Lady T
I loved the image created by this review of the tussle between Lawyerensis rapaciosus and Tyrannosaurus rex (24 August, p 54), but can’t help wondering: should “her” sex ever be determined as female, would she then be Tyrannosaurus regina?
For the record
鈥� In “Chimps have already conquered AIDS” (24 August, p 15) we misidentified one of the researchers from the University of California, San Diego. His name is Pascal not Paul, Gagneux.
Letter
The first of your two features on the World Summit contained an impressive number of statistics (17 August, p 30). But it also stands as an example of how statistics can be skewed to show only one side of the story.
Income statistics are a good example. To be meaningful they should be given in “purchasing price parity” figures, which take account of the fact that $1 buys much less in Britain than, say, Rwanda.
Aid statistics are another. If you add up total foreign aid, including private charitable donations, the US doesn’t look nearly so bad.
Nuclear future?
Tam Dalyell implies that because spent nuclear fuel can be stored for 50 years that this somehow gives the green light for new nuclear power stations in Britain (17 August, p 58). How does he propose we safely store the waste from these stations for the following 250,000 years? Given that civilisation has been around for only a few thousand years, the nuclear industry must be employing some pretty good soothsayers.
The ground is being prepared for fresh building in the nuclear industry. I suspect there are a number of factors behind this: the unfounded assertion that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar cannot provide uninterrupted power supply; a refusal to invest the same resources in renewables and the emerging hydrogen economies as we put into the subsidies for nuclear power; to bail out an already uneconomic industry; and to build on the myth that this is the only practical way to further reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
If electricity generated from renewable sources is used to produce hydrogen, as Iceland seems able to do, then both the CO2 issue and the issue of uninterrupted supply can be solved.
Miami good guys
Every physician learns the same painful lesson: leaping from observation to inference is a dangerous exercise which can sometimes land you smack on your face.
In your article on healthcare being “bad for your health” (17 August, p 26), John E. Wennberg observes: “During the last six months of their lives, people living in Minneapolis on average see a physician twice a month, while in Miami they see one twice a week”. He infers that patients in Miami are getting too much medical care. Government take note! Miami doctors must be a bunch of greedy incompetents, compared to their colleagues in the chilly north.
But his observation may have led him to the wrong inference. Perhaps the patients who died in Minneapolis were seriously undertreated? What was the quality of their lives during their final months? Compared with those who died in Miami, perhaps a Minneapolis patient had poorer control of his or her pain, depression, incontinence, bedsores, nausea, vomiting, or any of the multitude of nasty complications that can make dying such a needlessly wretched experience.
Nobody yet knows which inference is correct, so these are important questions which deserve more study. Maybe the doctors of Miami were the good guys after all.
The poor need the law
I have just read the essay by Jeffrey Sachs on the importance of science and technology for the fight against poverty (17 August, p 52).
I have to say that in nearly 50 years of work in developing countries I have learned that the two primary requirements for any country to make progress are a combination of effective 鈥� and therefore uncorrupt 鈥� law and order, and good communications.
Without the one or the other, and certainly without both, it is impossible for science or any other beneficial form of aid to contribute effectively. If scientists cannot get to a problem in safety they can neither investigate it, research it nor apply a technology developed to solve it.
Clever little brains
I read Stephanie Pain’s article on clever crows with some interest but was dismayed that she seems to fall into the trap of correlating the size of an animal’s brain with its abilities (17 August, p 44).
For some years I have wondered why scientists become so fixated on this hypothesis while all around them there are obvious examples that disprove it. The idea that any creature with a brain of lesser physical mass than a human cannot perform complex cognitive tasks is both presumptuous and preposterous.
A cow, with a brain much larger than ours, is clearly comparatively dim while many smaller creatures such as ants, spiders and meerkats can outperform us in a number of areas relevant to their own worlds. Even a crocodile, with a tiny brain in comparison to its size, has been shown to exhibit long-term memory that could easily match ours.
Certainly, other creatures that don’t possess our manual dexterity are difficult to compare directly with ourselves, but I find it hard to accept that this means their brains function any less efficiently. Indeed, perhaps their brains are more efficient at what they do, while ours have an excess of duplicated matter.
Physics of politics
“Put people together and they behave like atoms in a magnet” (24 August, p 42). Is this a new example of research telling us what we already knew? That politics is like magnetism should surely be obvious. Both are based on spin.
Pillow protection
The authors of the plan to use airbags to help deflect asteroids seem to have forgotten that most asteroids rotate, some even around more then one axis (31 August, p 16). This makes the method impossible to use, as the balloon would rotate with the asteroid. The force would constantly change direction, making it impossible to sustain a force vector in the required direction.
Pesky mouse
Ed Catmur suggests computer users can avoid repetitive strain injury by using the keyboard more (24 August, p 26). This is surprising news to the many thousands of us who contracted RSI before ever using a mouse and for whom the mouse provides some relief from the dreaded keyboard. Besides, the keyboard is of little use for painting or drawing.
I would suggest that a combination of input devices is the best way to keep RSI at bay. I use keyboard, mouse, pen and tablet, and voice recognition.
Library wreckers
I would like to comment on Robert Matthews’s review of Nicholas Crane’s book Mercator: the man who mapped the planet (10 August, p 52). Matthews incorrectly states that the library of Alexandria was razed by Christian zealots in the year 391.
While it is true that the library was attacked by the Christian rioters and many works were destroyed, over the years the library managed to restore itself to its former glory. It was in AD 641 that the library was completely destroyed 鈥� with all the stored works burnt except for those of Aristotle 鈥� by Amrou, the Islamic general leading the armies of Omar, Caliph of Baghdad. The books were used to heat the public baths.
So, to correct Robert Matthews, it was the Islamic zealots that participated “in an act of intellectual vandalism perhaps unparalleled in history”.
Said the Caliph of Baghdad: “If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious, and ought to be destroyed.”
Scholarly opinion is that there were several libraries at Alexandria and that the destruction of a single great library should be treated as legendary. Great destruction has been attributed in turn to the Romans under Julius Caesar in 47 BC, fanatical Christians in AD 391 and then the Caliph of Baghdad in AD 641. The heating of the bath houses for six months would have taken far more books than were ever in the Library of Alexandria 鈥� and the story of the Islamic destruction has been discredited because it first appeared about 600 years after the event. For a good round-up of sources and accounts see Ellen N. Brundige’s paper “The Library of Alexandria” on the Perseus Project website at Tufts University, 鈥� Ed
Origin of the signs
Feedback tells us that hobos in America marked up houses as friendly or unfriendly using chalk marks and called it “warchalking” (17 August). That would be astonishing: why would hobos have anything to do with war?
The real story is that “warchalking” (marking up houses that have wireless Internet nodes covering their neighbourhood) derives from “wardriving” (driving around with a car and checking out the neighbourhood for wireless LANs using a notebook, a wireless LAN card and a car-mounted antenna) which itself derives from “wardialling” (dialling all the phone numbers in you local exchange in turn to see which ones connect to modems that you can then probe for access), which derives from the classic movie War Games in which the protagonist phreaker/hacker proceeds to do just that 鈥� check the local exchange numbers using a 1980s acoustic coupler.
Arty elephants
author of Love, War and Circuses: the age-old relationship between elephants and humans (reviewed 29 June, p 56)
“Modern elephant art” may indeed have “a relatively short history”, but it didn’t begin in 1995, as your “We Hear That” item would have it (10 August, p 17).
Joan Embery, the “goodwill ambassador” for the San Diego Zoo, trained an elephant to swing a paintbrush more than 30 years ago. More serious inquiry into elephant art-making began in 1979 when David Gucwa, a keeper at the zoo in Syracuse, New York, noticed an elephant named Siri using a pebble to scratch graceful patterns in the floor of her stall. He gave her pencil and paper, and published the results in a curious book, called To Whom It May Concern: An investigation of the art of elephants. Gucwa’s superiors weren’t interested, and he later lost his job.
Publicists for flashier elephant art projects have since appropriated the evaluation tendered by the painter Willem de Kooning after first seeing Siri’s art, then learning she was an elephant: “That’s a damned talented elephant.”
Micro power
Your articles on global poverty and the World Summit provided useful and thought-provoking comment about poverty’s social and political contexts (17 August, p 6, p 30 and p 37).
However, there is no mention whatsoever of perhaps the single most effective tool in addressing extreme poverty, one which provides humane, effective and elegant solutions to many of the concerns raised. I refer to microfinance, which is serving more than 19 million of the poorest families 鈥� about 100 million people. These small loans allow the creation of small businesses, giving the poor dignity, and a measure of security and autonomy, without the need for intervention of government or other top-down mechanisms.
The repayment rates are comparable to rates for Western high-street bank loans, but in other ways microfinance turns the conventional principles of sound banking upside down. These clients have no visible means of support, no collateral, and conventionally would fail every test for creditworthiness. Yet they are servicing their debts, improving their lives and removing themselves from the category of “poorest”.
The goal of the Microcredit Summit + 5, which will take place in New York in November, is to give 100 million families access to microcredit. That’s nearly half the world’s poor being brought out of extreme poverty. I know of no other social, political or religious endeavour that has ever tried to achieve such a staggering prize.