Bats relocated
Despite their famous navigational skills, the grey-headed flying foxes (or fruit bats) which illustrated your article seem to have gone astray (29 October, p 36). You had their photo captioned “…difficult neighbours in the [Royal] Botanic Gardens of Melbourne”. Sydney-siders could be forgiven for going batty when they see their city’s prominent Centrepoint tower looming high in the background.
Of more importance, and pertinent to your article, is the claim that “in 2003, 30,000 of these bats set up camp in the gardens’ trees”. They are certainly not there now: the Victorian government’s Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) has relocated the bat colony.
Godless and proud
I agree with E. O. Wilson that scientific secularism is the only effective antidote to what he describes as the toxic mix of religion and tribalism (5 November, p 48). But he confuses the issue by introducing a supposed third force: the alleged blank-slaters. Who is he talking about? No western scientist in the past 30 years has argued that the newborn’s brain is a blank slate.
He refers to the ideology of the Marxist-Leninist states as promoting the blank-slate thesis, but as he rightly observes they are few and fast fading. And even before they faded, the excesses and downfall of communist dictators owed no more to biological theory than did the excesses and downfall of fascist ones.
Dividing Darwinian evolutionists into two supposedly distinct camps enables him to distance himself from what he calls “atheistic communism”, and to reserve “humanist” to describe his own beliefs. But he obviously is an atheist, and he has a right to be proud of it.
I don’t think we can hope to counter the blazing passion of crusading religious fundamentalists by pandering to their assumption that believers are nice people and atheists, by definition, nasty ones.
Unsafe for nukes
Any suggestion that nuclear power generation should be renewed at existing locations must be unrealistic for most UK sites, especially the Atlantic-facing ones. These are open to the risks of devastating tsunamis that Bill McGuire highlights (22 October, p 38). Indeed, the 1607 tsunami he mentions, which funnelled up the Severn estuary, appears to have scoured away farmland to make a lagoon that has since become the Oldbury nuclear power plant’s cooling pond.
It is not a comforting thought, and even more disquieting when rising sea levels caused by global warming are taken into account.
This isn’t an argument against nuclear power. But future locations need to be based on a prudent risk assessment that leaves sufficient safety margins to allow for the large unknowns. I would suggest that 15 metres above the high-water mark should be the absolute minimum.
From Richard Grimmer
In the same issue that you pointed out the danger to North America and Europe (not to mention South America and north-west Africa) of a tsunami caused by a gigantic landslide on La Palma in the Canary Islands, you also highlighted the need for scanners that can reliably detect smuggled nuclear material (22 October, p 22). Might I suggest that the airports in the Canary Islands be the first recipients of such scanners?
Bath, Avon, UK
Nothing but the truth
Even “low-level” falsification of data can affect research (5 November, p 3). During my PhD I spent six months trying to perfect an analysis based on a method that had appeared in a reputable journal. When I contacted the author he all but admitted that his co-worker had been wrong and perhaps even “economical with the truth”.
As my knowledge of the subject grew, it became glaringly obvious that the method could never have worked. It seems extraordinary that no reviewer picked this up. Six months’ down time in a PhD is a lot to lose.
As it turned out, I completed my PhD in biochemistry, but gave up science to become a journalist. I find the standards of oversight are far higher in the media, as rival journalists in other papers often follow up your stories. If you lie you get caught pretty quick, and maybe even sued. It’s a pity science can’t make the same boast.
Intelligent evolution
Symbolically, reason has already triumphed in the debate over intelligent design. The faith-based side has shifted from using the term “creationism” to using “intelligent design”. So their argument has…evolved.
Who's creative?
Richard Florida’s piece on “creative hotspots” makes some very limiting assumptions about the word “creativity” (29 October, p 43).
This is typified by what he calls the Global Creativity Index, which he suggests can identify the “most creative countries”. It is based upon criteria which are significant in his own society and economy: it mentions R&D expenditure and patents 鈥� things that are very important in western Europe and the US. He then says other communities lack creativity because they achieve less of these things. This seems unacceptable.
Suppose a Buddhist monk in Nepal devised a creativity index based upon the success of a society in the visual arts, chanting, peaceful meditation and maintaining stable relationships. Western Europe and the US would rate poorly on such a creativity index. Or think of a teacher in a British school inventing stories, constructing different ways to present ideas, challenging the thinking of their pupils, answering questions, and so on. This would be a dynamic and powerful exercise of creativity, yet those activities would go largely unnoticed by everyone apart from colleagues and pupils.
Human creativity is not so easily categorised. It is far more dispersed throughout human lives and exhibited in more varied ways and more richly in all human societies.
Extraordinary claims for WIMAX
Paul Marks is correct that WiMAX data rate performance has been misrepresented (29 October, p 26). Some of the media have used 70 megabits per second and 50-kilometre range in the same sentence, which is a physical impossibility. It does not take “calculations” to work out the actual user data rate, since the 70 megabits per second raw rate is shared by many fixed end-users on the last mile connection 鈥� giving a rate about of about 1.5 megabits per second per user, as the article states.
To say that fixed WiMAX offers nothing that third-generation (3G) cellphones will not soon be able to achieve is wide of the mark, as fixed WiMAX was intended as a last-mile service for places that don’t have mobile coverage; it will take a very good service using 3G to offer 1 megabit per second in any case.
The article is correct to be sceptical about mobile WiMAX. This will be a technical tour de force if it works at all, and will involve quite extraordinary amounts of signal processing at both the user’s end and the base station.
For the record
鈥� The end of the note following the interview with Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand got lost (29 October, p 46). It should have read: “Franz Ferdinand’s new album is You Could Have It So Much Better“.
鈥� In our piece on the campaign to remove “Reiter’s syndrome” from the medical lexicon (22 October, p 6), researcher Kenneth Katz was wrongly named Matz.
鈥� Our double apologies to Craig Stanford of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, whose name we got wrong for a second time in our correction on 12 November, p 27.
It's logical
John Feather argues that Sudoku is a matter of logic, not maths, because the numbers used are merely representative symbols (5 November, p 21). However, much of modern mathematics does not deal with numbers at all, but with abstract objects for which numbers may be used as convenient symbols. Logical games are mathematical games, because maths is just formalised logic.
Faecal enema
It was a great shame that Ken Green was ridiculed by his vet for suggesting a faecal enema for the treatment of his dog’s antibiotic-associated diarrhoea (29 October, p 23). Human physicians might have greeted the proposal with a little more understanding. The equivalent treatment has been shown to be effective in small numbers of people by researchers in Bergen, Norway, in 1998. Finding volunteers for larger-scale trials of the treatment might prove challenging, however.
Left footedness
I’m not surprised there are not many strong left-handers in the human population: from a very young age children are subjected to a right-handed world and must adapt accordingly. I was wondering, though, whether humans have a left/right footedness which could be measured (ease of balance when standing on one or other leg, for example) and whether left-handers are also left-footers. It would seem logical to presume that footedness is subject to less cultural bias than handedness and may therefore give a more accurate representation of left/right preference in the human species.
Abandoned cities
Simon Winchester is mistaken in maintaining that the US has no ruined cities other than “a few ghost towns” (29 October, p 20). He is forgetting the substantial ruins in the south-west, typified by the Chaco canyon remains, and the less obvious but probably more significant remnants of the Cahokian pre-Columbian civilisations in the Mississippi basin.
At its peak, Chaco canyon was home to 1000 people or more, while the Cahokia population may have been an order of magnitude larger, spread over a conurbation of several square kilometres. Though we shall never know for sure what led to the collapse of these civilisations, one credible theory is that their disappearance was due to social tensions and population movement as a result of climate changes in the 13th and 14th centuries AD. If this is so it would, ironically, lend support to Winchester’s arguments.
Bob in Rindler space
In response to Chris Robbins’s question about Rindler space and the equivalence principle, you say that from a windowless box “Bob would not be able to tell whether he was accelerating in Rindler space or in the presence of a black hole” (22 October, p 27). Unfortunately, this is incorrect.
Although Rindler space and a black hole both exhibit event horizons, they are in other respects very different. In Rindler space, the gravitational field is uniform, space-time is flat, and the equivalence principle holds globally. For a black hole, the gravitational field is non-uniform, space-time is curved, and the equivalence principle holds only locally. Consequently, Bob would be able to tell the difference by dropping an object from his left hand and one from his right. In the presence of a black hole, the two objects would be seen to move slightly closer together as they both fall towards the centre of the black hole. In Rindler space their trajectories would remain parallel.
From Pete Wigens
Am I alone in becoming somewhat irritated by your continued employment of Alice and Bob in your thought experiments? It is surely time that my friends Xavier and Yolanda were given a fair crack of the quantum whip, to say nothing of Zoe, who may sometimes be a complex character but is frequently their equal.
Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK
No need for new law
Paul Davies muses that a fourth law is needed to explain complexities such as life (29 October, p 51). It seems to me that existing laws will do it just fine.
Given the enormous combinatorial possibilities that atoms offer the universe, and how vast the universe is, the probability of life having emerged somewhere with its necessary chemistry is probably quite high. The only chance of observing life is, of course, to be alive. We are, so why should we be so amazed by life’s complexity? Paul Davies gives hope to the creationists with his musings.
Physicists may be “far from knowing just what it takes to create order out of chaos”, as Davies says. Perhaps they should consult chemists or biologists for an answer.
Permission to breed
One of your “60 Seconds” items reports that private companies in the US have patented nearly 20 per cent of all human genes (22 October, p 7). Does this mean if my wife and I have children, we need to get a patent licence for copying our genes?
Resistant pests
The lack of developed resistance in genetically modified Bt cotton crops in Arizona is indeed surprising, especially considering what has been found elsewhere (29 October, p 4). Australian researchers recently obtained “unequivocal evidence” that a strain of the cotton bollworm Helicoverpa armigera was resistant to the Cry1Ac toxin. Unlike the Monsanto-funded study in Arizona, where the inheritance of resistance was recessive, the resistance mechanism was found to be semi-dominant, raising serious concerns about how such resistance might be managed.
There are growing concerns that inconsistent levels of Cry toxin both within the plant and during the growing season could lead to the development of resistance. Such variations in toxin levels have been observed in Bt cotton in several studies in India, China and the US.
Science meets fiction
The similarities in the creative processes used by artists, fiction writers and scientists surely comes as no surprise (29 October, p 44). Writing fiction and carrying out scientific research also both require a logical approach. But for art and fiction (whether stage-plays, Hollywood films, or novels) to take advantage of scientific ideas and use them creatively, there has to be some basic understanding of the facts.
American author Kim Stanley Robinson (8 October, p 56) never found a scientist who would refuse when he asked them for help 鈥� and it is now possible for fiction-writers in the UK to receive similar help, by drawing on the large resource of the SciTalk project for inspiration. SciTalk () is a growing database of scientists who would enjoy talking to fiction writers, and showing them where they work. Its aim is to get “good science”, and scientists as realistic characters, into fiction.
An added bonus is that writers and scientists have the fun of seeing the creative process in action.
The colour purple
So Cadbury owns the colour purple (5 November, p 21). Does Alice Walker (The Color Purple, 1982) know this, or Steven Spielberg?
Metric leap
You report on the plan of action by the US National Academy of Sciences to overcome the science crisis, entitled Rising Above the Gathering Storm (22 October, p 6). Although all the recommendations are valid, particularly that the US should become more “welcoming”, there is nevertheless an initiative that they failed to mention, and which the media and our politicians are reluctant to discuss: the need for the US to make an all-out effort to convert to the metric system.
The poet A. E. Housman wrote: “By brooks too broad for leaping/The lightfoot boys are laid.” So far, getting over to the metric system seems to be Uncle Sam’s brook too broad for leaping. For some time, as a spur to making the leap, I have been advocating converting our football fields from 100 yards to 100 metres. But even that little stream, as it were, has proven to be “too broad for leaping”.