Voices off
You quote Bern psychiatrist Daniela Hubl saying that a case of hers “proves that the voices were generated in the language areas of the patient’s own brain” (18 August, p 16).
And here we dumb members of the lay public were thinking the voices really did come from one of Satan’s imps, the bedstead, hyenas in the kitchen, or outer space. We should all celebrate this great breakthrough.
For the record
鈥� An editing error had us introducing beavers to Banff, which is in Aberdeenshire, when they are in fact being reintroduced to Bamff, Perthshire (25 August, p 42).
鈥� We said that of surviving gorillas, “roughly half are in the Virunga mountains and the rest of Uganda” (25 August, p 5). That should have read ““.
鈥� The fisheries minister of Iceland is , not Guofinnsson (1 September, p 7).
鈥� Apologies to readers whose emails to letters@newscientist.com bounced from 1 to 3 September. The megabyte-a-minute of junk jamming the inbox at the time has now abated.
Bug, not beetle
It was certainly unfair of Linnaeus to insult his erstwhile colleague Daniel Rolander by naming an insect Aphanus rolandri 鈥� Aphanus being Greek for ignoble and obscure (4 August, p 41).
Unfortunately, you refer to it as a beetle.
The insect in question is a heteropterous bug belonging to the Pyrrhocoridae.
Soft landing
In your report on artificial fingers you say “the software gauges how much downwards force the material absorbs by comparing the force applied by the finger with the force felt by the platform. Softer materials absorb more force” (4 August, p 23).
Perhaps you would like to explain how this is consistent with Newton’s third law of motion?
I look forward to breaking all world weightlifting records by using a suitably soft, force-absorbing material between my hands and the bar.
Of course, I would be careful to place the force-absorbing material the right way round!
鈥� Oops. That should have been “Softer materials show different rates of change of forces.”
Examine this symbol
Lawrence Krauss raises the issue of the scarlet A for atheists (25 August, p 21). I agree that there are several reasons why it doesn’t make a good symbol: not only is it ambiguous, but the specificity of its colour and typography make it difficult to execute in vernacular media.
On my blog, Effing the Ineffable (), I propose an unambiguous alternative to symbolise all kinds of rationalist world views, not just atheism 鈥� which defines us by what we are not, rather than by what we are.
The proposed symbol is quick and simple to execute in any medium from graffiti to monumental masonry to, yes, T-shirts. It comprises a circle atop a vertical line, and depicts a simple magnifying glass 鈥� the most basic tool of rational, scientific enquiry.
It requires no graphic skill to draw and can be executed in any medium, colour or graphic style. It also has the advantage of being sufficiently obscure to require explanation on first acquaintance, making it useful both as a sign for clandestine meetings and as a graphic that gives its wearer an opportunity to expound their views to the curious 鈥� much like the Christian fish.
Food stuffed
Your interview with Andrew Wadge, chief scientist of the UK Food Standards Agency, contrasts an example of the laudable “traffic lights” food labelling scheme proposed by the FSA with the labelling scheme adopted by Tesco supermarket in the case of its 400-gram cheese and bacon quiche (1 September, p 56).
The Tesco example shown correctly quotes the number of calories and the weight in grams of sugar, fat, saturates and salt contained in 100 grams of the quiche. It shows these amounts translated into percentages “of your guideline daily amount”.
But might not shoppers confuse the phrase “guideline daily amount” with a “recommended daily amount”?
That would result in them believing, in this example, that the recommended daily intake of salt is 6 grams 鈥� whereas 6 grams of salt is actually the daily maximum intake.
By the same token, some shoppers may conclude that the recommended daily intake of sugar is 80 grams!
As a 69-year-old with hypertension, I am appalled at how manufacturers load foodstuffs with salt, sugar and saturated fats. I am equally appalled at the abysmal failure of successive UK governments to compel food manufacturers to put the nation’s health before profit.
Science friction
You write “Rebecca Goldstein has received numerous awards for fiction and scholarship” (25 August, p 46) Here is one more: the Blind Spot Award. In her entire article on science in fiction she never once mentions science fiction.
Perhaps she feels that “literary fiction” is what she writes. I guess we science fiction writers just aren’t literary.
Spooks from space
Before evaluating the havoc wrought on cosmology by the observational clout of spontaneously emerging “Boltzmann brains”, perhaps one ought to evaluate the quality of such brains (18 August, p 26).
Human brains have been selected through Darwinian processes to observe the universe consistently and usefully 鈥� and so, presumably, have alien brains.
Not so these quantum fluctuations. I wonder what proportion of Boltzmann brains will be blind, preoccupied, permanently asleep, hopelessly psychotic, or just plain stupid.
I don’t see why there is all the fuss about Boltzmann brains. So they overthrow the assumption that we are typical observers of the universe. But we already know that we aren’t typical observers because, to borrow from J. B. S. Haldane, the typical observer, on this planet at least, is a .
It is quite possible that most life in the cosmos lives in oceans beneath the surface of icy moons, or in clouds of cosmic dust, which would make us even less typical. But none of this stops us from speculating about the nature of the universe: we merely have to work within our constraints.
Using our existence to “prove” that the universe must self-destruct before any Boltzmann brains can appear or, if that doesn’t work, that “our” infinity of observers must outnumber “theirs”, is surely taking the anthropic principle to ridiculous, unnecessary lengths.
Wellington, New Zealand
Why should the laws of physics care about the relative abundances of different kinds of observers in the universe? The argument that the universe must somehow intervene in order to preserve the “typicalness” of the human experience is the exact opposite of the Copernican principle that our position in the universe is not special. It presumes that our experience must somehow be privileged beyond all others in the universe.
Clearly, I am missing something here, but I can only assume, based on careful observation of the article in question, that my confusion is typical of other readers. Doubtless the universe will somehow conspire to ensure that this remains the case.
鈥� Regarding typicality, the assumption is not that we are privileged in some way, but rather the opposite. It is that what we see should be in some sense representative of the universe at large, by the laws of probability. If what we see were atypical, then this would be a threat not to any sense of superiority, but to our generalisations about the structure of the universe.
Rebound rejoinder
There was logic in Sadie Williams’s comment that energy conservation may not reduce carbon dioxide emissions (18 August, p 18). It is true that funds saved through saving energy will be put to new uses, but this is a problem only if the energy expended on those new uses is powered by fossil fuels.
The key to reaping an environmental net benefit from energy conservation is to use renewables. Using wind, solar, hydro, tidal, wave and geothermal energy 鈥� combined with energy efficiency and conservation measures 鈥� will result in genuine green gains. Take a look at the report at , for example.
Flexi-laws framed
Correspondents looking askance at Paul Davies’s proposal of flexi-laws of physics (30 June, p 30) perhaps find it unsettling to consider that the objective reality of physical laws is not in their “are”, but in their “would be”. Thinking about the reality of physical laws as processes rather than products is another way of grasping Davies’s point. The great American philosopher, mathematician and scientist Charles Saunders Peirce (1839-1914) “got it” but remains largely unrecognised.
of the University of Toronto has noted: “Peirce’s view does not lend itself to snappy summaries”, but time taken attending to his “architectonic system” should provide blueprints for finding objective meaning that is intelligible. Against this background, Davies’s hypothesis is anything but outlandish.
Population pressure
It is certainly time to bring discussion of population growth out of the shadows, as William Laurance does (1 September, p 23). He says that educating women is the single most important action needed. We would argue that, while education is absolutely critical, it needs to go hand in hand with the provision of adequate and non-coercive family planning and reproductive health services.
While the was ground-breaking in many ways, budgetary support for family planning services has since fallen away. As a result, many women cannot exercise their human right to choose to plan their families or, indeed, to space their children out.
This point is powerfully made in The Return of the Population Growth Factor 鈥� an evidence-based report by the UK’s , published in January 2007.
Corn-fed goodness
You report the findings of a paper presented at the American Chemical Society meeting, in which researchers at Rutgers University claim that fizzy drinks sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) have raised levels of carbonyl compounds that have been blamed for causing diabetic complications (1 September, p 7). These findings appear to diverge from a considerable body of published research which finds that HFCS is both safe and no different from other common sweeteners, such as sugar and honey.
Many parts of the world, including Australia, Mexico and Europe, have rising rates of obesity and diabetes despite having limited or no HFCS in their foods and beverages, which supports findings by the US Centers for Disease Control and the American Diabetes Association that the primary causes of diabetes are obesity, advancing age and heredity.
The US Food and Drug Administration has long recognised that HFCS is safe. In 1983, the FDA listed HFCS as “Generally Recognized as Safe” for use in food, and reaffirmed that ruling in 1996 after a thorough review.
Suspicious absence of siblings
Bob Holmes writes that a long period of coexistence “would certainly rule out the simplest scenario 鈥� that Homo habilis gradually evolved into Homo erectus” (11 August, p 12). Can he cite a single example, from any era, of one species evolving en bloc into another? This could only happen in a Lamarckian world, not the Darwinian one we actually inhabit.
A daughter species buds off from a parent one. From then on, it has its own history; it may or may not die off; it may or may not bud off new daughters of its own. Bushiness is the paradigm.
What has to be explained is not the ancestral coexistence of different hominid species, but its suspicious absence today. The simplest hypothesis is genocide.
Bike, not breakfast
Richard Lovett’s article perpetuates myths about the effects of breakfast on brain function (18 August, p 30).
Skeletal muscle (almost half of your total body mass) stores glycogen and takes up glucose from the blood to replenish those stores, which must be available as an instant energy source for fight or flight. This occurs through the anaerobic conversion to lactate until the circulation begins to deliver sufficient oxygen for the aerobic utilisation of both glucose and fatty acids. Insulin receptor sensitivity 鈥� and thus the rate of uptake of glucose from the blood 鈥� depends both on the state of training of the main muscle groups and on the timing of any recent muscular activity.
So parents who want their children to stay awake in class and perform to their true intellectual potential should let them eat what they like for breakfast, but insist that they walk, run or cycle to school at as brisk a pace as is safe. This way, the delivery of oxygen to the brain is optimised and an adequate supply of glucose for peak performance is assured.
Such behaviour will also help the child avoid obesity, diabetes and the early onset of hypertension.
What goes around…
I wonder why you considered it news that there was a USB turntable being released that will enable you to turn records into MP3 files (4 August, p 23). I already own one, the Numark TT USB. According to Amazon.com, it has been available since 2001. There are at least three other makes that I know of.
Music enthusiasts have been doing this for many years, using the analogue audio input sockets in sound cards built into nearly all PCs since the early 1990s. High fidelity is easily achievable with a good quality card, and this method doesn’t cost 拢75.
鈥� These options are possible, but when the input is analogue the gain levels have to be manually set or left to AGC (automatic gain control), which changes the dynamic range. Furthermore, hi-fi buffs who have spent 拢1000 on a turntable 鈥� such as a Linn 鈥� do not want to pipe the signal through a comparatively lo-fi computer microphone input and sound card or a budget pre-amplifier. The new conversion box should do the signal much better justice while being more user friendly.
Spooks from space
Any “Boltzmann brain” is likely to be suicidally depressed, popping into existence billions of light years from anything else (18 August, p 26). The odds on finding another intelligence nearby are mind-bogglingly minuscule: our “brain” is much more likely to encounter Boltzmann toasters, Boltzmann Elvis detectors or, if really lucky, a Boltzmann Shakespeare sonnet. Pretty depressing really.
Besides, what exactly are we supposed to fear about being outnumbered by these absurdities? The toasters, at least, could be useful.
Since most of the mass of the universe is different from the mass that makes up people, why would it be surprising that a typical observer would be different from us? We represent the universe in one way, while other observers represent the universe in other ways. Perhaps all that is needed is for these representations to be combined in a consistent way.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, US