ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

Correction

“Playing with Fire” by Shepard Krech
(23 October, p 56) contains
a phrase that should have been deleted during editing. The phrase is in italics:
“There is little argument that Native Americans . . . and hunted buffalo to
extinction.”

Money isn't everything

Your editorial’s attempt to “get away” from the inconvenient questions of
morality and ethics with regard to the copyright of the human genome
(30 October, p 3) is untenable.

By taking the stance that the argument should be in terms of “property
rules”, you unavoidably state (as with taking any stance) a moral
position—that generating economic wealth should be put before other
considerations. In so doing, you also equate the biological building blocks of
human life with any other intellectual or commercial property, neatly
disregarding any ethico-moral distinction between human and non-human.

At the same time, you dissolve any sorry remnants of the notion that the
genome project is at all a question of disinterested science. Is it not time
that genetic science—and perhaps New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€”critically
examined both its moral position and its embrace of the free market? And is it
too much to ask that science in general match its technological prowess with
even one iota of spiritual progress?

Delayed evolution

The bicycle isn’t so much like the coelacanth, as Michael Cross suggests
(6 November, p 51).
It’s more like a domesticated animal.

Since 1934 it has been prevented from evolving in any major way by the UCI
(the international cycle sports organisation), after Francis Foure broke seven
world records riding a Mochet Velocar recumbent. The UCI reacted to this by
banning recumbent designs from racing and effectively limited the evolution of
the bicycle.

In recent years, though, a growing number of recumbent bikes (and trikes)
have been setting records, now validated by the International Human Powered
Vehicle Association, which will accept any design. Andy Wilkinson, for instance,
took nearly 10 per cent off his previous record for Land’s End to John O’Groats
riding a “Seat Of The Pants Windcheetah” (designed by Mike Burrows, of Lotus
bike fame). In Australia, a solar-electric Greenspeed trike recently defended
its World Solar Challenge title, travelling over 1400 kilometres in under 33
hours.

In London, Sainsbury’s supermarket and Red Star parcel delivery have begun to
use recumbent trikes and quadricycles to deliver people and goods. At last, the
delayed evolution of the bicycle seems to be starting up once more.

Senseless seeing

Can an anaesthetised cat “see” anything at all? Reconstructing a picture of
the outside world by measuring the signals conducted by the neurons from the
cat’s retina to its brain is an impressive technical achievement
(2 October, p 17).
However, does this justify Ehud Kaplan’s “hope that future studies will
shed light on how the brain makes sense of these scenes” and “how we know that
this is grandmother and the other is Marilyn Monroe”?

Reception of signals under anaesthesia should methodologically not be
confused with perception in a state of consciousness. To solve a problem it
should be appropriately defined.

Only convert

Feedback used the phrase “the offending paragraph has been amended and the
wildly inaccurate metric measurements removed” to describe NASA’s metric
conversion of imperial measurements
(23 October).

On closer examination, your use of the term “wildly inaccurate” seems mildly
inaccurate. NASA’s inaccuracy was not wild at all, in fact it was a very mundane
and dull mistake showing enormous consistency. It was their inability to read
English that was at the core of the problem. They did not multiply imperial to
metric (× 0.3048) but metric to imperial (× 3.28).

Trees have no guts

Efforts to combat the greenhouse effect have focused on countering the
build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
(23 October, p 20). Why is so
little attention given to the effect of methane on global warming? It is a more
powerful greenhouse gas than CO₂. One of its chief sources is the guts
of ruminants.

Beef is beginning to go out of favour, and if the land now given to cattle
rearing were given to trees, both CO₂ and methane levels in the
atmosphere would be lowered.

Solid mercury

I read with interest your article on a “snowball” Earth
(6 November, p 28),
in which Gabrielle Walker states that “with the mercury barely topping –40
°C, only a few living things survive”.

This snowball Earth must have been a strange place indeed. In today’s world,
the mercury would have solidified at −39 °C.