Policing power
Political virgins like futurist James Martin mean well, but in his interview (9 September, p 46) he did not offer a mechanism by which the powerful supranational body he proposed could be policed and held to account by the people whose interests it is intended to serve.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Who's a clever boy?
It is neither a new nor a profound discovery that geniuses need to learn their trade before they can perform well at it, and that their proficiency improves with years of practice (16 September, p 40). As the great golfer Arnold Palmer said when it was suggested that he was just lucky, “It’s funny, the more I practise the luckier I get.”
The article misuses the term genius. It applies to innate abilities, not to achievement. The very high achiever needs two talents: first an outstanding natural aptitude, and then an outstanding ability to work hard. We see this repeatedly in the field of athletics.
From Guy Faulkner
As an observer of the professional golfing world, I am always struck when watching the 120 tournament qualifiers that they are all potentially as good as each other in getting the ball from tee to hole. Yet the winner always seems to be one of a small select band.
The need for good teaching and a lot of hard slog on the practice ground go without saying, but the essential extra element is mental toughness. There is a pecking order as far as this is concerned. While challengers may be putting in just as much work as Tiger Woods and others, their will to win is not as strong. This mental toughness needs training just as much as the ability to hit a ball straight and far.
Tunbridge Wells, Kent, UK
Trapping the dew
You mention that the practice of using volcanic stone to trap moisture for agriculture is a remarkably localised one, and you list a few islands where it occurs (9 September, p 50). On a recent trip to Savai’i, the northern island of Samoa, which suffered extensive volcanic eruption early in the 20th century, I noticed that not only had farmers liberally scattered small broken pieces of volcanic rock all around their crop plots, but that they had also stacked substantial pyramids of the same stones halfway up the trunks of the village fruit trees.
Some areas of the island are still covered with extensive lava flows of this same black rock, and I was surprised to find a slab of it that was uncomfortably damp to sit on even after it had been baking in the tropical sun. Presumably this was caused by moisture left over from the previous night.
Men make jugs
Graeme Mulvaney need look no further for a new planetary mnemonic (2 September, p 19). My father told me he initially learned “Men Very Easily Make Jugs Serve Useful Needs”, but that with the discovery of Pluto he was forced to amend that to “Men Very Easily Make Jugs Serve Useful Necessary Purposes”. Now we can all revert to the original.
For the record
鈥� The article on ocean acidification (5 August, p 28) stated that over 130 species were recently found on one cold-water reef in the north-east Atlantic. In fact, over 1300 species were reported in a study that looked at a small selection of reefs.
鈥� When we printed David Prichard’s letter (9 September, p 23) his name was spelled incorrectly as “Pritchard” and we moved him from his real address of Geraldton, Western Australia, to Geraldton, Washington, US.
鈥� In our article “Uncovering the hazards in our electronic gadgets” (23 September, p 26) a decimal point was mistakenly entered as 0 in one of the entries in our table. The reading for decaBDE in the Apple laptop should have read 8.5 milligrams per kilogram, not 805 mg/kg.
Patents help us all
Joseph Stiglitz uses powerful and emotive arguments to challenge the effectiveness of patents in promoting innovation (16 September, p 20). But when the article makes assertions such as “the global intellectual property regime denies poor people access to lifesaving drugs” his logic is flawed.
Without an effective patent system, who would have made the necessary investment to discover and manufacture those drugs? It is politics and economics that block access to drugs for the world’s poor, not the intellectual property (IP) system.
Stiglitz rightly claims that “the AIDS epidemic lays waste to so much of the developing world”. Yet his accusation in the same paragraph that the drug companies “spend next to nothing looking for cures and vaccines for the diseases of the poor” appears to ignore the huge investment that has gone into finding effective treatments for HIV and AIDS in recent years.
Stiglitz is quite wrong when he argues that it is the IP system and the IP provisions of the Uruguay agreement that have “reduced access to knowledge for developing countries”. On the contrary, patent information databases are the world’s biggest source of technical information. All that information is freely accessible to anybody who wants it, and most of it is not available anywhere else.
In referring to the so-called “enclosure movement” he is also perpetuating the myth that it’s possible to patent existing plants or foodstuffs, such as turmeric and basmati rice. No patent system in the world allows that. Patents are granted only to inventions that are not previously known: no innovation, no patent.
From Adrian Bowyer, University of Bath
Stiglitz is right that the world’s IP protection system is inhibiting more innovation than it is promoting, but there is another way round this, besides his suggestion of awarding prizes for innovation: that is to grant free patents.
Under this system, the owner of a patent declares it to be free for all time 鈥� in other words, anyone will be allowed to use the patented technology without paying royalties. In exchange, governments would grant the patent owner 鈥� but nobody else 鈥� exemption from taxation on any profits that they make from the idea. Innovators would have a choice: patent their invention, as now, and keep their monopoly; or gain a tax advantage by declaring the patent free.
The patent owner would also benefit by avoiding the expense of defending their patent in court from use by their competitors. Governments would probably collect more tax from those competitors than they would lose to the patent holder.
Bath, Avon, UK
From Michael Berkson
I take issue with Stiglitz. It is a necessary condition of patent protection that the applicant publishes full working details of the invention, thereby disseminating that knowledge for the benefit of anyone who cares to use it. In my own practice as a chartered patent attorney I have had occasion to advise clients, especially for software-related inventions, that confidentiality offers better protection than the publication and temporary monopoly of a patent. Contrary to Stiglitz’s arguments, abolition or restriction of the patent system will remove an important source of technical information and significantly limit the spread of knowledge.
Cambridge, UK
'Badness' in food
I would like to add some comments to your article about adding capsules of “goodness” to foods (2 September, p 24). The food industry, like any other industry, is about making money. The big food producers try to boost their profits by reducing manufacturing costs and extending sell-by dates 鈥� which is why you see potentially harmful additives and ingredients in food.
An example is the use of hydrogenated fats. These fats are cheap, and do not go rancid. They were added in massive quantities between their discovery and the end of the past decade, with the results that we now see: the biggest killer in the west is heart-related diseases.
What I want to see the food industry doing is not adding more “goodness” so much as taking out all the “badness”.
Don't dig here
The plan for the Carlsbad nuclear waste repository seems to ignore the fact that radioactive waste is actually interesting to some people, and those people are likely to try to dig it up (9 September, p 44). Right now, for example, there must be people who would love to get their hands on a big barrel of nuclear waste that they could then blow up in a city somewhere to cause mayhem. There is no particular reason to expect this state of affairs to be any different in the future. There will probably always be power-hungry lunatics running about.
Given this, the whole idea of putting the waste underground and then abandoning the site is deeply irresponsible. The site will need to be heavily protected by armed guards until such time as humanity either has no more lunatics running about, or has the capability to dig up the waste and neutralise it somehow. The cost of this perpetual guard ought to be factored into the total cost of nuclear energy.
From Clive Groves, De Montfort University
I take the point that appropriate labelling of nuclear waste repositories in such a way as to be comprehensible to future generations is a necessity. I suggest though, that there is one language that would be clear to any future generation, or even another species, with a level of technology equal to or greater than our own, and that is the language of chemistry.
A pictogram showing the periodic table and highlighting the symbols for uranium, plutonium and any other radioactive elements buried in the repository, together with a link to pictograms illustrating the longest-lived fission products, would indicate the nature of what lay below to any being that uses chemistry. It ought to be safe to assume that any descendants whose level of technology has declined to a point where they no longer recognise or use the periodic table will not have the technology to overcome the physical barriers that one trusts would be incorporated into such a repository.
Leicester, UK
From Peter Wright
I can’t think of a better way to attract the unwanted interest of a future civilisation to a nuclear waste site than by ringing it with earthworks and inscribed monoliths. Archaeologists 鈥� and tomb robbers 鈥� have a long track record of ignoring curses, warnings and genuine health threats in search of knowledge or treasure. If we genuinely want to keep waste dumps safe from people in the future, showing off about how clever we are at creating warnings is not the way to go. Instead we should remove any trace that it was ever there. Genghis Khan’s tomb has never been found despite intense interest and active searches because he did exactly that.
If we really must mark the site, the warnings should be buried and designed not to show up on a casual survey so they will only be found by someone who would otherwise actually disturb the site.
Polegate, East Sussex, UK
From Robbie Walker
The discussion about indestructible stone warnings for the Carlsbad nuclear repository reminded me of a strange gravestone I encountered when recently visiting Brookwood Necropolis in Surrey, in southern England. Made from a substance called coadstone, its durability is best summarised by a quote from the Brookwood website: “This memorial is over 100 years old, but has not weathered at all. It is made from artificial coadstone 鈥� the secret of making it died with its inventor” ().
Coadstone was cast, not sculpted. It was named after Mary Coad, who perfected the formula and produced it at the family factory after her father died. Following her own death, only poor imitations of the material have been produced for outdoor ornamentation.
The guardians of the Carlsbad repository might wish to investigate this intriguing material further.
London, UK
From John Woodgate
I think the 32 engraved monoliths should be arranged in a circle, and lintels placed on top.
Rayleigh, Essex, UK