Letter
Why? My answer is that it was a drunken agreement over the new year period
that we would bet who ate the most burgers in 2001. I couldn’t remember where
2000 went so I thought I’d write a few reminders on the site. The locations of
burger-eating events will be more exotic by the end of the year.
On the Thursday and Friday after you published the item, 292 readers came to
the burger log from www.newscientist.com and a similar number typed in the
address directly鈥攑resumably from the printed magazine.
Now I need some good translating software to find out what has been written
about the page in various languages (Korean and Portuguese seem to be the most
popular).
Letter
What irony that in the very same issue you rightly mourn the death of Fred
Hoyle and extol the virtues of thinking outside the box, I should find an
excellent article quoting almost entirely new research on the dangers of
fructose (in sucrose). It ignores the wealth of research done, collated and
publicised by another of life’s unorthodox scientists, Linus Pauling.
Pauling wrote in 1986: “The increasing incidence of [coronary] disease
closely parallels the increasing consumption of sugar. It is not at all
correlated with the consumption of animals fat (saturated fat) or of total fat.”
At last the spotlight might now move away from the eating of cholesterol and the
saturated fats, onto the eating of fructose.
Sweet but deadly
Thank you for putting sugar under the spotlight
(1 September, p 26). One
could also mention its habit-forming properties, particularly since its (ab)use
in affluent societies begins almost at birth. The parallel your conclusion draws
with the tobacco industry is striking and to the point.
US lawyers rejoice! There will be sweet and fat profits for you in a couple
of decades.
Question everything
Small bites of an interesting story can be frustrating. The report of cot
death associated with dope-smoking dads is typical
(1 September, p 18).
Imagine a household where Dad says: “Pass the bong my man. Hey Kerry, all our
mates here partying on have the munchies, any pizza?” Perhaps poor Kerry hasn’t
had a chance to duck in and see whether the baby is OK.
The researchers consider a “magic ingredient” may explain the link between
marijuana and cot death, but lifestyle factors should be considered first.
Breathe more easily
Surely there is a better reason for the pleural membrane in elephants
(8 September, p 17).
I’m a physicist, not a biologist or zoologist, but I’d
estimate the weight of an average healthy adult African elephant lung to be
between 60 and 80 kilograms. That’s a lot, and I don’t believe a standard
pleural cavity could support such a loose heavy structure against the force of
gravity. Matters get worse when the elephant runs.
I can’t think of a better “design” than to support the entire lung with a
huge number of filament-like tendons in the form of loose connective tissue. I’d
also expect the larger dinosaurs to have had a similar structure. And perhaps
dugongs share the elephant’s physiology, not the other way about.
Just like a calculator
Richard Wilson says that “Hal promises to enhance human-machine
communication. However, it no more `experiences’ or `understands’ than your
humble pocket calculator knows what it’s doing”
(8 September, p 53). In the
fully human understanding of those verbs, and in the present state of Hal, he is
of course right.
But it’s a dangerous statement. If an entity鈥攃alculator, ant or
person鈥攈andles inputs and produces coherent and useful outputs, it becomes
difficult to say that it doesn’t “understand” what it is doing. That would be
true only if “understand” necessarily involves self-awareness and having a
theory of mind.
Machines will become more complicated and sophisticated by leaps and bounds.
They will come to be based not on deterministic programming but on self-learning
capabilities鈥攁s is already happening in many applications. The danger is
not in anthropomorphising the actions of machines, but in mystifying the
capabilities of humans.
It is very likely that to an entity as much more complicated than us as we
are more complicated than a calculator, our belief that we are different in
kind, not just in degree, would be “a superstitious attitude towards something
that is ‘little more than a collection of general learning algorithms in a human
brain’.”
That is not to deny that human intelligence is pretty hot stuff. But as
machines become more intelligent and powerful, we need to keep a clear head
about their capabilities, or we will certainly miss something important as and
when it happens.
Letter
Hand-chargers for mobile telephones are offered at
www.mobilestyle.co.uk/frameg.htm鈥攑谤颈肠别诲
拢12.95 when I looked.
Letter
Melanie Cooper says I will be able to get a wind-up mobile-phone charger “by
the end of the year”. I have one now: I paid 拢16.95 for it to JEM
Marketing of Cranleigh, Surrey. It took me three minutes of winding to get
anything useful and it was a hard slog. But it worked.
Wind-up to a healthier lifestyle
Melanie Cooper writes “nobody wants a bicycle-powered computer”
(8 September, p 24).
In fact, I have wanted one for some time. Like many computer
users, I spend long hours sitting at a desk, seldom remembering to take any
exercise. This is not a healthy lifestyle. A power source that could be pedalled
at a steady rate would provide sedentary workers with much-needed exercise as
well as cutting costs and reducing pollution. It might also encourage some of us
to consider whether all the time we spend sitting in front of our computers is
really productive. I am sure a device like this would have a big future.
Letter
I have a rare copy of Louis Leipoldt’s Cape Cookery and find in it
some interesting observations about sugar. “The modern cook,” he writes,” would
find it difficult to make most of his sweet dishes if he were deprived of sugar
. . . yet that was the difficulty that, 400 years ago, cooks successfully
overcame . . . It is interesting to note that the quantities of sugar prescribed
in those early days yield results that are much less sweet than what would be
acceptable today.”
He also notes that a tiny dusting of salt was used to make fruit taste
sweeter, and says: “There was always a cruet on the table with powdered salt,
pepper, ginger and cinnamon . . . Fresh melon, for instance, was usually eaten
with a little salt and pepper, though some preferred ginger, and others salt and
cinnamon.”
The ready availability of sugar, which only became affordable in the 1700s,
seems to have changed our eating habits. As we are not adapted to this
bombardment of sugars, it is鈥攗nsurprisingly鈥攎aking us ill with
syndrome X. Perhaps we should look to the way things were done before sugar
became cheap. Merely cutting it out of the diet is not enough鈥攕omething
has to replace it. Out with the sugar bowl, and in with the powdered salt and
spices?
Eccentric, moi?
It is a sad day when Feedback asks an English eccentric “why”
(1 September).
After all, English eccentrics are a special breed, even among eccentrics, who
have given the world so much in science, arts and social development. They have
endured the scorn of society and their “peers” throughout history and can do
without you (of all people) demanding reasons.
Strength to Az’s bow I say, and to others of his ilk: we should all be
grateful.
Correction:
We incorrectly reported that the “cosmic dark ages” ended 900,000
years after the big bang. That should have been 900,000,000 years.
Not so dark
You speak of the “dark ages” when the Universe was between 300,000 and
900,000 years old
(18 August, p 14).
But as you point out, the temperature was
3000 kelvin at the beginning of this time. This means that all space would be
filled with a brilliant reddish-orange light, as bright as the surface of a red
giant like Betelgeuse.
During the period in question the temperature fell and visible light was
replaced by intense infrared. So the “dark ages” were only dark right at the
end, just before the stars came out.
The measure of metrics
Feedback reports on a requirement for “a minimum of .017 cubic metres of
concrete”
(8 September).
This kind of thing is not uncommon.
It seems to me that there are three kinds of people in Britain. There are
those who use the metric system happily and sensibly; those who use it crassly,
probably out of resentment at having to use it for some particular purpose; and
those who won’t use it at all.
I sometimes wonder whether attitudes to the adoption of the euro fit the same
pattern.
Bite was always worse
I have my doubts about Norma Guy’s claim that neutered dogs are more likely
to growl and bite
(1 September, p 25).
In my experience, aggressive behaviour is
one of the commonest reasons for dogs being castrated. Thus, a sample of
neutered dogs is likely to contain a disproportionate number of dogs with
aggressive tendencies.
Conversely, a sample of dogs that have not been castrated is likely to
contain a higher proportion of dogs whose owners do not perceive them to be
aggressive and hence have had no reason to have them neutered. I suspect that
the results have more to do with sample bias than with hormones.
Letter
Perhaps a civil-engineering solution could help protect against a tsunami.
Why not place some soil offshore, to protect against such a landslide? The
output of modern quarries can be 5 to 10 million tonnes annually. At that rate a
trillion tonnes could be moved in a century, and made safe in less.
If you used electric railways with regenerative braking to move the material
to the coast, and covered the site with wind farms, it could be fairly energy
efficient. You’d need purpose-built barges to dump it in deep water, but there
may be usable products in the spoil. The beneficiaries鈥攖he US, Britain,
Canada, Brazil and Spain鈥攕hould pay for it. All that’s needed is a bit of
Victorian thinking with a bit of 21st-century technology.
Slipping away
The unstable volcanic slopes of the Canary Islands may offer an explanation
for a long-standing puzzle
(1 September, p 17).
When Spaniards first visited the
islands, the Guanche, who had no boats, inhabited them. But how did they get
there?
If in the remote past a similar landslide caused such a monster tsunami, the
coastal inhabitants would all have drowned. In the centuries that followed,
descendants of mountain people who had long since forgotten about boats would
have repopulated these areas.