Many power stations
Peter Tredgett is clearly correct 鈥� 1013 lasers for one year is much more sensible than one laser for 1013 years for transmuting a tiny fragment of iodine-129 into iodine-128 (11 October, p 31). The tricky bit, however, is organising the 1013 power stations needed to drive these beasts.
For the record
鈥� Our story on the European Space Agency’s SMART-1 lunar mission stated that “previous moon trips only circled the equator” (4 October, p 17). In fact, NASA’s Clementine and Lunar Prospector spacecraft have both gone into polar orbits around the moon.
鈥� The letter from Tom Nash referred to carbon-12 micelles and carbon-16 micelles (25 October, p 33). In fact, these should have been C12 and C16 micelles 鈥� that is, micelles made from molecules containing 12 or 16 carbon atoms. Carbon-16 is an isotope of carbon having a half-life of 0.75 seconds.
鈥� The UbiTable, an interactive digital image display table mentioned in “Pass the JPEGs please” (11 October, p 22) is being developed by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and not by Mitsubishi, which is a different company altogether.
Letter
So Max Immelmann was renowned for his acrobatic skill. I can picture the scene now: Edward Mannock comes into view and Immelmann does a handstand in the cockpit followed by a somersault on the wing. Not surprising he didn’t shoot many people down. Or could it be you meant aerobatic skill?
Radical sheep shearing
Feedback mentions the Ig Nobel prize awarded for an Australian paper on the best surface for dragging sheep to be sheared (11 October).
Sheep are dragged on their rumps, not with a rope round their necks as your cartoon suggests. Shearing shed floors are made of wooden strips with gaps of just the right size for sheep faeces to pass through, and the space beneath them gradually fills up with saleable quantities of garden manure.
I doubt that it was just a coincidence that the Ig Nobel prizewinners found wooden slats the best surface for dragging, but the 1-in-10 slope finding could influence the design of shearing sheds and benefit generations of shearers to come.
There are radical changes in the offing, however, including a mechanised sheep-shearing production line built onto a semi-trailer chassis.
How to be famous
You report that Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury compared the number of web pages for each first world war flying ace with the number of planes shot down (18 October, p 17). The implication is that Manfred von Richthofen got far too much fame because he didn’t shoot down all that many planes. This shows the science of statistics going where it cannot really reach, like a family car trying to explore a water meadow.
Von Richthofen was famous for being an aristo 鈥� everyone used to love a gentleman rider 鈥� and above all for having a flying circus, inherited by Monty Python. That is the stuff fame is made of: glamour. Andy Warhol had far more to say about this than any statistician.
You say the researchers plan to do the same analysis for tennis players. They will, predictably, find that Pete Sampras has won much more than John McEnroe and has less fame. The point is that McEnroe emitted more squawks per match than probably any other player, and the squawk index is more important to the public than the win index.
Can this letter please be taken as a nomination of Simkin and Roychowdhury for an Ig Nobel prize, for taking science into areas where it has difficulty breathing?
Leaky condoms
Although the Catholic church may be facilitating the spread of HIV by giving people the impression that condoms don’t work at all, it seems to me equally important that people understand that they only work 85 per cent of the time (11 October, p 8). This is a figure that I for one did not know, and many people base their behaviour on the idea that condoms provide “safe sex”.
Does trade corrupt?
Daniele Paserman advises the governments of developing countries to maintain closed economies while increasing their wealth (11 October, p 14). I would like to question both his analysis and the paradigm within which he makes it.
He claims that there is a stronger correlation between wealth (measured as GDP per capita) and corruption in “open” countries than “closed” ones. But I note that the range of wealth values in the closed set is much smaller than in the open set, and it appears from the graphic that if he analysed the open subset with the corresponding wealth range he would probably find the same low correlation.
Letter
I felt Paserman’s analysis was just a rediscovery of a small part of what Friedrich List was saying in the early 19th century, well before Karl Marx.
He proposed a three-stage economic model. First open up to simple trade, to get the economy started. Then put up protectionist barriers, to let infant industries grow strong. Finally open up to world trade when you are ready.
Adam Smith said that Britain industrialised despite having strong protectionism in the relevant period (mostly reckoned as 1760 to 1830). List said that Britain needed protectionism, that the US was right to be protectionist in that era and that Germany should do the same. Which they did, industrialising under Bismarck.
Given the accuracy of List’s predictions, it is odd that he gets overlooked.
Wounded foxes
Stephen Harris claims that among X-rays of 764 foxes from wildlife hospitals only 20 revealed bullet wounds (4 October, p 4). He ignores the welfare implications of these injuries.
It is popular to flag up wounding percentages. The catch of course is: percentages of what figures? The start must be the shot fired. When a shot is fired at a fox it either misses, kills or wounds. The wounding rate is the percentage of total shots fired that wound. Once a fox is shot and wounded it may subsequently die, or it may recover, perhaps fully, or perhaps maimed. Further shots or dogs may be used to kill it. Few wounded foxes (we have no idea what percentage) are likely to escape, recover, and later be injured again (alive but incapacitated) and be found and taken to a wildlife hospital to join Harris’s elite sample.
Calculating the wounding rate as a percentage of the rate of killing is nonsense. Both are independent variables.
Wounding varies according to shot size, range, skill of the shooter and various other factors such as the behaviour of the fox. We measured these wounding rates in our study for the All Party Parliamentary Middle Way Group. Even in the very best scenarios, guns wound and hounds don’t.
Cost of longevity
The prospect of living alongside her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren might be “fantastic” for Cynthia Kenyon, but would the rest of society 鈥� and indeed the rest of the world 鈥� share her delight at her long life (18 October, p 46)?
If food and wealth were redistributed, perhaps the planet could support these extra two generations who insist on hanging around. But ignoring the potential healthcare costs (Kenyon assures us 150-year-olds will be healthy), has she computed the impact of super-super-supergrans in terms of the energy they and their cars will consume, the waste they will produce, and the sheer living space they will take up?
Shouldn’t we figure out an environmentally friendly way of feeding and housing the current world population before self-obsessed westerners start doubling their lifespans?
Still, people might not be so quick to pop her pills after all. As she says, society won’t want to give pensions to 90-year-olds who are “biologically just like 40-year-olds”. Faced with having to work for a century or more, those of us in the rat race might opt for three score years and ten with something like relief.
Global see-saw
Philip Stott was destined to be savaged by the global warming faithful (20 September, p 25). Indeed, your letter writers may even be right about Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas going too far, and J谩n Veizer and Nir Shaviv stretching their data (11 October, p 30) in their papers.
However, Gavin Schmidt gets it very wrong by equating the “demonstrable impact” of increasing carbon dioxide levels on radiation of heat from the planet, with the accuracy of prediction by climatic simulations. This single factor is simply not enough to produce an adequate predictive model when, on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s own admission, the IPCC does not understand the role of water vapour or cloud, and cannot even say whether the net feedback is positive or negative.
Garbage in, garbage out. If the net sign of the water feedback is negative the system will homeostase. The fact that periods of intense warming and cooling, accompanied by CO2 see-saws, have reversed 20 or more times in the Quaternary suggests that this is very likely.
James Hansen, “father” of some of the present global warming hysteria, has recently changed tack and written: “Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate-forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic under current conditions.”
It seems to me the time has come for some scientific discussion of global warming 鈥� away from the political arena, the pressures of funding bodies and the prayers of acolytes.
Policing the whalers
Dan Goodman’s letter about whaling repeats two misleading arguments (18 October, p 32). First, he suggests that the International Whaling Commission’s agreed procedure for setting quotas will “ensure” that only sustainable whaling of abundant stocks will be permitted. Even the best quota calculation procedure cannot guarantee these things because it cannot guarantee the behaviour of the whalers.
What is missing from his letter is any reference to the whaling management regime needed, which would include enforcement measures such as the presence of independent observers. The whaling industry has consistently opposed any measures that would restrict its ability to maximise its commercial returns from whaling.
Secondly, Goodman suggests that the IWC is dysfunctional. This is common rhetoric intended to put more pressure on member nations to “save the IWC” by restarting commercial whaling. The IWC would benefit from modernisation, but it is not in crisis and is adequately fulfilling its function of conserving whales.