money
Bristol
It is not only American banknotes which are tainted with cocaine (“White hot on green”,New 杏吧原创 supplement, 4 October, p 2).
In 1995, while at the University of Bristol, I studied how contaminated sterling currency was with a range of controlled substances. The results broadly reflected those found in the US study, namely that cocaine contamination is widespread, albeit at levels lower than in the US. Cocaine was detected on 40 per cent of sterling notes from general circulation. By contrast, contamination with other illicit compounds was rare.
This work has been developed by Mass Spec Analytical in Bristol. We have established a comprehensive database of the levels of various compounds to be found, which allows a comparison to be made with seized money. Our findings in Britain bear out the conclusion of the American researchers: although contamination is commonplace, significant differences are observed between “innocent” and “drug” money. The police and customs officials regularly use our results in court.
Letters : . . . . .
The ideas discussed in this article are the ideas of the scientists quoted, not those of the author or of New 杏吧原创. The fact that scientists at the cutting edge of research in the field hold such views seems fascinating and is surely worth reporting鈥擡d
Letters : . . . . .
Folkestone, Kent
As a regular reader of New 杏吧原创, I have come to rely on articles that are objective, balanced and unbiased. Margaret Wertheim’s article was none of these. The only balancing opinion from the other side of the debate was a vague reference to Stephen Hawking as an “unbeliever”.
In a magazine noted for its rationality and its commitment to the public understanding of science, this inarticulate hotchpotch of mystical ideas was definitely an own goal. What next? Horoscopes?
Letters : . . . . .
G.Barber@uea.ac.uk
The scientific enterprise in finding natural explanations for natural phenomena may seem to squeeze God out of existence, as assumed by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time, but it only removes the “god-of-the-gaps” that had been invoked solely to explain such natural mysteries.
If a complete explanation for the origin of the Universe in terms of natural laws and mathematical equations is ever found then the question could still be raised: “Who is the author and guarantor of those laws?” Or as Stephen Hawking himself vividly asks: “What breathed fire into the equations?”
Letters : . . . . .
Kingston, Surrey
We learn that 15th-century Jewish mystics proposed ideas that have some similarities to current cosmological theories. Even if you accept that there is a correspondence, I find it hard to know what to do with this information. Is the implication that the cabbalists were genuinely divinely inspired? That they were “right”? If so, are other religious beliefs, which do not match current thinking “wrong”?
It seems more likely that this is simply a tendentious exercise in coincidence and pattern matching. Many hundreds or thousands of creation myths have been described by theologians and anthropologists.
It would be surprising if analogies could not be drawn between some of these myths and current scientific theories. But to do so provides no more insight to cosmologists than the naming of patterns of unrelated stars after mythological characters does to astronomers.
Religion has, of course, influenced the development of cosmology (sometimes by attempting to suppress its most important results). However, it is futile to attempt to link the one to the other. Religious ideas can provide no support to a scientific theory, and religion, which requires absolute faith from its adherents, presumably has no need for the evidence about the development of the Universe that science provides.
Letters : . . . . .
Ultimo, NSW, Australia
The article describes a very plausible scenario that might have occurred and given rise to the biblical story. In fact, it was just as plausible the first time I read it…in a science fiction book entitled Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, written by Orson Scott Card and published in 1996 for Tor Books by Tom Doherty Associates, New York.
Letters : Electric crimes
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Your story about “malicious consumption of electricity” (Feedback, 4 October) reminds me of a crime associated with the days of coin-operated phone boxes that took four pennies and required you to “Push button A” when you heard the person at the other end answering.
If you were caught bypassing the money box system you were accused of “fraudulently converting GPO electricity”. Precious few of the several watts involved were ever converted into sound, so I assume the legal principal of de minimus non curat lex (the law does not concern itself with trifles) was never invoked.
Letters : Wet world
Shrewsbury, Shropshire
Although the theory in your article about Noah’s flood is plausible, I wonder if “The Flood” was a memory of much greater things (“Noah’s flood”, 4 October, p 24). After the end of the last glaciation, the climate warmed rapidly to a climatic optimum around 5000 BC, when it was warmer than the present day. During this climatic optimum, the tropical arid belt in the northern hemisphere was considerably wetter than it is today. This would have affected all the Old Testament lands and much of northern Africa and Arabia.
The wetness was sufficient to support lakes with hippopotamuses in what is now the centre of the Sahara. Lakes were also present in the “Empty Quarter” of Arabia. H. H. Lamb, in Climate, History and the Modern World, notes that this is recorded in paintings and the records of early Egypt. Evidence for it would therefore have been available to the writers of the Old Testament.
Letters : Magnetic Mars
Huntley, Gloucester
I was intrigued by Philip Cohen’s report that “the puny magnetic field on Mars shows that the planet’s core must have cooled very quickly. `For some reason it aged prematurely.'” (This Week, 27 September, p 22). Might the planet’s magnetic poles be reversing?
The last reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles occurred about 730 000 years ago. If the present geomagnetism decrease of about 5 per cent per century continues, the Earth’s magnetic field strength will be zero in about 1500 years and the magnetic poles will reverse. Researchers have recorded at least 22 magnetic poles reversals in the last 4.5 million years.
As the Earth’s magnetic field strength decreases it will increasingly let in the solar wind, cosmic rays and occasional gusts of devastating cosmic dust. The same thing must have happened on Mars, where, because of its comparatively feeble gravitational field strength, repeated ingress of these charged particles must have physically blown away the planet’s atmosphere, water and any form of life.
Letters : Same game?
Malvern, Hereford and Worcester
Your report on European patent application number 778 536 states that: “to keep [Nintendo game] players on their toes one frame [of the image] is drawn on-screen while the data for the next is being prepared” (This Week, 20 September, p 13).
We have been doing this for donkey’s years. It’s called “double-buffering”, and is used in almost every application that requires animated graphics. I am certain it’s been in use for at least 15 years. Or maybe I’m missing something here?
Letters : Plumbing the Thames
les.ruse@environment-agency.gov.uk
You wondered at what depth white cards or sneakers would become invisible in the Thames today (Feedback, 4 October). It’s a boring answer, but we biologists at the Environment Agency (Thames Region) found that between May 1995 and April 1997, 50 per cent of 78 readings by Secchi disc (a piece of black and white card) were greater than 1.23 metres.
This is equivalent to a euphotic depth鈥攖he point below which photosynthesis is not possible鈥攐f 3.1 metres (we measure this with photocells these days).
This applies to the Thames at Reading and Abingdon. It wouldn’t be fair to use the sneaker index to monitor water quality in the tidal section due to natural precipitation of salts when freshwater meets saltwater.
With the water so clear we are more aware of sunken shopping trolleys and car wrecks. Perhaps this sneaker index is a bit too simplistic.
Letters : Yes, use the nets
Nairobi, Kenya
Christian Lengeler and Marcel Tanner claim that we recommend withholding impregnated bed nets in certain areas of Africa (Letters, 20 September, p 61). This is a bizarre claim, certainly not arrived at by the traditional method of reading what has been written on the subject.
Our approach to the scientific basis of malaria control starts from the premise that it is important to understand the relationship between transmission of malaria and consequent morbidity. To this end we and our colleagues have conducted what even our serious scientific critics consider to be the most thorough set of studies in this difficult area.
Aware of the danger that some may misinterpret or misunderstand the data, we were cautious in discussing possible interpretations. This caution was well captured in your original article, where our view was accurately reported as that we “simply do not know how reducing people’s exposure to malaria in infancy will affect their survival in the longer term” (This Week, 16 August, p 16).
Just in case such caution was insufficient for casual readers we conclude our report with explicit statements that “these considerations do not argue against control methods to reduce transmission” but that “they do emphasise the need to monitor such inventions”.
If it is true, as Lengeler and Tanner imply and others have claimed as fact, that donor agencies may be dissuaded from investing in malaria control by one single scientific paper, then this must reflect either the irrationality of such agencies or the ineffectiveness of those in charge of promoting international support of malaria control. A sad state of affairs in either case but not one that can reasonably be laid at our door.
Letters : Web, web, web
Dave@Yost.com
“W” is a letter that is not one syllable, for that would be too few, nor a letter that is two syllables, for that too would be too few, but a letter鈥攊n fact the one letter of all 26鈥攖hat insists on blathering on and on in its attempt to twist the tongue and overtax the ear, extending to the full three, yes, three syllables, the legal alphabetical maximum.
But that is only the beginning. We go on to treble the damage by repeating this freak letter, this monstrosity that is one thing, claims to be two other things, but is really three things, not once, not twice, but a full three times, in a nonometric rhapsody fleshed out to the nines, a compound triplicate triumphant cat-o’-nine-tails tongue-lashing, a nonotuple witches’ syllabic brew of treble, treble, toil and trouble.
Enough, I say. Nine times enough, in fact. The simple Old English word “web”, adopted from the ancient Monosyllabic, falls easily off the tongue, moves on nicely to the “dot”, and is unmistakable in its equivalence to its bombastic predecessor.
“World Wide Web” is elegant. “Double-you-double-you-double-you” is idiotic. “Web” is short and clear. Better Web sites everywhere are starting their names with “web” instead of “www”.
If you have a Web site, here’s how easy it is to do your part: instruct your DNS server to add “web.YourHost.com” as another name for “www.YourHost.com”. Leave “www.YourHost.com” in place forever to support old links and bookmarks. It doesn’t cost anything. Change all occurrences of “www” to “web” in all your Web pages.
I know it’s not a big deal. But if you do it, the world will be relieved of a silly little bit of tedium, and radio announcers everywhere will thank you.
Letters : Health code
London
You report criticisms of pharmaceuticals advertising to health professionals (This Week, 27 September, p 11).
Promotion of medicines to health workers is covered by the code of practice for the pharmaceuticals industry, which is administered by the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA). The code requires that any information, claim or comparison must be capable of substantiation and such substantiation must be provided without delay at the request of members of the health professions.
Companies can only give references in advertising when referring to published studies. They must be able to substantiate everything in their advertising. If the only data available are confidential data on file then the claims cannot be made.
Those who are concerned about pharmaceuticals company advertising to health professionals should consider submitting complaints to the PMCPA.
Letters : Acute Asimov
Lancaster, Lancashire
The work of historians and computer scientists to model the decline and fall of civilisation (“Decline and fall”, 4 October, p 32) has an extraordinary parallel in the Foundation stories of Isaac Asimov.
He imagined a science of “psychohistory” that modelled a galactic civilisation from its past and steered it into the future towards, of course, a liberal democracy. Asimov was accused by rugged individualists and libertarians of the worst sort of determinism, but it looks as if he may have had the right idea.