Letter
Stanislas Dehaene cites “gub” as an example of a pseudoword 鈥� that is, it is pronounceable, follows phonetic language rules but is not found in the dictionary.
This may well be true, and even online Scots dictionaries don’t seem to list it. However, the term “gub”, as commonly used in Scotland, refers to a comprehensive defeat inflicted on one party by another, usually in an adversarial or competitive context. For example, given the likelihood of Dundee United flirting with the relegation trapdoor yet again in the coming football season, one can reasonably expect that the phrase “Aye, we wiz gubbed” will sum up their supporters’ post-match sentiments most of the time.
Letter
It’s funny that the police are enthusiastic backers of this technology, given that they are not willing to implement it in their own weapons.
They know that the “safe” gun technology is about as reliable as a desktop PC, and they wouldn’t want a computer glitch to determine their fate in the heat of an armed confrontation with a criminal. Neither would a civilian gun owner faced with similar circumstances.
This whole “safe” gun debate misses the point. This is a human behavioural problem. A gun cannot kill someone on its own. It requires human intervention.
Trigger happy
The idea that gun accidents can be prevented by various electronic or mechanical devices is not worth even casual consideration (12 July, p 8).
Guns are an old and simple technology. Removing “statutory” safety devices will be simple. Sporting shooters will do this because they like to share guns. And if a household keeps a gun for self-defence purposes, it is essential that more than one member of the household is able to use it.
Then take the fact that there is probably at least one gun for everyone on the planet. Availability of illegal firearms has never been a problem for criminals, nor will it ever be.
The only way to reduce gun accidents is through proper education. Unlike driving a car, being safe with a gun is very easy and can be taught in minutes. The only way to reduce gun crime is to allow private citizens to arm themselves.
As for teenage suicides and spree killings, the question that societies have to address is not the trivial “how?” but the desperate “why?”. Tinkering with rules, regulations and safety devices is classic avoidance.
Shifting the problem
Economist Sven Wunder suggests that mining and drilling for oil can save forests, because the region becomes wealthy enough to import food and so the inhabitants no longer need to clear forested land for agriculture (5 July, p 6).
This seems to miss the point that their food still needs to be grown somewhere. Will it come from neighbouring countries, who will then have to clear enough forested land to grow food for export as well as for the domestic market?
Or will it be transported halfway around the world, fuelling the need for still more oil extraction?
Human origins
I disagree with your conclusion that the Out of Africa camp has won because of the discovery of skulls of the first modern humans in Ethiopia (14 June, p 3 and 5).
A paper published last year by Alan Templeton (Nature, vol 416, p 45) summarised results showing that some of our genes show geographical variations that date to much further back than a mere 160,000 years.
In other words, we have inherited genes from forms of Homo who lived outside of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Thus, strictly speaking, it is the multiregionalists who are right, even though the recent expansion from Africa had a huge influence. The degree of gene replacement by the Africans varied from one gene to another, apparently because of environmental and sexual selection.
Star names
Since the world’s leading astronomers seem to be a bit of a boring unromantic bunch, can I suggest on their behalf that Methuselah might be a better name for a 13 billion-year-old star than HE 0107-5240 (28 June, p 36)?
Isn’t it about time that some of the more spectacular celestial objects were given more user-friendly names rather than migraine-inducing catalogue numbers?
For the record
鈥� Due to an editing error, the definition of the number “gamma” became garbled in the book review by Ben Longstaff (19 July, p 51). It should have read: “the limit, as n tends to infinity, of (1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 鈥� + 1/n 鈭� ln(n))”.
Sporting lizards
According to your report, biologists are seeking a radical new theory to explain why otherwise totally unrelated members of the lizards’ blue team “cooperate” and “help defend each other’s territories” against the incursions of the marauding (sneaky) yellow team, and guard their females from the Don Juans of the lecherous (aggressive) orange team (28 June, p 14).
Maybe it’s the lizard version of the Rugby Union World Cup?
Letter
I was disturbed to see “gub” used as an example of a pseudoword in Dehaene’s article, because I am one. Gub, or gubba, is a koori (native Australian) word which essentially means “non koori”, or “white person”. It is thought to be a contraction of “government” 鈥� pronounced “gubmint” by most Australians.
Well done, brain
In your interview with Garry Kasparov you say: “Kasparov, the world’s top chess player, had lost to a computer, Deep Blue. It was a major insult to human brain power” (12 July, p 40).
Alternatively, one might see it as a major compliment to human brain power. Imagine 鈥� building a machine that could defeat Garry Kasparov!
Right reading
If a section of the brain is responsible for learning to equate sequences of symbols with recalled sound and learned meanings, I would question whether this only happens with certain symbols that acquire a collective significance among a tribe or nation as a whole (5 July, p 30). Perhaps any reasonably well thought-out system of letters would do the job.
The Roman alphabet in use today can be traced back to Egyptian hieroglyphs that evolved through Old Hebrew and Greek letters, while the modern Hebrew alphabet was virtually invented by a Jewish professor around the time Israel was founded in 1948. Yet Israelis seem equally at home with their written language as any other nation.
No trial, please
Your article on the use of computer-assisted detection in mammography presents our evidence that such systems are ineffective, and an argument that evidence to the contrary may be flawed (28 June, p 7).
In practice, all of the studies mentioned, including ours, have their own shortcomings. This is why others have called for a larger-scale trial. Our view, however, contrary to what the article stated, is that the speed at which the manufacturers are improving the software means that the results of any large-scale evaluation will probably be out of date before they are published. Faster and more focused studies are required.
First with the rule
I just read your interesting article about the possibility of a single formula underlying the fabric of the universe (21 June, p 32).
You mention Ed Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram. But did you know it was Konrad Zuse who was first to suggest that the physical universe is being computed on a discrete, deterministic cellular automaton? His first paper on this topic dates back to 1967 (Elektronische Datenverarbeitung, vol 8, p 336).
This is the same Zuse who built the world’s first working general-purpose computers from 1935 to 1941 (). His book on cellular aut omaton-based universes came out 2 years later. So Zuse’s book pre-dates those of Wolfram and Fredkin by three decades. Clearly Zuse is the man to cite.
鈥� An extended version of this letter with additional links appears on our website
Rock flashes
Alberto Enriquez describes various lights seen in the sky before violent earthquakes that are believed to be caused by seismic movements producing extreme compression of the underlying rock (5 July, p 26).
Three years ago, in the Chocolate Mountains area of southern California, I detonated a series of 19 piles of explosive, each of about 225 kilograms. These were separated from each other by a distance of about 300 metres and triggered sequentially at intervals of about a second. The naked eye observed nothing remarkable.
Subsequent examination of a “movie” of the event, recorded on my digital camera, revealed, immediately above the flashes generated by three of the charges, a quite separate white flash in the air. Two of these were very distinct, intense, elongate emissions, an estimated 100 metres high. The third was about twice as high but less distinct. In addition, two vertical flashes appeared closer to the ground in synchrony with two other explosions, above points some hundreds of metres from the charges themselves.
Would any seismologists with access to appropriate monitoring equipment be interested in attempting to record this phenomenon?
Drinking seawater
In 1996 I recommended “water chimneys” to the governors of the island of Majorca, which gets lots of rain, loses most of it in flood run-off, and then imports ship-loads of fresh water throughout the summer (12 July, p 15).
The idea is to tether large, transparent domed rafts on the sea. These domes are fitted with fan-assisted transparent chimneys, laid out in full sunlight along prominent land ridges, that run up to condensing rooms higher up the island.
The rafts allow a shallow layer of seawater to cover the inside base, where the sun causes rapid evaporation. The water vapour is then carried up the chimneys and kept from condensing by the heat of the sun until it reaches the cool rooms at the top of the island, from where the fresh water can be fed downhill. It may even be an environmentally friendly, low-energy system.
Individual pain
At last a piece of research that points out what all non-scientists have known for years: the only reality is individual reality. The fact that some people feel more pain than others only confirms that what each of us experiences is our own individual reality and that there is nothing other than this (28 June, p 17).
There is a major area of research opening up that will link this with our individual reactions to treatments for diseases.
Cost of longevity
You would not expect the polypill to “reduce the costs of health insurers or state-run health services” other than for an initial period (5 July, p 3).
We all have to die some day, and Alzheimer’s disease and cancer are probably more expensive ways to die than a quick heart attack. The pay-off would be in longer lives, not money.