Memento motor
Tam Dalyell contrasted the approaches to road safety in the UK 鈥� design the roads 鈥� and France 鈥� warn of dangerous ones (11 September, p 45). Here in Somerset we have an informal French approach: instead of life-size figures of victims at the scenes of accidents, they are marked by poignant bunches of battered flowers.
Whatever the national statistics, the British technique does not seem to work here. Most of these memorials are on roads designed and built in the last 10 years. They may have looked safe on the drawing board but have proved vulnerable to the failings of real human drivers.
For the record
鈥� Since 1999 Canada has had a new province, Nunavut, which we should have shown on the map in our US and UK editions (25 September, p 50)
To dream, perchance
The mystery of why we dream is constantly being cited as one of the last remaining puzzles to be solved, and yet here is a theory that more than satisfactorily unifies and explains the different neuroscientific findings to date.
Time of a whale
Paul Chambers’s engaging piece on Harriet, the 173-year-old Galapagos tortoise, claims that she is the world’s oldest known living animal (11 September, p 38). Some anonymous whales are probably decades older: new methods of determining age reveal some to be surviving into their third century.
Broken Eskimo harpoon tips found lodged in the blubber of whales who escaped are at least pre-1880s. And analysis of eye tissue estimated that one whale was 211 years old when she died. Even accounting for a 16 per cent error rate using this method, she was at least 177 and maybe as old as 244. This information comes not from whales who died of old age, but (sadly) from those killed by hunters. Who knows how long they might have lived otherwise, or how many other Methuselahs may still be cruising the oceans?
Chance is all
I can’t believe Fred Pearce wrote that “perhaps natural rainforests are constructed far more by chance than by evolution” (18 September, p 44). Evolution is what happens when “chance” events affect plant or animal individuals or populations. There is no “guiding hand”, only the combined effects of environmental stressors.
Even accepting what Pearce probably intended by the comment, any half-decent ecological model would surely show how such a situation would arise. Introduce several hundred species, probably selected as a number of discrete groups within which individual species were known to be at least compatible, and there will inevitably be room for a lot of them to find space, even on a small island.
First is the worst
I suspect Ben Haller’s suggestion that folk drink to excess for fun is too simplistic (11 September, p 24).
In the 1970s I studied cognitive psychology with the Open University. One of the papers I read concerned the effects of alcohol on decision making. Participants were given alcohol and had to decide if they could drive a car between two bales of straw some distance away. I did not keep the paper, but I remember that a single unit of alcohol altered their ability to judge whether they could do it, and that many who initially said the gap was too narrow changed their minds as they approached and attempted to get through.
It seems to me that the first unit of alcohol is the dangerous one. It alters the ability to decide whether you should drink more.
Row, row my boat
Syncopated rowing itself is not new (25 September, p 23). The results of experiments with it were published on the noticeboard of the engineering laboratory at Cambridge University in 1936. An eight-oared racing boat was converted to a six to allow the oarsmen more room. Instead of rowing in unison they rowed in rapid succession: bow+two, three+four, five+six.
An accelerometer showed that the boat moved much more smoothly through the water, which should suggest greater speed. However, the oarsmen had to concentrate hard to maintain the rather awkward rhythm.
Row, row my boat
Hylton Cleaver in his 1957 book A History of Rowing describes an eight in which the rowers were arranged into four groups of two, rowing so that only two oars would be in the water at any one time and that there would be no point in the stroke cycle when all oars were out of the water. The necessary rearrangements to the seating apparently led to the Cox being placed in the centre. Cleaver gives no information as to when this boat was built and tested, merely recording that it was all in vain as the experiment failed.
Costing the Earth
Should we allow these costs to be incurred merely to provide joyrides for the super-rich? Should we let them upgrade from sports utility vehicles to space futility vehicles without any consideration for the consequences?
Costing the Earth
One of the features most coveted by terrestrial vacationers is notably absent from your space hotel diagram 鈥� windows (4 September, p 20). But perhaps a business model focused on zero-g “sports” will deliver sufficient return on investment.
Cold comfort
You say the idea that global warming could trigger a large drop in temperatures has finally been put to rest because no such event was found in the interglacial period around 120,000 years ago (11 September, p 6). But what about the Older Dryas event (ending around 12,000 BC), the Younger Dryas event (ending around 10,000 BC) or the cold snap that occurred between 6400 and 6000 BC?
Can we be sure that conditions today are sufficiently different that such periods of sudden cold, lasting hundreds, or thousands, of years, could not recur?
Green diesels?
A couple of years ago I took a Toyota Prius hybrid car for a test drive with an eye to keeping the environment green. It wasn’t that cheap, but offered (from memory) a fuel consumption of about 6 litres per 100 kilometres 鈥� 47 miles per gallon or so. Then I came across a modern diesel (Skoda Fabia) with far more performance for less money and a proven technology, which uses less than 5 litres per 100 kilometres (57 miles per gallon).
Aware that the emissions from a diesel car are controversial, I tried to find out on the web whether I would be better off burning more fuel in a greener manner, and it proved surprisingly difficult to get clear and comprehensible guidance. So I thought with my bank account and bought the diesel, wondering why anyone would bother with hybrids, though your article explains this 鈥� no diesels allowed in California (11 September, p 22).
Nearly all European countries, with the exception of the UK, offer diesel at lower prices than petrol, sometimes much less. This is presumably to encourage people to buy and run lower consumption cars, and suggests diesels aren’t all bad. For tree-huggers like me, it would be interesting to read an article in New 杏吧原创 which looks authoritatively at the relative nastiness of diesel and petrol emissions.
To dream, perchance
Weeks before Richard Gregory’s review of Dreaming Reality (25 September, p 48), a publisher’s advertisement claimed the book was “A groundbreaking new theory” and “One of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the last hundred years”. Normally such claims contain references to work that had been submitted for peer review prior to publication 鈥� either in academic journals or at conferences.
Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrell’s book contains oodles of references to their earlier works which seem to me to have appeared in a nest of journals and books published by companies, institutes or foundations owned or controlled by the authors themselves. Two leading researchers in dream studies, Adam Schneider and D. William Domhoff at the University of California (), have shown that it takes 75 to 100 dream samples from one individual to study their dream life adequately. Yet Griffin describes only a handful of dreams in this book, many of them his own.
This is not to suggest that Tyrell and Griffin’s theory is wrong 鈥� maybe some of it is true some of the time. But they have certainly fallen short of proving themselves right in a way that is acceptable to the scientific community. I agree with Gregory that “there is something very strange about this book”. Its style is emotive, riddled with marketing hyperbole and protests too much about its own scientific validity.
Costing the Earth
There seems to be a very big hole in the thinking in various articles recently about the race to win the X prize and the flood of space tourism that it will release, (for example, 4 September, p 20).
Before anyone accuses me of being a killjoy, let me say that I entirely support the exploration of space by any government, by professional men and women. However, I cannot see why rich playboys, who already consume far more than their fair share of Earth’s meagre resources, should be allowed to do so.
Every space launch creates a large amount of pollution. We, the rich people of the west contribute significantly to global warming every time we take a “cheap” flight to the sun. How much more damage will space tourism cause 鈥� or don’t we care about that either?
Long live Linnaeus
We would like to add to Peter Forey’s powerful response (2 October, p 30) to Bob Holmes’s article on the PhyloCode (11 September, p 12), and at the same time alert New 杏吧原创’s readers to an urgent problem.
Holmes portrays protagonists of the PhyloCode as “rebels” and “renegade biologists”. We argue that the PhyloCode is actually born of intellectual timidity, in the way it defers decision-making on nomenclature.
We agree with the PhyloCode’s proponents that we are poised on the brink of a revolution in taxonomy. At a time when the Earth’s remaining (and dwindling) biodiversity urgently needs to be described using every technological tool available, we need to prepare our system for naming these millions of new organisms.
Linnaean biological nomenclature has been debated, dissected, analysed in detail and modified by dedicated biologists for centuries, and is still with us. Phylogenetic nomenclature has been debated, dissected and analysed in detail, has been found wanting, and will be a distraction and a hindrance to the far more important task.
The year 2008 will mark the 250th anniversary of the 10th edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae. It will also be the year when the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) predicts a financial crisis for itself. When the ICZN’s activities should be expanding to produce web-based products that make the naming of animals easier, its work is threatened by lack of funding.
The Convention on Biological Diversity has a specific mandate to support the naming of organisms. Yet there is no international funding to support it. It is time for the biological community to unite in its objective of describing Earth’s remaining biodiversity. The role of the ICZN, and related organisations representing other living kingdoms, will be central to this project.