One in the eye
Feedback’s prediction of the consequences of the widespread use of iris recognition at UK airports (29 March) seems unnecessarily gloomy.
Since we do not actually need airports in order to stay alive, it is unlikely to lead to “the country grinding to a halt”. On the contrary, it might actually help save the planet if the frustrating wait for the computer to recognise them, followed by transfer to the “low-tech” passport queue, leads people to seek alternative modes of transport or re-evaluate the need for their journey. This applies especially to those scientists who currently think nothing of jetting around the world to conferences several times a year.
So yes, let’s have iris recognition 鈥� and the sooner the better.
Vowel play
The did not involve the shortening or the forward movement of vowels, as Michael Erard says (29 March, p 28). Only the long vowels shifted 鈥� upwards 鈥� or became diphthongs (two vowels closely associated that function as a single vowel). For example, when “ee” shifted to “aye” it did not shorten, but became a diphthong. And when “oh” shifted to “oo”, it was not moving towards the front of the mouth, but upwards. Note that the tongue is higher in the mouth when pronouncing “oo” than it is when pronouncing “oh”. Note, also, that “oo” also shifted, becoming the diphthong “au” as in “house”.
Michael Erard writes:
鈥� Yes, the great vowel shift turned long vowels into dipthongs. Due to an editing error, we omitted to say that vowel sounds shifted upward in the mouth as well as forward. Incidentally, we have this vowel shift to thank for some of the difficulties of English spelling, since some letters were assigned before the vowels changed.
From Ann Thulin
Your cover story “English as she will be spoke” was of interest to me, having recently become aware of how chat, letters and comments appearing on the web are written in a foreign language. They come from the land of text messaging. How is it possible that writer Michael Erard failed to mention this alarming fountain of change, which really does not match the old patterns of change he reported so well in the article.
Angelholm, Sweden
From Michael Vaughan-Rees, International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language
Erard lists a number of reasons why non-native speakers (NNSs) of English may be more at ease conversing with other NNSs than with native speakers (NSs). To these, he should add the simple fact that when NSs talk together, especially in informal settings, they talk fast.
And in order to do so a number of predictable things happen. For example, sounds may disappear 鈥� “las(t) night” and “ban(d) stand”. Or they may change 鈥� “10 boys and 10 girls” becomes “tem boys and teng girls”. Or they may merge 鈥� consider “did you” and “would you”, and so on.
Most bafflingly to the ears of NNSs, a consonant may leap from the end of one word to attach itself to the vowel at the start of the following stressed word, so that there may be no difference between “a name” and “an aim”. This also happens the other way round, which explains why the /n/ sound in German “Natter” and French “naperon” became attached to the indefinite article in English: “an adder” and “an apron”).
Even we NSs can become confused about what happens at word boundaries 鈥� Jimi Hendrix’s “Excuse me, while I kiss the sky” famously misheard as “…while I kiss this guy”. So, if we don’t want to frighten off the vast majority of speakers of English in the world, the lesson is to take it slow and easy.
Butlers Cross, Buckinghamshire, UK
Unnecessary need
Deborah Keith of Syngenta quickly reveals a key reason why multinational corporations like Syngenta are by their nature ill-equipped to contribute usefully to discussions of global agriculture and food security (5 April, p 17). She refers, without comment, to “the increased demand for meat that comes with rising incomes”. It is understandable that such a company will see everything in terms of meeting (and implicitly encouraging) a need, but the need itself must be called into question. No company with a vested interest in promoting such needs is likely to offer arguments as to why those needs might be insupportable, or suggest strategies for reducing them.
Meat, for example, and particularly red meat, is not something that humans need in any quantity at all, especially in the developed world where so many other dietary options are available. Its consumption is 鈥� as Keith acknowledges 鈥� mostly symbolic of affluence and status. It is a luxury the planet can no longer afford.
It will be a formidable challenge to change cultural assumptions and aspirations to acknowledge this, but change they must. Return that grain now committed to feeding animals to its best application 鈥� as food for people 鈥� and there would be more than enough for everyone and no need for genetically modified contrivances.
Rather than merely seeking to meet increased “needs” of this kind 鈥� an equation that can never balance 鈥� we need scientists, and communities at large, to challenge the needs themselves. If companies such as Syngenta are incapable of doing that, as Keith’s arguments demonstrate, those discussions are much better off without them.
Tricky marketing
I was slightly disturbed by the closing words of Duncan Graham-Rowe’s article on installing mobile phone base stations in people’s homes (8 March, p 25). Having pointed out that there is a “perceived risk to health from placing yet another source of microwaves in the home”, the article goes on to quote Ian Fogg:” ‘It’s a touchy subject,’ he says. ‘I think it’s going to need very careful marketing’.”
I would hope that researchers care more about establishing a sound basis for health and safety decisions than for any technology company’s “marketing”.
Over the coals
Your article on carbon capture and storage (CCS) is timely but may leave your readers with an unduly negative view of the costs involved, the status of the technologies and the risks of carbon dioxide leaking from appropriately managed geological formations (29 March, p 36).
Fred Pearce asks “What would this hugely costly undertaking achieve?” and suggests it is all too expensive. He ignores the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which suggested in 2005 that CCS could achieve 55 per cent of the global mitigation effort while reducing costs by 30 per cent or more compared with a non-CCS solution; the European Commission, which found in 2008 that the costs of meeting its climate change commitments to 2030 will be 40 per cent higher, at 鈧�60 billion ($95 billion), if CCS is not included; and the Pew Center on Climate Change, which concluded in 2007 that building 30 CCS demonstration projects for $30 billion would save the US $80 to $100 billion in subsequent mitigation costs. This tranche of CCS demonstration projects will be expensive, but in the medium term they will bring considerable savings to society.
Pearce may ask what CCS achieves, but scientists, industry and governments around the world are working on this issue precisely because they know that CCS will be indispensable in meeting the challenge of climate change.
From Chris Davies
It was good to see a rational criticism of CCS, but disappointing that the risk of a carbon dioxide outgassing like the one that , Cameroon, in August 1986 was so understated.
In the UK alone, if CO2 is to be sequestered at the rate it was produced in power stations in 2006, sites will need to be found to store twice the amount of CO2 that bubbled from Lake Nyos 鈥� every week. Worldwide, the weekly sequestration rate forecast by Pearce is 500 times the Lake Nyos emission. Emissions forecasts by the UK’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology already assume that CCS will be used. Since the only thing CO2 can do is stay where it is put or leak, it seems to me that sooner or later leakage will lead to a CO2 eruption.
Nuclear waste seems safe as houses compared with CCS. Radioactivity declines over time and if it escapes it is likely to do so slowly and to disperse before it reaches lethal levels. Is there a special dispensation for CCS that allows this sort of waste dump to be created without a public inquiry?
Cambridge, UK
From Geoff Richardson
The article discusses the scrubbing of CO2 from the flue gases of coal-fired power stations and sequestration of the CO2 underground.
A better method of sequestering the CO2 may be by utilising it to form weak carbonic acid and storing it in shallow ponds 鈥� which may have to be covered with translucent film 鈥� and growing algae in them which would use the carbon, sunlight and photosynthesis to produce carbohydrate to feed animals or even people.
It’s not a new idea; J B S Haldane proposed something similar in 1923.
Glen Iris, Victoria, Australia
We will survive!
Debora MacKenzie’s two pieces, “The end of civilisation” and “Are we doomed?” (5 April, p 28 and p 32), overstate the problems of our complex civilisations.
We have recently seen several collapses of complex national civilisations due to governmental problems, notably Russia and Yugoslavia. We have also seen the collapse of less technologically complex national civilisations: parts of Somalia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Zimbabwe. The results are that many die and there are reductions in quality of life, and in life expectancy. In the long run, the nations involved see these events as mere hiccups in national history. Contrast these with local collapses due to hurricanes, floods or droughts and the like, which are treated as problems which can be overcome in a few months or years.
If our complex global civilisation should collapse, the human race will simply pick itself up, dust itself off and start all over again. This may take decades, but it will happen.
From Bryn Glover
These articles on the collapse of civilisations echo most gratifyingly my long-held theory of “inverse differential rewards”. Put simply: consider a short, random list of human occupations 鈥� two dozen or so, say 鈥� ranging from farm labourers, sewage operatives and hospital cleaners to supermodels, investment bankers and famous sportspeople, not to mention MacKenzie’s own truck drivers. Now arrange these under two different criteria. In list one, arrange the people in order of the reward paid to them by society or, as MacKenzie neatly puts it, in order of the number of joules each is responsible for consuming. That’s the easy list.
The second, trickier, criterion requires ranking in order of “usefulness”, which is just about as subjective a decision as one could hope for. But consider it this way: if the occupation in question suddenly and completely ceased to exist, how long would it take for the rest of us to decide it was necessary to reinvent it? In the case of some, the answer could well be as little as a few hours. In the case of others, we may decide not to bother.
Thus arranged, it is my observation that these two lists can now be overlaid with very close correlation 鈥� provided, of course, that one of them is turned upside down first. I suggest that if our civilisation is to have any chance of long-term survival, then we must find a political way to reverse the very curious circumstance that those who contribute the most consume the least, while those who contribute the least consume the lion’s share. This is not a new notion, as a reading of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists will testify.
Cracoe, North Yorkshire, UK
From P. Siddall
The allegory of your “collapse of civilisation” cover illustration would have been completed by showing a major aggregates company mining the foot of the cliff on which the city is perched to make concrete for the buildings above.
St Neots, Cambridgeshire, UK
For the record
鈥� Our interview with Richard Stallman (12 April, p 42) referred to “compromised copyright”, a mishearing of “a compromise copyright system”.
鈥� Joseph Tainter is at Utah State University in Logan, not the University of Utah as stated in our articles on the collapse of civilisation (5 April, p 32).
Oracle tape
The Mundaneum, described by Paul Collins, tried to record all knowledge on index cards long before the internet made such massive cross-indexing a feasible endeavour (22 March, p 46).
I participated in a similarly overambitious project dealing with audio. As a graduate student in astronomy at Harvard University in the 1960s, I went to a Polaroid Corporation office every week for a while and attempted to record the answers to all conceivable questions about astronomy. It was a personal project of Edwin Land, the visionary founder of the company. The idea was that people would come into a booth, ask a question about astronomy and shortly thereafter be played a recorded answer, presumably coming automatically from some kind of machine.
Actually, my answers went onto reels of audio tape so that high-speed tape players could fast-forward to the appropriate places. The idea was that humans behind the scenes would grab the tapes from shelves and put them onto the machines. Clearly nothing came of the project, though I did earn a little pocket money to help me and my girlfriends of the time see nouvelle vague films around Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Occam's causality
So quantum randomness may not be random after all (22 March, p 28). Let’s apply Occam’s razor to this little debate. Which is more likely: that the cause-and-effect-based universe we observe is completely random at its basic level, or that there are cause-and-effect relationships that we currently cannot measure?
I know where my money is.