Cricket ball tampering
So we have yet another ball-tampering controversy in cricket. With all the disappointing events that unravelled at London’s Oval cricket ground recently, the one issue that still seems to cause some confusion is that regarding the benefits of ball tampering.
One school of thought is that effective reverse swing can only be obtained if the ball is tampered with. This is certainly not the case. The fact is that even a brand new ball will reverse swing, but only at very high bowling speeds. The main advantage of a rough, dry surface on the side of the ball facing the batsman is that the bowling speed at which reverse swing occurs is lowered. This also means that more reverse swing is obtained at the higher bowling speeds.
With conventional swing, the side facing the batsman needs to be as smooth as possible so that a steady and smooth (laminar) flow is maintained close to the ball surface. In this case, the ball will swing in the same direction that the angled seam is pointing. For reverse swing, a dry and rough side facing the batsman creates a chaotic (turbulent) flow close to the surface and the ball swings in the opposite direction to that of the seam.
Another advantage of ball tampering, which has only come to light recently, is its effect on contrast swing. Contrast swing can be obtained with a ball that has one side very smooth and the other side rough. While the ball is released with the seam angled for conventional and reverse swing, contrast swing is obtained with the seam straight up (pointed straight down the pitch). This type of delivery is a lot easier to produce and the ball can be swung both ways, and at all bowling speeds.
Buffer-overflow bugs
In response to Kae Verens’s letter (2 September, p 18), I feel I must point out that the letter from me he was commenting on (12 August, p 18) seemed to be edited such that it did not entirely represent the point I was making.
My original email stated: “The fact is that buffer-overflow bugs are an embarrassment and any programmer who allows such a bug to appear in their code should be ashamed of themselves. They are akin to a surgeon not sewing up a patient after an operation.”
I was not referring to all programming bugs when using the surgeon analogy, only the buffer-overflow bug. Verens is entirely correct that it is almost impossible to find and fix all bugs, but the software industry (myself included) must not fall into the thinking that software bugs are acceptable and that we should find ways around them instead of fixing them.
Passengers in a pod
Tom Holmes is spot on with his idea of pre-packaging passengers (12 August, p 19). My 1973 thesis at the predecessor of what is now Cranfield University, UK, proposed “The passenger module in air transportation”. I designed the cargo containers to fit the Boeing 747, and it would have been just a short step to equipping them so that people could board them at downtown terminals, be transported to an airfield and loaded onto the plane, then unloaded at the destination and distributed to outlying towns.
Each container would contain seats, toilets, oxygen, food, baggage and cabin crew. It would be fireproof, crash-resistant and floatable. There would be room for passengers and crew to walk along the outside of the containers in the fuselage. I recall that passengers were carried in containers in Bristol freighter aircraft in New Zealand years ago: this avoided converting the plane for each trip.
Full-steam ahead
In all the talk of alternative power sources, I have not seen any mention of steam power produced by burning wood. Using only fuel grown for the purpose, this would be CO2 neutral. Surely with modern knowledge, materials, hydraulics, electric and electronic controls and insulation, a modern wood-fired steam engine would enable a farm with a proportion of its land planted with trees to be self-sufficient for fuel. In high-rainfall areas, trees are a more suitable crop than bio-diesel.
I envisage a big steam-powered farm tractor, perhaps weighing 5 tonnes, doing heavy farm work when needed, but kept going almost non-stop, generating electricity to feed into the grid when not needed elsewhere, thus avoiding the problems of starting up from cold. It could be backed up on the farm by several small battery-driven farm vehicles. The economics depend on the relationship between the price of labour and the real cost of fuel oil.
It is only 60 years since I, as a boy, was entrusted with the job of carting water in milk churns, with a horse and cart, to supply the steam traction engine that powered and moved the threshing machine when it visited my father’s farm.
Here in the south-west of Western Australia, a huge industry has grown up in the last 16 years growing eucalyptus timber for woodchip for paper-making. The proximity of wooded areas has cured previous problems of waterlogging and salt encroachment on the farming land, and provided shelter for our livestock. This timber, or even just the waste material at present left to rot, would make fine fuel for our future steam engines.
Virgin grandmother?
How can someone be “descended from Joan of Arc” (19 August, p 35)? Not only was she a virgin, she didn’t have any children either!
Space shocker
I think there might be serious problems with a “space elevator” linking low-Earth orbit to ground (2 September, p 36). Even if the problems of construction were solved, then assuming the cable is a conductor, wouldn’t problems be created by forming an electrical conduit linking layers of the atmosphere such as the ionosphere to the troposphere and the ground? If we were lucky the potential difference could perhaps be utilised for powering the lift, but the environmental effects of a man-made fuse wire could be spectacularly dangerous. Remember the fears of an unstoppable chain reaction before the first nuclear bomb was exploded.
Bring on the muons
As stated in your article on “atom smashers”, the International Linear Collider will collide electrons with positrons to achieve a maximum collision energy of (only) 1 teraelectronvolt (26 August, p 36). It is also stated that using point-like leptons such as electrons and positrons offers advantages over higher-energy machines using more massive but multi-component particles such as protons. But why not use heavier leptons such as muons in the ILC and get the best of both worlds?
No case for ID
After reading Francis S. Collins’s religious apologia The Language of God, Steve Fuller is persuaded he was right to testify for the defence in the Dover debacle in Pennsylvania last year (26 August, p 48).
Judge Jones’s verdict shredded the defence case that intelligent design (ID) is science, not religion, and should be taught alongside evolution in school biology classes. Fuller’s criticism of Collins amounts to saying that ID is better religion than Collins’s theistic evolution. In saying this, isn’t he implicitly admitting that the defence in that trial was a sham? Are we to take it that the ID movement thinks it is right to compel parents, school education boards and courts to accept religion in science classes in contravention of the US constitution? Is it something intrinsic to the nature of the ID movement that it can contemplate forcing change on such a grand scale?
Fuller accuses Collins of being mired in confusion but he is no less mired in it himself. To imagine that the animal-rights movement has any more respect for or understanding of the science of evolution than ID reveals his own confusion in stark fashion. Fuller suggests that the animal rightists are “good Darwinians” (but not good Christians) because they don’t put humans “on top”. But they cannot appeal to evolution in support of their view that the use of animals as models for humans is impossible, a priori. Just the opposite is true. Evolution positively invites us to investigate their possible usefulness as human models.
Far from consisting of good Darwinians, the animal rights movement has no concern for the science of evolution. In this it is similar to the ID movement 鈥� and it is similar to Fuller too.
Drugs in sport
Michael Le Page argues that the controlled use of drugs in sport creates a level playing field and that this is the best way to resolve the doping crisis that many sports find themselves in (19 August, p 18). It is naive to suppose that athletes will be content with a level playing field. Athletes are not only driven to take drugs by their own will to win: there are the coaches, managers and medical advisers who are willing to put aside ethical constraints and engage actively in the process of drug use, including supplying masking agents. Moreover, those who participate in cheating are not driven by a desire to achieve fairness for the athletes they “support”; the motives are more often financial and the greatest rewards come to those that produce winners.
The only way to attack the problem of drugs in sport is to unpick the infrastructure that supports it. This won’t be achieved by a few random drug tests. Recent police investigations and investigative journalism have done more to bring the problem to the surface. To attempt to solve the problem by condoning it and thereby opening the door to greater and more dangerous levels of cheating is not the answer. The incentive to exceed the permitted levels will always be there. Le Page’s “level playing field” will become a dangerous battleground.
Evolution's botched job
“If it is such a good idea, why has evolution not built us that way?” is the question Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg say must be asked before we try to enhance human capabilities (26 August, p 25). Evolution didn’t “build” us at all. It can only play the hand mutation deals it. If no mutation occurs giving rise to a particular characteristic, no matter how much of a “good idea” that characteristic is, it will not arise. We, however, have the capacity for foresight and so can fine-tune some of evolution’s less elegant solutions.
From Andrew Hart
Unless they believe that evolution in humans has reached its ultimate conclusion, the fact that we are not more intelligent than at present does not mean that there is no evolutionary advantage in being more intelligent or that evolution could not boost our capacities in the same way that certain drugs or technology may be able to. Given that evolution’s timescales are measured in millions of years, the obvious conclusion is that evolution takes time and we are still on the journey.
A more interesting observation would be that humans have, uniquely, become the most significant agent of their own evolution. This appears to me to be an exciting and wonderful position to be in, and one to be welcomed, not feared. Of course, what is good for humanity is not necessarily good for the individual. Personally I think I’ll stay un-augmented and leave others to advance human evolution.
London, UK
Taxing gluttony
If food were priced according to calorie content, only rich people would be fat (19 August, p 6). More seriously, why not give all food a health value, then price it accordingly? Fresh organic apples would be 10 pence each, but doughnuts would be 拢10. Perhaps wines could be exempt, though…
From Janet Cavanaugh
So now economists are recommending clear price signals in relation to unhealthy foods. The Australian government did the exact opposite when it replaced the previous 22 per cent wholesale tax on soft drinks with a 10 per cent retail Goods and Services Tax in 2000. Soft drinks became significantly cheaper overnight, sending the wrong signal to the market.
Whiporie, New South Wales, Australia
Search engines' bias
To say that search engines are biased is to state the obvious (19 August, p 24). Their job is to be biased, in favour of maximum usefulness to the user. The value they provide lies in increasingly sophisticated algorithms for trying to evaluate usefulness.
They raise money through advertising, and their search results have to reflect this. To impose laws that interfere with this process would slow or stem the stream of technical innovations that benefit us all, and damage one of the most dynamic parts of the information technology industry.
The best way to counter the bias is to provide a separate, publicly owned search service that demonstrably does not have bias, as a kind of neutral reference. Any user wishing to ensure the objectivity of their search would use this service knowing how the search was being conducted and knowing that there was no commercial bias. The search algorithms would be open source to ensure transparency. This would also help the algorithms stay close to the state of the art and could allow some algorithms to come into general use sooner than they otherwise would. There must still be some basic legal constraints on the good behaviour of the commercial engines. Such a public service would also assist in ensuring compliance.