Stretching time
I was disappointed that the conclusion of the article on time distortion was that it takes too long to learn how to stretch time (4 February, p 35).
I have regularly used time distortion and can teach others to do the same in only a few weeks. It is something that hypnotherapists regularly use, whether for pain control, stretching times of comfort and shrinking times of discomfort, or for helping students have more time in exams.
The therapist Milton H. Erickson wrote many articles on time distortion and co-wrote the book Time Distortion in Hypnosis. He used time distortion regularly in his therapy, for example making a person who wanted to lose weight believe they were eating at normal speed when they were actually taking several minutes to raise the fork from plate to mouth.
Richard Bandler (the co-creator of neurolinguistic programming) has reportedly demonstrated how an ordinary person who has had their perception of time changed so that time passes slowly for them can outsmart a martial arts master. Whatever the martial artist does appears in slow motion to the other person, which gives them time to think about what to do. Bandler has also used time distortion to train athletes such as baseball players to see the ball moving slower when it is pitched. He has some good CDs available (Time Distortion 2000 and Adventures in Time) and a book that covers time distortion called Time for a Change.
It doesn’t take years to learn these skills, just practice and occasionally some help. I felt that it was a very disappointing end to the article that it didn’t suggest any techniques or ideas for trying time distortion, just the hope that one day a drug may be available.
From Belinda Martin
A similar theme to your article is put forward in John Brunner’s novel Born Under Mars, which describes an exercise whereby one can speed up or slow down one’s temporal perception at will.
I have used this exercise on many occasions and with some success 鈥� visualising a bead with a curved hole through it sliding along a string which is loosened or pulled taught, so that the bead (representing temporal perception) is either speeded up or slowed down.
Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, UK
From Vanda Hamilton
I don’t know what all this fuss is about stretching time. Every weekday morning I leave my house at about 8.27 for the five-minute walk to the local station. And every morning I get there in plenty of time to catch the 8.26 to the Melbourne suburb of Sandringham. It’s amazing.
Maybe, instead of talking to neuroscientists and physicists, you should have a chat to a commuter rail company.
East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
From Kenneth Young
I have come across what we might call time dilation three times. The first was a personal experience when 15 minutes seemed to last for hours, this was many years ago and the experience so pleasant that I have hankered after a repetition ever since. The second was as I skidded towards the back of a lorry before hitting it.
The third and more interesting was in the experience of a management consultant hired to use behavioural interviewing to see if he could detect the differences between an outstanding ice hockey player and his more ordinary team mates. The only but major difference was that the outstanding player saw the puck in slow motion. The player was apparently unaware that this was unusual and the consultant stumbled on the discovery having had no inkling of the possibility of such an attribute.
Darlington, County Durham, UK
From Jack Upsall
Robert Levine is quoted as saying: “Until the biomedical people can make us live forever, the closest thing we have is to stretch the moment.”
So Dunbar was right in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: “Dunbar was lying on his back again with his eyes staring up at the ceiling like a doll’s. He was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom. Dunbar was working so hard at increasing his life span that Yossarian thought he was dead.”
Bridgnorth, Shropshire, UK
Need for flu tests
Debora MacKenzie is right that no government seems to have included rapid diagnostic tests in its pandemic preparedness plans (4 February, p 30). These are absolutely vital. It is no good stockpiling antivirals like Tamiflu or Relenza if you haven’t also stockpiled tests to tell what you are infected with.
Certainly it is difficult to distinguish flu subtypes, but there are rapid tests to tell simply whether you have flu or some other respiratory infection, and these are all that are needed for deploying antiviral therapy. In Australia, and I think in most other countries, Tamiflu and Relenza can only be obtained with a doctor’s prescription. Since these drugs are most effective if taken 6 to 12 hours after you first experience flu symptoms, the time taken to get a prescription could render them ineffective.
Tamiflu should be available in pharmacies without a doctor’s prescription. If the drug is used inappropriately, to treat the common cold for example, no harm whatsoever will be done other than, of course, wasting the drug. This is clearly a bad thing if Tamiflu is in short supply, so rapid, accurate and inexpensive flu tests should also be available in every pharmacy. That way, people who think they have flu can be tested on the spot and, only if positive, be given Tamiflu.
This simple procedure should become standard practice for treating seasonal influenza throughout the world.
Cooking the planet
Your editorial about climate change hits the proverbial nail on the head when it says “there is something wrong with conventional economics” (11 February, p 5). But the biggest problem is that politicians have adopted conventional economics as their highest authority, as an operating system and a belief system. This stops them from doing what is obviously needed.
Only in times of war does bean-counting go out of the window in favour of directed activity. We now need a global war on climate change, or else the conventional economic machinery is going to cook this planet.
From Nick Reeves, Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management
Your editorial deals with only part of a complex equation. Whether governments can afford to mitigate the worst effects of global warming through technical fixes is not just a matter of economics and cost/benefit analysis. There is also the infinitely more tricky issue of ethics and doing what is morally right.
For example, to save London, its environs and its people from flooding would come at a significant financial cost. At some point a decision might have to be made about the extent to which we are prepared to make sacrifices for one of the world’s greatest cities beyond what would be conventionally economic. This would be a real test of the value we place on a city’s people, history, culture and institutions. The UK government, the Environment Agency and local councils are already grappling with these issues as parts of the country’s coastline retreat as a result of rising sea levels.
London, UK
Liberal road rage
Your magazine did a poor job discussing a recent survey that relates gun possession to road rage (4 February, p 7). The survey asked whether respondents had a gun at least once in their car over the past year and whether they made an obscene gesture or drove aggressively sometime over the same year. But their questions made no attempt to ask whether a gun was in the car at the time the road rage incident occurred. Nor did they attempt to differentiate law-abiding permit holders from those who illegally possessed guns, for example by asking respondents if they have a permit to carry a gun.
Also a single cross-sectional survey tells us nothing about causation. Ironically, the researchers’ regression results also show that liberals are much more likely to engage in road rage (both making obscene gestures and driving aggressively) than conservatives, and that the difference is larger than the difference for whether one had carried a gun in the car at least once. This variable is apparently never investigated, but presumably the researchers are also concerned about liberals being allowed to drive cars.
From Michael Brown, Doctors for Sensible Gun Laws
Unfortunately, David Hemenway and his colleagues are notorious anti-gun-rights activists and are known for issuing studies that denigrate gun owners.
Vancouver, Washington State, US
'Walk again' warning
As a researcher and a neurologist who has cared for patients with spinal cord injuries, I applaud most scientific efforts that help us better understand these injuries, but I do not expect that data from animal experiments will translate into effective treatments for humans (11 February, p 11).
Despite more than 40 years of spinal cord injury research on animals and numerous “breakthroughs” in laboratory animals, spinal cord treatments, including Naloxone, Nimodipine, interleukin-10, and even the controversial methylprednisolone, fail when applied to human patients. Precisely controlled animal experiments simply do not mimic the complexity of human spinal cord injury, which often includes organ failure, shock, multiple fractures and infections.
The numerous differences between humans and animals in spinal cord neuroanatomy, physiology and reaction to injury 鈥� even at the cellular level 鈥� can manifest as profound differences in disease physiology and treatment effectiveness. For example, many animals possess a “central pattern generator” that allows spinal cord function independent of input from higher brain centres, but this has not been shown to exist in humans.
Rather than continue with disappointing and wasteful animal experiments, scientists who want to help patients with spinal cord injuries should concentrate on clinically relevant human-based research.
Different languages
I do not believe art and science have a common language 鈥� and they never will (4 February, p 50). Because an artist like Jackson Pollock painted a picture that may have some fractal properties it is assumed this provides a connection with science. Other painters have composed works using atoms and molecular structures as a subject, and such artists have stated that this brings science and art together. Well it does no such thing. I am a full-time artist and have painted many oils over 40 years, using football, tennis and other sports as subject matter. Can I therefore say that art and sport are closely connected? In my opinion, no.
Nanodollars
I fear a “nano” gremlin has interfered with your reported spending on nanotech risk-related research (11 February, p 7). Recent estimates of government-funded nanotechnology risk research lie between $15 million and $40 million per year worldwide 鈥� a far cry from the reported $800 million.
Is this enough? I guess it depends on how serious we are about developing safe nanotechnologies. It is perhaps more useful to ask, “Is the right research being funded?” Sadly, there isn’t much evidence that it is.
From Paul Reeve
Nanotechnology promises huge steps forward in materials, computing, energy and medicine 鈥� but we have seen wonder materials before, such as CFCs and asbestos, that fell because the basic hazards were too great. Even some investment companies are issuing warnings to the effect that stakeholders are trying to run before they have tied their shoelaces.
Of course, nanotechnology may be benign, but we should not make that assumption. If the technology gets a clean bill of health, we can go forward with confidence. If not, it’s better to know sooner rather than later.
London, UK
Tectonic fingernails
For years, I have been describing plate tectonics to my classes by saying that the continents drift apart at about the rate at which fingernails grow 鈥� roughly a millimetre a week. Following David Jackson’s letter that described his observations of his own fingernail growth (21 January, p 21) and the earlier article on William Bean’s fingernail growth (24/31 December, p 37), I can’t resist pointing out this fact to your readership too.
Almost human?
I thought my sons would be interested in the article highlighted on the front cover of your 4 February issue: “Almost human: Robots with a graceful walk, velvet tones and a gentle touch.”
However, when I mentioned this to my mother her response was that she didn’t actually know many humans like that. I wonder whether robotic scientists should instead aim to create a robot that slouches, screeches and belts anything in sight after a couple of cans of machine oil.
Success in Montreal
James Levy claims the stipulation about new negotiations in the Convention decision in Montreal came from the US government (4 February, p 24). He also contends that brown coal plants are in the “spirit” of Montreal. I can only conclude that he, in common with the author of the recent editorial castigating me for statements taken out of context, is either unclear about the difference between the Kyoto protocol and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, has not read the actual conclusions of the conference, was not at the Montreal negotiations, if in Montreal spent his time in a coffee bar, or all of the above.
For the record, the pundits who have made a cottage industry out of composing death notices for the Kyoto protocol were again proved wrong. The US government failed in Montreal. In the face of overwhelming pressure from US civil society, trade unions, churches, municipal and state governments and the business community, US negotiators blinked. They walked out, expecting it all to come to a halt, but nobody followed. They then came back to the table agreeing to essentially the same thing they walked away from.
Levy and New 杏吧原创‘s editorialists are engaging in the kind of tired whining that we at Greenpeace are so often accused of. They miss the significance of a sea change in public and political opinion in the United States which will force America back into a global system of legally binding emissions reductions within a decade or less.
Hot water from the wind
John Clough is right to suggest using wind turbines to supply hot water (4 February, p 24). The process improves conversion efficiency and is simpler. With vertical axes turbines, the conversion equipment can be brought down to ground level and the behaviour of pumps and churners better match the velocity-cubed power output of the wind.
Furthermore, more heat is produced when it is windy 鈥� usually during colder periods, which is also when buildings lose more heat due to stronger forced convection. But why stop with a churner? By driving an (admittedly more complicated) heat pump compressor with a wind turbine, low-grade heat in the air, ground and water could be harnessed, with efficiencies effectively exceeding 100 per cent.
Grassballs, dust bunnies and planets
I saw a relation between the balls of fibrous plant/algae matter discussed in The Last Word (4 February) and my own humble contribution to New 杏吧原创 (27 August 2005, p 19) and also the online comment “Planet Formation” (1 October 2005) where I discussed the importance of fibrous matter in the formation of clumps (such as dust bunnies) and the possible implications for aggregation of matter during planet formation.
Basically the processes that form plant fibre balls should be the same as the ones forming dust bunnies as the fibres become entangled and the agglomerate grows in size, incorporating more fibres. Some of the comments in recent The Last word include additional important aspects. I agree with Gerard Lees when he points out that water, being more viscous than air, produces larger structures than those found in fabric pilling. The size of the fibres themselves is possibly also an important factor.
Carl Nielsen’s suggestion that ridges on the ocean sand floor would favour elongated shapes is also correct, as it would make the motion of the growing fibre balls on the sea floor nearly uni-dimensional instead of bi-dimensional. In much the same way you can make play-dough into either a ball or a cylinder depending on the way you roll it between your hands.
Finally, two important aspects come out: the production of such structures requires not only the presence of fibrous material but also a force and an interface. For grassballs the force can be the wind or water movement and the interface is either the surface or the bottom of the water. With dust bunnies the air movements and the floor act as the force and the interface.
Because of these additional factors, I now doubt that dust bunnies can form in space and be important in planet formation, even if there were fibrous matter in planetary discs.
Is religion a placebo?
The special report on religious belief “Beyond Belief” seems to raise the inevitable question of how faith works (28 January, p 28). Is religion just a placebo effect, and how is belief translated into physical benefit? I recall being told during my training in clinical psychology of a study that suggested that the best predictor of the recovery of hospital patients was their own belief that they would recover.
What is the biochemical mechanism triggered by belief which leads to the body’s recovery? On the other hand, is there perhaps a negative placebo effect in the process involving “learned helplessness”, which has been demonstrated in humans, dogs, monkeys 鈥� even detached cockroach legs. The most dramatic examples discussed at some length in the 1975 book Helplessness by Martin Seligman is Voodoo or Hex Death, where individuals sentenced to death by their tribe just go off and quietly die. How does a psychological experience have such a devastating effect on a body’s natural survival processes? It is fairly easy to comprehend the feelings of distress, anguish and depression, but the link to the physical process which results in the heart stopping seems to raise questions that are awaiting further study. A controlled study would have a job getting past an ethics committee, I suppose.
From drunks to nerds
Talking of reverse-spelled words (4 February, p 25), Wikipedia has this to say: “Nerd 鈥� A colloquial term for a computer person, especially an obsessive, singularly focused one. Earlier spelling of the term is ‘Nurd’ and the original spelling is ‘Knurd’, but the pronunciation has remained the same. The term originated at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the late 1940s. Students who partied and rarely studied were called ‘Drunks’, while the opposite 鈥� students who never partied and always studied were ‘Knurds’ (‘Drunk’ spelled backwards). The term was also (independently) used in a Dr Seuss book, and on the TV show Happy Days, giving it national popularity.”