Beyond criticism
Feedback covered Conservapedia before I got around to it (7 April). Its article named “Examples of Bias in Wikipedia” contains some wonderfully terrible stuff. Visiting the discussion page about this article, I find that someone had tried to post a similar page about bias on Conservapedia 鈥� and it had been removed without any visible explanation.
Market failure
Brian Hicks believes that “there is no alternative to capitalism” and that “price and profit signals in a (relatively) free market” could help achieve sustainability (31 March, p 23). But the inefficient command economies 鈥� Soviet Russia, Cuba and so on 鈥� were or are part of the capitalist system.
In every country most people work for wages or salaries, and goods are traded for money, as commodities. As for the efficiency of capitalism’s “relatively free market”: the pharmaceutical industry has clearly failed to produce innovative new drugs to counter tuberculosis and other diseases of the poor, as shown by Angela Saini (31 March, p 20).
And Debora MacKenzie noted that “a key goal is to develop new antibiotics effective against TB. The pharmaceutical industry has long neglected the disease, as it has mainly affected the poor.” (24 March, p 44).
This is what will always happen when “price and profit signals” determine key decisions about research and investment. Price and profit signals respond to economic demand: not to our needs, only to our ability to pay.
We should never accept that “there is no alternative to capitalism”. Every problem suggests a solution: in this case, that would be a classless society, based on the common ownership of the land and other means of producing and distributing wealth, with production for use, not for profit. With that 鈥� you might call it socialism or communism 鈥� we could end poverty and also address the problem of sustainability.
Let’s face it: so far, capitalism has not made too much progress in this direction. Isn’t it high time we started to look for some alternative to this system which clearly fails people and the planet in so many ways?
Bees and toxins
Your article about disappearing bees in Florida gives many possible reasons for the die-off (24 March, p 10). Surely one should also consider the increasing acreage in the US devoted to crops genetically engineered to express the Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) toxin, such as corn. I believe bees were thought to be insensitive to the Bt toxin; but could they be reacting to low-level or cumulative doses of this poison, picked up in many tiny doses when foraging for pollen, nectar or the plant resins used in hive construction?
Capital idea
It was unusual and refreshing to see capitalism itself being brought into the debate about climate change (10 March, p 23). But it was highly unfortunate that Adrian Pollock then equated “communism” with the regime in Cuba.
As Brian Hicks pointed out (31 March, p 23), command economies have observable inherent weaknesses that make them inferior to market capitalism. This does not close the debate, however.
The greatest disaster of communism was not that it was tried and it didn’t work, but that some heavily centralised and authoritarian regimes passed themselves off as communism and discredited an entire untested economic theory in the process. This theory remains excluded from rational discourse because people imagine that the collapse of most of these regimes meant the end of the matter.
Communists advocate, not a command-led market, but a phase-change in productive and social relations based on a globally democratic gift-economy. The theory is scientifically based, and thus should be falsifiable, but to what extent the model is yet sufficiently developed is hard to say because the subject is deemed ultra vires by the very people in the best position to find hard evidence for or against it 鈥� scientists themselves. This is a shame, as the evidence continues to suggest that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we humans “do business”. In all our anxiety about the future of the planet, the biggest assumption is that we are obliged to operate within capitalism forever, and that there is no ‘next step’. The argument for this next step has not been lost, it has simply not taken place.
Wild at heart
Feedback is confused about “Wild blueberries from Canadian fruit farms” (7 April). It actually makes sense. Domesticated cultivars of the blueberry are large, plump and very bland tasting. The wild varieties of the blueberry are small, but very tasty. These are much more in demand than the domesticated cultivars. Therefore, blueberry farmers in Canada cultivate the same blueberries as grow in the wild, and call them “wild blueberries” as opposed to the tasteless “domesticated blueberries”.
Think of it like the farmers who raise “wild game animals” such as boar, bison, or red deer. Domestic animals or plants that escape into the wild are called “feral”. Maybe the English language needs a word for wild species that are being farmed. Perhaps your readers could suggest one.
One place at a time
Marcus Chown’s account of quantum theory is unnecessarily paradoxical (17 March, p 36). He asserts that a quantum object can be in several places at once. Observing it may make it appear at one of these places and disappear at the others. A mysterious and acausal action-at-a-distance seems to be required, which many people find worrisome.
One does not have to assume that the object is in several places at once. It is less confusing to assert that it has several possible positions, but not that it actually occupies any of them. Only when the object is observed (or, more generally, when it decoheres through its interaction with other objects) does it come to occupy one of these positions. The observation is a local event at the place where the object appears. Since the object is not actually in the other places, there is no need to tell it to disappear from them. No mysterious, acausal signals are required.
Confusions such as this arise if one regards the wave function as some kind of picture of the quantum object. Bohr pointed out long ago that this is incorrect. Perhaps one might also quote Heisenberg: the atom is not an object, it is a tendency.
Scale relativity
Discussing the possibility that the universe is fractal, Amanda Gefter makes a small reference to Laurent Nottale’s theory of Scale Relativity (10 March, p 30). But she goes nowhere near doing the theory justice.
The basic concept adds scale invariance to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The consequence is a minimum length (a quantum length), the Planck length, which cannot be further reduced. The Planck length has a similar role to the speed of light in general relativity as an asymptote that can be approached but never reached.
Among other things, Nottale’s theory:
1) Combines general relativity and quantum mechanics: Quantum mechanics becomes a manifestation of the fractal geometry of space-time in the same way gravity is in Einstein’s general theory of relativity a manifestation of the curvature of space-time.
2) Removes problems in big bang theory and shows inflation is unnecessary.
3) Explains the transition of quantum effects to classical ones 鈥� it is all about scale as your article “Forever quantum” concludes (17 March, p 36).
4) Removes the various infinities that require “re-normalisation” that crop in quantum mechanics.
5) Makes testable predictions about the masses of various quarks and other particles, the value of the cosmological constant and numerous other predictions
I do not understand why Nottale’s theory has not been given wider coverage or discussion. If he is wrong it needs debunking, if he is right he deserves a Nobel prize.
Crossed lines
I was intrigued by the benefits Ian Stewart suggested may follow from using Euler’s mathematical ideas (24 March, p 48). However, the proposal to use electricity power cables to carry data signals has been in development in one form or another for at least 20 years. The odd trial installation has connected real homes, and error correction and other techniques can indeed get over the problem of data corruption.
A more intractable problem lies in the signals that escape from the wires. If every home were wired up in this way, our airwaves would fill with unwanted and interfering signals, upsetting our radio, mobile phones and even television. One way of minimising this would be to spread the signal across a wide band of frequencies, trying to keep the signal level within the background noise levels; but there is a fine balance between enabling the signal to get through and radiating it into the air at too high a level.
No one has yet solved this problem. The idea has anyway been overtaken by modern wireless technology.
For the record
鈥� Not all the people shown in the pictures on the opening spread of the article “They made me do it” (14 April, p 42) were suicide bombers. Among those who are not is the hooded man who was maltreated by soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq.
鈥� In “Global warming will make Earth spin faster” (7 April, p 17), we incorrectly said that the tidal friction of the Earth-moon system slows our planet down by 0.23 milliseconds every 100 years. The correct number is 2.3 milliseconds.
Concrete idea
While rather outlandish ideas are being proposed to compete for Richard Branson’s carbon sequestration prize (17 February, p 5), I nominate John Harrison of Tasmania and his alternative cement based on magnesium carbonate (13 July 2002, p 39). Manufacturing this produces fewer carbon dioxide emissions than calcium-silicate-based Portland cement, and it absorbs more CO2 as it hardens.
If, instead of giving away money for ideas, Branson put that money towards a pilot plant and construction project he could radically change the construction industry and at the same time remove carbon dioxide from the environment 鈥� without resorting to tinkering with ecosystems where the consequences are unpredictable, such as dumping iron into the sea to promote plankton blooms.
People will build. Why not use a construction material that contributes to the solution?
Not so mad cows?
The Roman writer Vegetius mentioned a cattle disease called mania (7 April, p 21). He described it only briefly, at the end of a list of diseases including elephantiasis: “There is mania, which deprives well-fed cows of sense, so that they neither hear in the usual way, nor see; from this affliction they quickly die, however happy and fat they might have looked. All these diseases are full of contagion, and if they affect one animal, rapidly spread to all…”, and he goes on to recommend isolating the affected animal. At you can see this in Latin.
This sounds quite like one of the group of diseases called “staggers”. Their symptoms are increasing paralysis and blindness, collapse, convulsions and rapid death. Their causes are dietary: magnesium deficiency when cattle are turned out to spring pasture, calcium deficiency, selenium poisoning, or infection of fodder by ergot fungus. Ergot is thought to have caused medieval outbreaks of dancing mania, affecting whole villages. Since all the herd will be affected at the same time, the disease may appear to be contagious.
Mapping fiction
I am surprised that Feedback does not know why a map of Cornwall would mark the presence (or, rather, the absence) of a “non-existent footpath” (24 March). To discourage copying, map publishers have a dirty secret: they insert fictional features into their maps. Each map company creates their own imaginary additions. If the same wholly fictional street shows up in maps issued by two different publishers, one of them has plagiarised the other’s work.
There could be deadly consequences if any road map confabulated a feature that motorists might actually try to use, such as a completely imaginary motorway. So, map-makers usually limit their imagination to harmless cul-de-sacs and footpaths in obscure corners.
I propose that a previous edition of the map cited by Feedback must have contained a non-existent footpath presented as genuine; some rambler got lost because of that misinformation; and so the map’s current edition is attempting damage control by informing us that a footpath which never existed is, indeed, still non-existent.
The editor writes:
鈥� See our description of “copyright traps” (25 November 2006, p 23)
Marilyn Einstein
I’m not sure the explanation Gregory Huang gives for the picture that is either Albert Einstein or Marilyn Monroe can be the entire case (31 March, p 35). If you hold the page at arm’s length, facing you, you can see Einstein. But rotating it edge-on, at the same distance, reveals Marilyn.
The effect is better the more edge-on the page is viewed. It may depend on the relative density of information between different parts of the image and the whole. Although this may be just another way of expressing the relative detail frequencies of parts of the image, the distance here is unaltered, so as the overall size of the image reduces (as it is turned edge-on) the higher frequencies get lost in the reduced contrast and the lower frequencies dominate.
It's mutilation
I was angry, shocked and deeply saddened that you called the barbaric practice of cutting out a woman’s clitoris and, often, inner labia “circumcision” (14 April, p 7).
It has long been clear that this, along with a number of similar heinous practices, is female genital mutilation 鈥� more akin to castrating a boy (while fully awake) than circumcising him. Use of the term “circumcision” is one of the reasons why this practice has only just been outlawed in Eritrea and is still legal, or simply ignored, in other countries. Please follow the World Health Organization and call it what it is.
Falsifying warming
Roger James is right that falsification can disprove a hypothesis (14 April, p 22). He is wrong, however, when he concludes that this means that a scientist’s task is to show that no established facts are incompatible with a theory. One cannot prove a negative: before the discovery of black swans, no one could prove that not all swans are white.
As for global warming, all the evidence points to man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The onus is on sceptics to produce counter-evidence; not those who accept the International Panel on Climate Change’s hypothesis.
From John Woods
Roger James advances a somewhat naive view of Popperian philosophy 鈥� which is, in any case, hardly the last word in scientific philosophy. He suggests that unless “scientists” can exhaustively disprove an infinitude of increasingly ludicrous alternatives, no hypothesis can ever be accepted.
Arguing our inability to categorically prove that we do not all live in The Matrix, for instance, implies that we cannot know anything at all.
It is a rhetorical form beloved of creationists, global warming deniers, 11 September conspiracy theorists and those who believe that the lunar landings were faked. Many of these people refer to themselves as sceptics, but this is a misinterpretation 鈥� perhaps a deliberate misappropriation 鈥� of the term.
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, UK
Power plans
Power generation from coal is a threat to the climate (17 March, p 14). There are, however, abundant supplies of cheap coal which will be used. Storage or sequestration of carbon dioxide is only a partial solution. It is just as important to build combined heat and power (CHP) stations. If a power station is 30 per cent efficient, and 10 per cent is then lost in transmission, only 27 per cent of the coal burned is producing electricity and 73 per cent is wasted.
CHP increases the percentage of energy used to around 80 per cent. New power stations should be built only if they use the “waste” heat, and transmission losses should be minimised by shortening the distance power lines cover. The heat can be used for district domestic heating, or industrial processes, or even to provide refrigeration. The power generation industry claims that gigawatt-sized stations are more economic than smaller ones 鈥� but this ignores the increased output in energy from local CHP.
Embrace those trees
Daniel Boyd points out the impracticality of carbon offsets that would demand 625 square kilometres of newly planted trees to offset emissions for a mere 50,000 people (7 April, p 20). An alternative might be to expand the carbon offset market to preserve as well as create forests. Tropical rainforests are being cleared at a terrifying rate leading to habitat loss, extinction of species, carbon emissions through uncontrolled burning and, of course, the removal of future carbon sinks.
If the fashion for carbon offsets could be diverted into buying, preserving and perhaps even expanding forests at risk, then we might begin to address more than one desperately urgent problem at the same time.