Pepperami percentages
The basis of Feedback’s confusion about the percentage of pork in Pepperami (108 per cent) is probably the use of the word “ingredients” (29 May). This is not an analysis, it is the start of a recipe: to make 100 kilograms of Pepperami, take 108 kilograms of pork鈥�
Presumably Pepperami, like salami, chorizo and other dry sausages, is cured by a process of partial desiccation. The missing percentage represents the water that evaporated during this process.
Letter
The UK Food Labelling Regulations 1996 require that most pre-packed foods have a quantitative ingredient declaration for major ingredients. These are normally expressed as a percentage and must be expressed in terms of the ingredients at the “mixing bowl” stage.
If water is lost during processing (due to drying in the case of salami) then the sum of the ingredient weights will be greater than the final product weight. A simple example is tomato ketchup, which contains 120 per cent tomatoes.
Letter
The answer to the percentage problem is given on the admirably clear label of a Hungarian salami made by Pick, of Szeged in Hungary: “Ingedients: Pork (min. 161 per cent), Fat, Salt, Spices, Preservative E260. Made with 161 grams of raw pork meat per 100 grams of salami. Moisture is lost during curing and maturation.”
For the record
鈥� In The Last Word (15 May), the amount of food an 83-kilogram human should eat each day in order to match that consumed by a hummingbird was given as 125 kilograms. This figure was correct. However, the wording of the text suggests the person should eat three times as much food (249 kilograms) as their body weight in order to match the hummingbird, which has to eat three times its own weight before crossing the Gulf of Mexico. This is not the case, because the number of kilojoules contained in 125 kilograms of hamburgers is greater than that contained in the same weight of nectar 鈥� the hummingbird’s food. The figures were based on energy consumption, not on total weight of food consumed.
鈥� The captions underneath the illustrations of faces in the feature “The boldest cut” (29 May, p 35) described several of them as a “doner” rather than a “donor”. Those responsible for the error have been kebabbed.
Letter
Thank you for publishing the article questioning big bang theory. The standard “concordance” model is so entrenched that many editors would have refused to publish such a paper that dared to question the cosmological paradigm, even though its criticisms are well founded.
The trick is to have a credible alternative against which the paradigm may be compared and tested. Now is a particularly exciting time because observations are about to be made that will do just this. Gravity Probe B is entering its science phase following its launch on 20 April, after about 40 years of planning and delays. Many cosmologists, such as Kenneth Nordtvedt, have said that the experiment was worth doing when it was first planned in the 1960s, but that today the result is a foregone conclusion.
However, not all agree with this dogma. The satellite is in a polar orbit and will measure the two precessions of four gyroscopes caused by the curvature of space-time and the spinning of the Earth. My published theory, Self Creation Cosmology, predicts that the first of these should be 5.5120 arc seconds per year, or 5/6 of the value predicted by general relativity, while the second should be equal to the corresponding GR value. We shall know shortly. The theory may be found at .
Incoherent
The match between theory and experiment in the buckyball diffraction experiment is pretty poor (15 May, p 30). According to the original paper in Nature (vol 427, p 711), the curve describing Anton Zeilinger’s quantum decoherence theory passes under many of the data points.
Scientifically one needs to assess whether the measurements distinguish his decoherence theory from other possible theories. The original paper does not attempt that.
Bellamy blast
David Bellamy correctly points out one positive result of global warming (22 May, p 30). The extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause increased plant production and, through their roots, plants will bury “lots more organic humus in the soil” thus improving the soil.
So far, so good 鈥� there is published evidence for this. Unfortunately he ignores other published evidence indicating that higher temperatures will cause soil microbes to decompose that humus faster. Published work using the Hadley Centre model suggests that by the middle of this century, faster decomposition will far outweigh the effect of increased plant growth. So the world’s soils will almost certainly not benefit. In addition, the extra carbon dioxide released from humus in soil will further accelerate climate change.
Bellamy also ignores the strong probability that climate change will cause more droughts in many continental interior regions. This will exacerbate malnourishment in poorer regions of our world 鈥� the exact opposite of his claim. And the rise in sea level expected to result from climate change will cause flooding of low-lying areas, such as parts of Bangladesh, which are vitally important as both home to millions of people and also as land for food production.
Despite what Bellamy says, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and is the strongest single contributor to global warming. Its positive effect on plant growth will not continue indefinitely and is not sufficient to counteract the climate change it causes. Nor does extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remove the need for chemical fertilisers 鈥� in many parts of the world lack of phosphate or nitrogen are major causes of malnourishment, and climate change will certainly not overcome this. In fact, shortage of these nutrients (or water) may prevent the potentially positive effect of extra carbon dioxide on crop growth occurring at all.
We hesitate to disagree with Bellamy, who has done so much to interest the wider public in science and vital environmental issues. But public prominence carries responsibility. In this case he is only giving one part of the story, which taken alone is highly misleading and encourages complacency.
Save with pleasure
Perry Bebbinton suggests that if you save money through reduced fuel costs, “pretty much everything I can think of [that the money could be spent on instead] will have used energy in its manufacture, distribution, or鈥se” (29 May, p 30). It is that “thing” which betrays the false assumption. Things take energy to produce; services do not.
You could spend the money on live music, hairstyles, nursing care, education, counselling, legal advice, sexual favours, quizzes. The energy costs of these would be negligible, because the providers would consume most of it in their daily lives whether they worked or not.
A number of other commodities, mostly intellectual property, also have a very small energy cost: books, recorded music and films, computer software and games. Designer clothes and fancy restaurants have very high labour to materials ratios, at least compared with their mass-market equivalents.
It is commonplace to disparage the fact that services are expanding as a percentage of the economy, displacing “real” manufacturing. But surely it is better, once our basic needs are filled, to consume man hours, of which we have an endlessly renewable supply, rather than finite supplies of materials and energy.
Accentuate the negative
We were interested to read Ian Simmons’s letter suggesting that someone establish a “Journal of Negative Results” (15 May, p 29). Bruce Charlton made this same suggestion in the pages of New 杏吧原创 as far back as 1987 (29 October 1987, p 72). There are now at least three journals dedicated to the promotion of scientific negatives: the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine (), the Journal of Negative Observations in Genetic Oncology (), and our own Journal of Negative Results 鈥� Ecology & Evolutionary Biology ().
Funding is a problem for any journal. The limited funds available to libraries make it difficult to encourage them to subscribe to a new journal, perhaps more so because of the “negative” nature of the published material. Fortunately, the costs of printing a journal can be reduced by publishing on the web, for which software is freely available, such as the Open Access System of the Public Knowledge Project ().
This means that the journal is freely available to all, regardless of their institutions’ desire (or ability) to subscribe. The main cost is the time needed to set up and maintain such a journal. We encourage researchers to contribute their time, thus expanding the breadth of information available to all researchers.
Big bang monopoly
Eric Lerner comments that virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies (22 May, p 20). I would interested to know if the Hubble Space Telescope and the COBE and WMAP microwave background probes would have been designed differently if the prevailing cosmological paradigm was not the hot big bang, but instead a plasma cosmology or a quasi-steady-state model.
I suspect not. Whichever model appears to steer the experiment, surely the principal task of collecting evidence on apparent galactic red shifts and the structure of background microwave radiation remains the same. It might be appropriate to consider the following wise observation:
“In the beginning, when a new instrument is proposed, humans control the scientific programme completely. But, as the instrument is constructed, it is as if humans exercise less and less control, until in the end it is the instrument that overrides the humans who service it and those who use it.” (Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Burbidge and Jayant Narlikar, A Different Approach to Cosmology, Cambridge University Press)