Hidden threat
Mike Huckabee might appeal directly to the evangelical right wing of the US Republican Party (12 January, p 3), but on a national scale he is way behind John McCain in the polls and it is McCain who is by far the biggest hidden threat to scientific fact and education in the US. McCain wants “intelligent design” taught in schools alongside evolution, and in February 2007 he at the Discovery Institute, which promotes ID.
For all that Mike Huckabee’s religious beliefs are grounds for concern 鈥� considering that he could lead the most powerful country in the world without understanding how that world actually works 鈥� he at least is honest enough to admit them. John McCain seems to change his mind on science facts as quickly as the polls suggest he should, and to try to hide his beliefs from the more secular or mainstream majority of voters.
Gets whose goat?
I read with some surprise that for us Scandinavians the straw goat is the equivalent of Santa’s reindeer (22/29 December 2007, p 38). As a Norwegian I have no relation to said goat whatsoever. I understand from the article that it is popular in Sweden. What people believe in Denmark is not revealed. Apparently you have vague ideas about geography and consider all Scandinavian countries to be the same.
All shall have nouns
The views of the physicist Niels Bohr on language have a lot to answer for, not least David Peat’s article about the language of physics (5 January, p 42). If European languages really consisted only of sentences like “the cat chases the mouse”, communication would indeed be impoverished. But we can produce sentences like “courage is connected more with a social situation than with intrinsic characteristics”, where none of the terms is very well defined and only a book-length discussion can bring out all the nuances.
And so, of course, to Native American languages, a favourite resort for woolly analogies. Since the Algonquin languages have nouns, it is hard to see how their world is not, at least to some extent, divided up into classes. In fact, it is clearly impossible to have a language without some sort of noun, however this is implemented. Peat quotes an Algonquin two-word phrase (without specifying which of the 27 or more Algonquian languages he is talking about) and then says that some 18th-century dictionary has a distorted translation. But he is perfectly capable of giving a detailed gloss on this phrase.
Languages are infinitely flexible and extensible. Hundreds of new words are added to English every year. Of course the language as it exists now is somewhat restricting 鈥� but we have no difficulty in breaking out and defining new concepts as we need them.
Smoking gun
You imply that the misuse of science by anti-smokers is a rare and recent phenomenon (10 November 2007, p 8). It is neither.
In 1950 Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill published the results of a which showed an association between smoking and lung cancer. It also showed that men who inhaled were less likely to develop lung cancer than men who did not. As the statistician Ronald Aylmer Fisher said at the time: “Even equality [of likelihood] would be a fair knock-out for the theory that smoke in the lung causes cancer.”
Surprising though this result may have been, far more so was the response of Doll and Hill. When they began their 1951 study, known as the , the question about inhaling was deleted from the questionnaires sent to their subjects. That was bad and, indeed, improper science.
One-world theory
Hugh Everett’s many-worlds view of quantum mechanics has implications for the fate of the universe (24 November 2007, p 52). Suppose there is a 90 per cent probability that within the next hour the “false vacuum” containing our universe will decay into a zero-energy ground state containing no material universe. This implies that 9 out of 10 parallel universes splitting at this point will contain a zero-energy vacuum, and that 1 in 10 will contain a universe closely resembling ours.
Unless there is a 100 per cent certainty that our universe will be annihilated at the end of some finite period there will always be some parallel “Everett worlds” in which our universe still exists.
Lucid rules
Jeff Warren attributes “informal laws” to lucid dreams (22/29 December 2007, p 73). I have often wondered to what extent the laws of physics are respected in these highly realistic dream states.
The last time I had a lucid dream I inspected my image in a mirror, and found it to be inverted in the familiar manner. My ambition is to perform Galileo’s experiment on falling dream objects. Perhaps one of your readers has already done this.
Drug not banned
Debora MacKenzie wrote that the anti-smoking aid bupropion is banned for use by athletes “on the day of competition, but it can be used during training” (12 January, p 12). To clarify, bupropion is not a banned substance at any time 鈥� whether during or out of competition. It has been placed on a list of substances being monitored during competition by a number of anti-doping laboratories around the world so that more information about its use and potential abuse may be obtained. At this time, there is no restriction on the use of bupropion by athletes.
Misleading maths
Although your report of our work on software which seems to encourage students to focus on the wrong aspects of scientific problems (5 January, p 22) quotes our results correctly, the website headline “Physics tool makes students miss the point” yields a spin that we are afraid may make readers draw an incorrect inference. Our title makes a more balanced, if less dramatic, claim: “Symbolic manipulators affect mathematical mindsets.”
Students using calculators may not to bother to think about numbers and draw inappropriate, or even nonsensical, conclusions; but we do not advocate taking calculators away from our students. Rather, as is cited in the references of our paper, research shows that students who have appropriate instruction in the use of calculators develop an improved number sense.
We expect that the use of a symbolic manipulator 鈥� with appropriate instruction 鈥� could result in students “getting the point” more effectively than working manually. We hope to discover what such “appropriate instruction” means and hope that other researchers will also begin to explore these issues. We do not mean to discourage teachers from using symbolic manipulators with their students; rather, we mean to encourage them to use these tools thoughtfully and carefully.
Beast bugging
Your recent article about attaching cameras to animals to monitor their behaviour (19 January, p 22) got me thinking about the problem of the weight of the devices. Could this be avoided by distributing them throughout, say, a flock of birds? Perhaps one bird could carry a camera and low-power transmitter, with another carrying a receiver and storage device. This might mean that no individual bird has to carry anything excessively heavy.
Spy plane problems
As a retired pilot I was intrigued by the Pentagon’s plans to recharge micro air vehicles (MAVs) from power lines (5 January, p 22). I fear that one factor may have been overlooked.
The American military has a well-known propensity to destroy absolutely everything within a wide area of a combat zone, so it is highly unlikely that there would be any functioning power lines from which the MAVs could refuel. Or would engineers be immediately deployed to replace the pylons and restore power?
About 55 years ago I warned the authorities that children were using the local public telephone without paying, by tapping out phone numbers on the flap on which the handset rested. The reply was that, if caught, they could be charged only with “stealing electricity property of the Postmaster General”.
I wonder whether a similar fate might befall those who operate the Pentagon spy plane?
Tamworth, Staffordshire, UK
Traffic pickle
You report research at Harvard University finding a correlation between childhood learning difficulties and road traffic fumes (5 January, p 13). To compound the matter, the tar used in blacktop roads could also be a source of health problems. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are usually present in these tars, as are numerous other toxic compounds, and as the road surface wears they will be distributed in the ensuing dust.
Intuitively, one could expect that the road wear rate will be highest where the density of traffic fumes is highest.
Reclaim the streets
If I understand him rightly, A. C. Grayling says that closing off areas of cities to cars might lead to urban decay because there is evidence of links between inaccessibility and decay (12 January, p 48). But most people do not travel around central London by car at all, and access on foot or by bicycle is improved when traffic is removed. Even motorists normally expect to park some distance from their destination and reach it on foot.
If we are to move to a low-carbon economy, we need to make motoring a minority means of access in all urban areas, in which case my argument above will be equally applicable everywhere. To use Grayling’s analogy, the way to avoid a “heart attack” in London’s traffic is to reduce the “blood pressure” in terms of the number of vehicles on the streets.
If congestion charging seems to be aimed at revenue-raising, that is partly a result of the inability of local authorities in the UK to raise revenue in ways that aren’t perceived as damaging.
In other words, there is a lack of “fiscal accountability”, which the late Jane Jacobs in her last book Dark Age Ahead described as one of the main signs of decay in western society.
Grayling accepts that the congestion charge has greatly reduced traffic in central London, and then complains that road space has been reduced, side roads closed off and the red phases of traffic signals for vehicles lengthened.
To pedestrians, the lifeblood of London, these are all blessings.
Yodel-ay-Euskara!
Jennifer Ouelette suggests that Marco Polo introduced yodelling to Europe from Tibet (22/29 December 2007, p 58). But in the 1959 movie Thunder in the Sun a group of Basques from the French Pyrenees make their way to California in the 19th century. The film showed the peculiar traditions of the Basques 鈥� a people reputed to have inhabited Europe before the Celts. Among these was their long-distance communication through a form of yodelling, including a remarkable, unearthly sounding war cry when they clashed with others.
The Basques’ long isolation and cultural uniqueness 鈥� their language, Euskara, is non-Indo-European, for example 鈥� suggests their custom of yodelling long preceded Marco Polo’s time.
Perhaps some food for thought for “yodellology” research?
Moths of war
Evolution from a single-celled ancestor to all the current forms of life requires not merely “changes in gene frequency” (8 December 2007, p 46) but the spontaneous generation of qualitatively new information coded in new genes at countless points along numerous lines of development. Simply changing gene frequency is selective breeding, not evolution.
In the case of the peppered moth, no qualitatively new genetic data comes into being with the change of the population from predominantly peppered specimens to predominantly melanic ones, or vice versa. Thus, while it is indeed survival of the fittest in action, it is patently not evolution in action 鈥� yet you tell us it is “the textbook example of evolution in action” and “the prime example of Darwinian evolution in action”. No wonder creationists find the case for evolution questionable.
鈥� The key here is “in action”. The rise and fall of industrial melanism in the peppered moth is observable. Hence “the prime example of Darwinian evolution in action”. If we could observe the spontaneous generation of new information (and the theory includes mechanisms to generate this, such as gene duplication) and its selection, that would be a better example of evolution in action. But it’s a rare event and you’d have to be incredibly lucky to observe it happening. We can, of course, look at genomes and see where and when it has happened in the past, but that is not evolution seen in action.
Spellchucker
The best spellchecker is Google. It is virtually immune to the “Cupertino effect” you describe (1 December 2007, p 62). Google has access to probably every word in all major languages and, more significantly, it can evaluate spellings in context.
Type a phrase into the Google search page with one or more misspellings and you will usually get one correct suggestion, presented as “Did you mean…?”. This contrasts with the list of mostly incorrect suggestions provided by traditional spellcheckers, including Google’s own one in Gmail. Maybe the contextual spelling ability of the Google/internet juxtaposition is a preview of the way in which machine sentience will emerge inadvertently.
Tata, cars
New 杏吧原创 readers might be aware of the new Indian car, the Tata Nano, which will sell in India for the equivalent of 拢1300 and has a claimed fuel consumption of 5 litres per 100 kilometres or better. The car is expected to sell by the million to India’s present cycle and motorcycle users.
It lays bare the myth that improving vehicle fuel consumption reduces fuel consumed and carbon dioxide emissions. This cheap to buy and cheap to run car will enable millions who were previously either non-polluting cyclists or low-pollution motorcyclists onto the first rung of car ownership and help increase India’s overall CO2 emissions.
For the record
鈥� The vaquita (Phocoena sinus) is a porpoise endemic to the Gulf of California (Sea of Cortes), and not to the Gulf of Mexico, as we suggested (22/29 December 2007, p 19).
鈥� A. C. Grayling’s comment on the fate of conceptions should have read: “an estimated quarter of all pregnancies spontaneously terminate before the sixth week… overall about one in five recognised pregnancies spontaneously terminate before 20 weeks” (22/29 December 2007, p 76).
鈥� We said a victim of hurricane Katrina was suing for $3 thousand billion (19 January, p 21) but the claim is in fact for $3 quadrillion ($3 脳 1015).
鈥� The correct reference for the paper describing Carlo Rovelli’s method of compressing multiple quantum events into a single event describable without reference to time is (19 January, p 26).
鈥� Ardaseer Cursetjee was the first Indian citizen to be elected to the Royal Society of London, not Srinivasa Ramanujan as we said (15 December 2007, p 46).
鈥� We mistakenly implied that New South Wales and Queensland are on the west coast of Australia (22/29 December 2007, p 10).
鈥� The definition we gave for the word “w00t” (22/29 December 2007, p 29) was a backronym, meaning that the phrase was invented after the alleged abbreviation: w00t is probably a random interjection.