Cradle-to-grave costs
The idea of using sprays to create sun-reflecting clouds sounds good, but the reader has no way of working out the relationship between the reduction of global warming and the amount of carbon dioxide generated by the fix (15 October, p 25).
Such articles would benefit from including the cradle-to-grave costs of the ideas. In this case, 500 large, technically advanced yachts will probably mean some sort of heavy industrial birth. Even if minimal energy is used in their operation, they will need maintenance over their 20-year lifespans, which will involve more heavy industry and a great deal of sea travel to ferry repair crews and materials, followed at last by death by decommissioning. Each of these stages will use a great deal of energy and generate CO2, but how much?
Time's arrow
I am deeply unconvinced by the article on the “riddle” of time, as I am by most discussions on the nature of time (15 October, p 30). If the universe started at some point and then developed or evolved 鈥� whatever its geometry 鈥� then an arrow of time is implied by the very words “developed” and “evolved”.
That overall entropy in the universe is increasing with time is not very controversial, but I can see no justification for equating time itself 鈥� one of the fundamental dimensions of the universe 鈥� with an increase in entropy.
It might well be that the rate of change of entropy would vary under different geometries and in some circumstances could even be negative, but surely the implication is that different geometries will merely define different versions of the second law of thermodynamics.
Different diabetes
In your article on the “slumber gene”, the “slumber secrets” include a claim that “meals with a low glycaemic index (GI) might help stave off diabetes” (15 October, p 14). This is not accurate. A low-GI diet may help stave off most cases of type 2 diabetes but not type 1 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is influenced by diet, lifestyle factors and in some cases genetics, while type 1 is an autoimmune disease and cannot be prevented by eating a low-GI diet.
Homer's hammer
You write: “The electric hammer devised by a team at the University of Bath, UK, uses a motor that is mounted so that it rocks about on a point in the middle of its handle to drive the head of the hammer rapidly back and forth, delivering a rapid succession of blows to its target” (15 October, p 25).
To give credit where it is due, Homer Simpson invented the electric hammer in episode 205 of The Simpsons, “The wizard of evergreen terrace”, first aired in 1998. Even then, it was apparently very similar to an invention seen in the 1984 film Gremlins.
Logical puzzle
Michael Atiyah is quoted as thinking that Sudoku could spur an interest in mathematics among young people (15 October, p 16). Sudoku is a logical game, not a mathematical one. The numbers used are simply convenient symbols. Presumably he has not played the game himself.
That colour's mine
Having just noticed that the colour red is owned by the Royal Mail in the UK (Feedback, 22 October), I thought I would let you know that the colour purple is owned by Cadbury here in New Zealand. Bars of “Mrs Claus” chocolate with marshmallow and caramel filling state: “Cadbury, Mrs Claus and the colour purple are Cadbury Limited trade marks used under licence in New Zealand by Cadbury Confectionery Ltd.”
For the record
鈥� Feedback referred to “Saddam Hussein’s horde of cash” (15 October). However, as reader Barry Rein correctly surmises, the intention was to refer to a hoard of cash rather than to a large band of marauding currency.
Holes in concrete
Will Knight speculates on the use of glass bubbles to strengthen concrete, given the finding that holes in many materials help to relieve stress (8 October, p 32).
It would appear that some earlier civilisations stumbled on this idea unwittingly. The Chinese used a cement containing rice flour to build the Great Wall. This has resisted erosion even better than the stones it was used to fix in place. It would be worth investigating whether the particle size of rice flour or its starch grains are optimum for cement.
The Romans made a remarkably durable, strong and lightweight concrete that contained volcanic ash or fine pumice. Pumice and ash have foam structures, so their use is another way of introducing small holes into the matrix.
The above examples suggest there may well be readily available materials that could give the requisite hole sizes without the need for costly glass bubbles.
From John Lack
The article about holes made me recall a joke from my 1950s military service in the air force.
The wings of a new aircraft kept falling off during trials. Despite the best brains working on it, no remedy was found. In desperation a prize was offered for a solution. Nothing worked until at last they tried a seemingly absurd scheme from an untutored aircraftsman, second class. A line of holes was drilled across the wing adjacent to the fuselage. Amazingly it worked! The a/c 2 was asked how the idea came to him. He replied, “You know when you tear a perforated toilet paper off the roll…?”
Burgess Hill, West Sussex, UK
Closet vegetarian?
I found Gary Francione’s article on the rights of animals rather too cryptic for my taste (8 October, p 24). If he is advocating vegetarianism, which seems to be the obvious conclusion, why on earth does he not say so?
To destroy or disrespect any life form indiscriminately is surely barbaric, but we are not as immune to the natural world as the gods. Sure, we can construct a morality, but some living organisms, whether they are snakes, insects or bacteria, are potentially harmful. In terms of the sort of rights advocated by Francione, we are forced to draw a line somewhere, and that is not necessarily at the point where vegetarians diverge from non-vegetarians.
It’s actually very difficult, I believe, to overcome natural instincts within our own species with moral and intellectual arguments. Not that we should abandon attempts to do so, but we’ve only recently started to get to grips with polygamy and we still can’t deal with the problems of poverty versus conspicuous indulgence 鈥� to abandon a carnivorous lifestyle is very radical indeed.
I’m all in favour of seeing the vegetarian ethic being forcefully debated. That can’t happen until writers like Francione nail their colours to the mast.
Terraforming Mars
I fear that Mike Martinez’s idea of diverting comets to Mars in order to speed up the process of terraforming is a complete non-starter as a means of colonisation (15 October, p 23). A great deal more than water will be needed to achieve even the first stage of terraforming, which is ecopoeisis 鈥� the creation of a self-sustaining biosphere.
At least four main modifications to Mars will have to be performed if basic anaerobic plant life is to survive. The mean surface temperature must be such that water can exist in liquid form; the mass of the atmosphere must be increased; surface ultraviolet light and cosmic rays must be reduced to a safe level for life; and nitrogen, which is essential to all organisms, must be present.
Creating Earth-like conditions that would enable humans to survive without any form of life-support system on the Red Planet will therefore be a very lengthy and complex process. Even using simple models of terraforming, it has been estimated that to create an atmosphere sufficiently rich in oxygen to allow human colonisation of Mars will take in the order of 100,000 years. An extra difficulty to be overcome is the fact that Martian gravity is only about one-third that of the Earth, making any artificially created atmosphere harder to retain.
When conditions on Mars are such that water can exist on the surface in liquid form, there will probably be no need to import it from comets anyway, since it is thought the inventory of water locked up in the planet’s permafrost and polar regions will be adequate to meet the needs of the first human beings to colonise the planet.
However, as an astrobiologist, I would need to be assured that there is no extant life on Mars before even beginning the processes of terraforming 鈥� human beings, thus far, have a pretty poor record of looking after their home planet, so any life forms on Mars would stand little chance of survival once Homo sapiens arrived. Perhaps we should concentrate on putting our own planet in order before it is too late, and certainly before we start deliberating on how best to colonise another one.
From Steuart Campbell
Martinez suggests terraforming Mars by dumping comets into its atmosphere. All very well, but this does not produce a breathable atmosphere.
N. N. Semenov (1975) proposed electrolysis of Martian water to obtain oxygen (time required: between one and four centuries). However, how to get rid of the hydrogen produced by electrolysis remains a problem.
Freeman Dyson (1979) suggested mining one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, for its water-ice and returning the material to Mars as hydrogen and water (more electrolysis?).
Robert A. Freitas (1983) pointed out that there is probably enough water already on Mars, in the polar caps and regolith, and suggested that mechanical self-replicating systems could excavate the surface to a depth of about 4 metres to release oxygen and create a breathable atmosphere within about 350 years (perhaps less).
Edinburgh, UK
Home alone
Frans de Waal expresses concern about modern communities, where the trend is for work, shopping and living areas to be physically separated (8 October, p 52). He points out that this lack of central focus severely disrupts community building. What he does not go on to say is that the opposite trend is also increasingly common, and is at least as disruptive to our social systems for exactly the same reasons.
For me, as for many others, work, shopping and living areas are not separate: they are identical. I work from home via the internet and shop primarily online. I rarely have any actual need to leave the house, or even to interact with another human face-to-face (other than my family).
As the number of telecommuters and online shoppers grows, the danger is that more and more people will withdraw completely from their local communities in favour of their chosen virtual communities. De Waal points out that “we’ve been designed to… ignore people we barely know”. When we don’t interact with our neighbours because we no longer need to leave our houses, what will local communities be like?
What about Zelda?
Apparently Wilma will be the last named hurricane this year because it is “using the last available name” (22 October, p 16). Do US weather forecasters use a different alphabet that stops at W, or have they never come across a Xanthe, Yvonne or Zelda?
Jeff Hecht writes:
鈥� Hurricane names are chosen to be easily recognisable and memorable. The US National Hurricane Center explains on its website (): “Experience shows that the use of short, distinctive given names in written as well as spoken communications is quicker and less subject to error than the older, more cumbersome latitude-longitude identification methods. These advantages are especially important in exchanging detailed storm information between hundreds of widely scattered stations, coastal bases and ships at sea.”
Separate lists of names are used for each region where tropical storms (known as hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons) occur. The monikers reflect common names in the area, and the number on the list varies from region to region. So while North Atlantic hurricanes never have names beginning with Q, U, X, Y and Z, names in the east Pacific this year include Xina, York and Zelda (though not names starting with Q or U).
Six lists of names are rotated for use in the North Atlantic, with names being retired after serious storms. Following destructive hurricanes in 2004, Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne have all been replaced on the 2010 list. Name changes are agreed by an international committee of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization. Until 1979 only women’s names were used, but since then male and female names have been alternated on each list.
In the western and central North Pacific, names are cycled so that each list is started when the end of the previous one is reached, and not necessarily at the beginning of the season.
Wake up America
There have been a number of comments recently to the effect that the increase in hurricane strength in the past few years should be a wake-up call to the US on global warming. It seems to me that a similar comment might be made about bird flu and the threat that if the H5N1 virus evolves to be highly contagious between humans it will kill large numbers of people. According to recent polls, most Americans don’t believe in evolution; could this be wake-up call number two?
* chatbots!
I’m amused at the puzzlement over why people swear at chatbots (15 October, p 26). The most likely explanation, it seems to me, is the same reason that people swear at voicemail systems: they dislike talking to a machine when they really want to talk to a human. This does not seem to be a big mystery. If companies want their customers to be less hostile and angry, perhaps they should try hiring real people to handle customer communication instead of investing in chatbots and voicemail mazes.
Duncan Graham-Rowe writes:
鈥� Ben Haller has a point, but it’s not the whole story. In the course of her research, Antonella De Angeli found that some people would talk to Jabberwacky for as long as seven hours, much of it abusively. This was clearly not out of necessity, given that Jabberwacky offered no service other than a chat.
Transplant pathogens
Your item on the pathosphere talks of new “biological weapons” being constantly created when microbes mingle (8 October, p 58). For some time I have been worried about a potential meeting place for pathogens, and the possibility that the transplantation of tissue between species or even people might provide such a “reservoir of development”.
Teaching must evolve
The rise of fundamentalism and the efforts to turn back the clock on science, at least in the US, come from a source that was not mentioned in your articles (8 October, p 39). Science is taught poorly in our schools, even by many of those who are qualified to teach it. And a shortage of science teachers all too often means that the subject is taught by someone who doesn’t understand it, and possibly doesn’t even like it.
It is little wonder that people misunderstand, dislike and fear science if their formal introduction to it was a series of dull, disjointed, confusing lectures and readings that required rote memorising of meaningless terms that students could not relate to their lives in any foreseeable way.
Things don’t necessarily get better at the college level. I teach college biology, and I have yet to find a textbook that is truly engaging, exciting and comprehensible. The area in which textbooks fail most miserably is evolution, which is generally presented as a mishmash of partly related concepts without any overriding structure. More space tends to be devoted to a description of Darwin’s voyage than to a clear explanation of his theory. And solid evidence for evolution is usually limited to a handful of poorly chosen, half-explained examples. Students are left to wonder, “Is this all they can offer as evidence?” Is it any wonder that many people prefer the better explanation presented in the Bible?
From Thomas McCabe
As a largely secular non-denominational Christian who does not consider the Old Testament to be the revealed word of God and opposes “scientific creationism”, I found your report to be arrogant in its conception and selective in its conceits.
I suggest you have misidentified the problem. The problem is not necessarily religious fundamentalism so much as intolerance. The bottom line is that most of the millions massacred in the 20th century were murdered not by religious fanatics but by adherents of the secular faiths of fascism, Marxism-Leninism and nationalism. That fact should have been central to your analysis.
Burke, Virginia, US
From David Piggott
Why not just take the fundamentalists at their word? We should relieve them of all that the evil scientists have forced upon them: modern medicines, weapons, technology and so on. And then see what happens. I have an image of an army of angry savages wielding nothing but sharpened fruit and launching a furious 鈥� but ultimately futile 鈥� attack on the great stone tower that science built.
Fear not, enlightened ones, for you shall inherit the Earth.
Loughborough, Leicestershire, UK
From Owen Clarke
Bryan Appleyard’s article points out the presence of some scientific fundamentalists but not the flawed attitude of many scientists that annoys the general public.
In my view there is widespread support in scientific circles for the idea that if a scientific explanation cannot be provided for a phenomenon, then that phenomenon does not exist. This alienates many people who feel that the relevance of their own experience is being trashed. In this situation they may well see fundamentalism as the only effective weapon against smug self-superiority.
Abersychan, Gwent, UK
From Ian Woodward
The use of retrospective probability analysis by ID adherents as proof of God is fatuous. Try telling a lottery winner that they haven’t won because the probability of doing so is too small to be credible. Their loot won’t suddenly vanish in a puff of improbability.
We’re here, no matter how improbable that may appear when looking in the reversing mirror. If life hadn’t won the lottery, we wouldn’t be around to calculate how unlikely we are. Life did win, and we’re part of the loot.
West Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
From Andrew Clifton
An understandable mistake draws many, I think, towards the false, ferocious haven of fundamentalism: that of confusing bad politicians with the rational, democratic, enlightened, liberal values that they hypocritically claim to represent.
When such self-styled progressive modernists actually deliver brutal injustices, social and environmental chaos and military mayhem, it’s no surprise that those on the sharp end are tempted to reject modernism tout court.
Perhaps the best way to defend enlightened values against a rising tide of fundamentalism is to try living up to them.
Edgware, Middlesex, UK