Perilous predictions
Your article on earthquake prediction fails to consider whether forecasts of seismic activity always benefit the community (29 March, p 28).
If the forecast is defined by time, location and magnitude, with a level of error assigned to each, it rapidly becomes clear that there is an extremely small range of combinations that will conceivably make for a beneficial forecast. For example, if the forecast says that there will be an earthquake of magnitude between 6.8 and 7.2 occurring between 10.20 pm and 10.40 pm on a certain date, with an epicentre somewhere in an area of 100 square kilometres, then action can be taken. Over an appropriate area, buildings can be evacuated, sensitive industrial processes shut down and emergency services including hospitals put on readiness.
On the other hand, a forecast predicting an earthquake of magnitude between 6 and 8 sometime in May or June with an epicentre somewhere inside an area of 5000 square kilometres would present a different problem. None of the precautions taken in the first example would be practicable. Meanwhile, property prices would collapse in the area, earthquake insurance would become unavailable or unaffordable, and people in a position to do so would move away. It is entirely possible that the forecast could do more economic damage than the earthquake.
It is difficult to see how the issuing of inaccurate forecasts (especially when the forecaster knows they are inaccurate) can serve any purpose other than to offer the prospect of lucrative business to the legal profession.
Justified boycotts
Your editorial calls for a revision of the principle of “universality of science” and argues for the justification for boycotts of scientists under certain circumstances (15 March, p 3).
I can think of only one justification for boycotting an individual scientist and that would be if the individual had done scientific experimental work which was not in broad agreement with the principles laid down in the Helsinki Declaration. Sadly, there are many examples of such experimentation in the past 50 years since the Nuremberg Code and after the first Helsinki Declaration.
Conceivably, a state that had initiated and conducted such work knowing it to be unethical could also be boycotted until it had been made to see the error of its ways and taken action to remedy the situation. Thus, if we had not been at war with Germany in the 1940s and we had learned of the experiments that were being conducted by doctors on human victims, it would have been appropriate to boycott the scientists and the state.
Iraq's explosive issue
Your special report on the Gulf war raised some interesting points about the environmental cost of the war with Iraq, but did not mention the hazards associated with the long-term legacy of unexploded ordnance (15 March, p 12).
Although figures vary, it is thought that up to 10 per cent of explosive munitions fail to detonate once fired. If these munitions are not properly removed, degradation of the weapon casing over time will result in discharge of the explosive into the environment. Explosives are totally non-natural compounds that can not only produce a powerful explosion, but are also toxic to many biological systems and are capable of persisting in the environment indefinitely. Virtually all explosives are biologically active, many are suspected of being carcinogenic, and some have been directly shown to be responsible for disease in humans, particularly of the liver.
The toxicology of the modern high explosives likely to be used in Iraq is not well understood and accumulation of these poisons, even at low levels, will have unknown long-term implications, not only for human health but also in terms of bio-magnification in the fragile ecosystems that rely on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. At present, there are few ways to reliably remove these substances from the environment, and I fear that widespread contamination of water supplies from this and previous conflicts will leave a poisonous legacy for what is the most precious resource in Iraq.
E-immortality
An inexpensive, if somewhat unpredictable, way to preserve sound archives (1 March, p 40) or any other media, would be to “copyleft” them (2 February 2002, p 34) and release them on the Web. Applying Moore’s law 鈥� that transistor density on chips is increasing exponentially 鈥� to digital storage media means it is more expensive to intelligently purge information than to preserve it 鈥� my new hard drive contains a copy of my old one, which contains a copy of the previous one 鈥� so that material may survive indefinitely into the future. Copy-protected material, on the other hand, may disappear in only a few years, rendered unplayable by changes in technology.
Letter
Your article about preserving audio recordings reminded me of the feature about using an array of 50 light bulbs and a computer to enable severely eroded cuneiform to be read (7 April 2001, p 38).
Would it be possible to use the light bulbs and computer to optically read the old wax cylinders and records? This would solve the problem of wear and instantly digitise each old recording.
Although the shape of the wax cylinders might pose a problem, and converting a picture of the bumps back into sound would require software, to me it seems like a good solution.
East is west
The whereabouts of “north-west Antarctica” is indeed a puzzle (Feedback, 8 March). Perhaps what was meant was “northern West Antarctica”, which would presumably refer to the Antarctic Peninsula.
West and East Antarctica are accepted geographical and geological terms. The former means the smaller part between the Ronne and Ross ice shelves, plus the peninsula, which all falls in the western hemisphere. East Antarctica is the rest, which lies in the eastern hemisphere, south of Europe, Africa and Asia.
If you are confused by this, consider the following. “In parts of East Antarctica West Antarctica is east, in others west. This of course depends on if you are in east East Antarctica or west. However, if you are in west West Antarctica, East Antarctica is west unless you want to go to west East Antarctica in which case it is east. The same holds for east West Antarctica, only in reverse, except that if you want to go to west East Antarctica, you still go east. No wonder we don’t know what we found.” (D.E. Hayes, L.A. Frakes and others, Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project, vol 28, National Science Foundation, Washington DC, 1975.)
Additive itches
The nucleotides that block bitterness may or may not be the ultimate food additive, and are indeed naturally occurring (1 March, p 14), but don’t assume that they will be harmless.
The recent addition of 5鈥�-ribonucleotides (E635) to our diets as flavour enhancers seems to have triggered in an outbreak of itchy ribo-rashes, dramatic skin eruptions and even anaphylactoid episodes.
In any case, surely the end result will be more inferior food made to taste good by artificial means?
For the record
鈥� One problem with being an international science magazine is misunderstandings caused by the different accents of our contributors, including those in the Antipodes. That is how “robber crabs” became “rubber crabs” in our story about Christmas Island (5 April, p 11).
Altruism is alive
Group selection, James Randerson tells us, has been discredited, and selfish genes are behind both cheating and cooperation (Inside Science No. 159, 15 March). This is indeed the world as portrayed by Richard Dawkins in his popular book The Selfish Gene. But that was in 1976, and much has gone on since then regarding the status of genes, groups and altruism.
Contrary to Randerson’s comments, group selection is very much alive, and is discussed in many biological journals.
Nuclear recycling
Rob Edwards’s description of the nuclear fuel cycle omits an important feedback loop, namely that reprocessing not only separates plutonium from radioactive waste (fission products) but extracts unused uranium for the manufacture of new fuel, so avoiding the mining of uranium ore (22 March, p 8).
In fact, 98 per cent of the “used fuel” is recovered in this way. Only 1 per cent is recovered as plutonium, and then only as a by-product in Britain today. It is misleading to claim that “waste remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years”. This is true of only a very small proportion of the waste, which for that very reason is only slightly radioactive. The more active radionuclides have much shorter half-lives, with the result that the level of activity of the waste comes down to that of the original uranium in only 500 years.
Wind power works
Ralph Ellis writes that “the cost of building wind farms needs to be doubled as a megawatt of back-up power needs to be commissioned for every megawatt of wind power” (22 March, p 30).
Bodies such as the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and the Performance and Innovation Unit of the Cabinet Office have studied these matters in depth. Does Ellis think that this basic “flaw” in the government’s arguments has escaped the attention of the eminent independent scientists and engineers on these committees?
Electrical power systems are designed to cope with substantial and unpredictable changes in demand, by means of partial loading of the generating equipment, pumped storage schemes and other mechanisms. It can be shown through statistical analysis that the variability of relatively small inputs from wind power or from other variable renewable sources would be swamped by the variability of demand.
Even if wind power were to supply the same amount of energy as the present nuclear contribution in Britain, the operational drawbacks due to the uncertainty associated with wind variability would be small, and very little or no extra back-up generation would be required. These facts are supported by the experience of national grids with large contributions from wind power, such as Denmark’s.
It is extremely frustrating for people who work and research in the field of renewables to read erroneous views such as those of Ellis, which are then picked up by the lay public and often propagated by uninformed journalists who wish to downplay the potential contribution of renewable energy.
Black-and-white emails
Recent writers have extolled the virtue of Bayesian spam filters but missed the point (8 March, p 42 and 29 March, p 29). There are two obvious approaches, called whitelisting and blacklisting, for controlling unsolicited access to computers 鈥� not just email 鈥� and both have important virtues.
Whitelisting works like this. Imagine that you have a new computer and software, and your first task is to set up an account with an ISP to get connected. Your email client then whitelists the ISP, while everybody else is blacklisted, so that you can at least get important service announcements.
It is then up to you to extend the whitelist with the email addresses of the people and organisations that you wish to communicate with. This is a little tedious, but you only have to do it once per address, and you are then in the loop of your own electronic community, and you will never receive “Yevgena is a sultry Russian temptress” again.