All for me
I can’t understand all those naive professors havering over whether the universe has a purpose when it’s all so obvious.
The sole goal and culmination of the big bang, inflation, stellar formation and everything else is the creation of a life-support system for me 鈥� the apogee and final purpose of creation and evolution. When I die it will all cease to exist.
It can be no coincidence that wherever I stand is astride the centre of the surface of the world.
Nor can it be mere happenstance that the whole of the visible universe is centred exactly between my eyeballs.
For the record
鈥� In the letter from Don Sims (20 October, p 26), the sentence “Sensitivity to the two antibiotics commonly used (metronidazole and vancomycin) is rare…” should have begun with “Resistance”, not “Sensitivity”.
Cutting up books
Your history of consumer advocate Frederick Accum may be mistaken in suggesting that in 1820 he tore pages from Nicholson’s Journal to save wasting time on note-taking (20 October, p 60). As a scientist, he may have been more concerned with accuracy and the dangers of transcription. Charles Darwin was, I believe, another tearer-upper of books. I research at the UK’s National Archives and it regularly amazes me to see documents being transcribed in longhand when, at the next desk, a document is being recorded with a digital camera.
Matthew effect
In the article on naming injustices in the scientific community (6 October, p 60), there is mention of the Matthew effect. Derived from a biblical quote, it is a particular type of unfairness in which eminence is rewarded with greater eminence, at the expense of the less well known.
The author overlooks the irony that the Matthew effect may be an example of itself. Many biblical scholars dispute whether St Matthew’s gospel was actually written by Matthew the apostle, suggesting instead that it was written by an unremembered 1st-century Christian who lacked an apostle’s cachet.
Is there a name for a term which exemplifies the feature it describes?
Free trademark
Could it be that the Famous Web Search Engine knows more about web searching than does Feedback, who is mystified at its suggestion that “free” is a trademark (22 September)? In France we have the large internet provider and any audio server fronted by “free” would, around here, be assumed to be theirs.
鈥� We searched for UK, EU and world trademarks at , but free.fr didn’t show.
Reverse illusion
You say that White’s illusion makes the grey stripes on a black line look darker, and on a white line look lighter (6 October, p 31). I experienced the opposite effect with the example given: the grey stripes on the black lines look lighter than the ones on the white lines. Do I have unusual vision in some way?
鈥� Sorry, we inverted our description. You see what everyone else sees: the grey stripes look lighter when they are within the black line.
Why to boldly go
“We have yet to set up home on another world,” you write (6 October, p 6). And we likely won’t, at least for 100 years or so. Ask yourself: “What will ever be produced on Mars and sold for a profit on Earth?” Nothing, or anyway not for a long, long time.
But space is still where we’ll end up, because rather than expending “a large share of global financial and technical resources to ensure the genetic survival of a few human specimens” (6 October, p 26) it will allow us to make use of resources not available here on Earth. There will be unlimited free energy, 24 hours a day; no gravity, reducing the requirement for structural mass by 90 per cent; and unlimited materials, already broken up into chunks, provided by near Earth objects.
Expanding into space will grow the Gross World Product by orders of magnitude and provide resources for a depleted Earth. Since humankind will create the environments to live in, there will be no indigenous populations to decimate. Not that there has been a huge outcry from the Martians so far…
Multiple selves
I’m no quantum physicist, but David Papineau’s interpretation of the multiverse model seems designed to mess with our minds (22 September, p 7). We subjectively experience only one world, so why worry about events in parallel worlds?
If I narrowly avoid smashing my car into another one full of passengers, I should still feel lucky to have avoided the collision rather than, as Papineau suggests, worry about the people I may have crashed into and killed in another world. Similarly, the excitement at watching my football team win is not diminished by the knowledge that another self was watching them lose in another world 鈥� a different “self” was disappointed by their loss 鈥� nor would it be any consolation if I saw them lose to know that they won in a different world, and I think the players would agree. My other “selves” may as well be different people entirely since I cannot tap into their experience any more than I could read someone else’s mind.
Constant anxiety about “what if” has been driving us crazy for millennia. Knowledge that we may be living in a multiverse can’t make it any worse.
Toxic colonialism
The new-found enthusiasm for using DDT against malarial mosquitoes (6 October, p 58) overlooks some crucial details. While the decision was made in the comfortable offices of the World Health Organization in Geneva, there will be no spraying of Swiss bedroom walls. DDT has been banned in Switzerland for more than 35 years, and for good reasons.
The bedroom walls that the WHO has in mind for DDT spraying are those of the poorest Africans. These are people with little money, literacy, information or power, and therefore unpromising candidates as a source of profit for pharmaceutical companies.
It is an unfortunate irony that this toxicological colonialism comes on the centenary of Rachel Carson’s birth. The enthusiasm for this poison following the second world war has left us with a personal DDT load. Over the past half century, none of the problems of DDT has been resolved. It remains a broad-spectrum poison, persistent and bio-accumulative 鈥� and it is still cheap to manufacture and highly profitable.
DDT treatment of a child’s bedroom wall is effective for six months, but the toxic legacy in soil, groundwater, food, homes 鈥� and the child 鈥� lasts a lifetime. DDT is a cheap-and-dirty option that would never fly in Europe or the US, but is being foisted upon the unsuspecting, far-away poor.
Decompression death
Anna Gosline’s article about different ways to die mentioned explosive decompression (13 October, p 57) but did not talk about the more gentle death from the slow loss of air pressure, or a failure of oxygen supply. Trainee pilots are shown how oxygen deprivation can creep up on them unnoticed. One moment they appear fully aware 鈥� capable of mental arithmetic or coherent speech 鈥� and the next they are unconscious. Similar effects can be obtained by breathing pure nitrogen.
As an undergraduate I watched such an experiment performed on a classmate. The reason it goes unnoticed by the victim is that the stimulus to breathe is caused by levels of CO2 in the bloodstream. Since the victim is exhaling normally, there is no CO2 build-up, so there is no gasping for breath.
This could provide a humane and cheap way to perform executions. The old US gas chambers used poisons such as cyanide, which cause respiratory distress to the condemned prisoner. A simple design change could flood the sealed chamber with pure nitrogen gas. Furthermore, the chamber would be safe to enter after a few minutes of ventilation.
It’s a gruesome topic, but if I were condemned to execution and had a choice, this is what I would pick.
Trans-what-ism?
In your article on “transhumanism”, Marvin Minksy is quoted as saying that scientists shouldn’t have any ethical responsibility for their inventions and should do whatever they like (13 October, p 46). This appalling attitude is passed on without comment, yet in the same issue (p 4) we hear about the manufacturers of certain “alternative” treatments being taken to task for their lack of social responsibility.
As a medical doctor and Buddhist, I have spent many hours contemplating death, ageing and the issue of humanity’s suffering, and I am firmly of the opinion that the transhumanist movement is engaging in not only the most dangerous exercise in history, but also the most stupid. Should we not be coming to terms with the inevitability of death and engaging with this reality?
Stretched light
In your article on the true nature of black holes, Lawrence Krauss and others suggest that event horizons may not exist around black holes (6 October, p 36).
Although I am just a “normal” physicist, not an astronomer, I know that light from an object falling into a black hole should become increasingly “stretched out” 鈥� red-shifted 鈥� and diminish in intensity (from the perspective of an outside observer), as the object approaches the black hole.
So even if there is no “real” event horizon, this won’t matter since infalling objects would still be invisible to anyone watching.
Gay bomb
Feedback asked what happened to the US air force’s Ig Nobel-winning “gay bomb” proposal after it was put forward in 1994 (13 October).
The Pentagon has played down the story ever since New 杏吧原创 covered it on 15 January 2005. One spokesman is quoted saying it was “” and another claimed in 2005 that it was never considered “for “.
These claims sit awkwardly with the known facts.
In 2000 鈥� six years after the idea was proposed 鈥� the document describing the “gay bomb” was included in a CD-ROM produced by the Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, which was distributed to military and government agencies to encourage new projects.
In 2001, the proposal was one of a number which the JNLWD put forward for assessment by a scientific panel at the National Academy of Sciences.
No information has been released suggesting that the proposal was taken any further. However, aphrodisiacs would fall under the US military’s broad new definition of a ““, for “an antipersonnel chemical that leaves the victim awake and mobile but without the will or ability to meet military objectives or carry out criminal activity”.
It seems there is considerable classified research in this area.