Giddy capital
Reading “The six trillion dollar men” (31 May, p 34), I thought I had mistakenly picked up Business Week rather than New 杏吧原创. It was very short on the kind of incisive, fact-based writing which is your hallmark and long on exposition, atmosphere and giddy optimism.
Also, it did not critique the venture capital model at all.
Oil prudence
You suggest rather unfairly that oil companies deliberately under-report their reserves and mislead the public (14 June, p 4). In fact, the definition of “proved reserves” has for many years been very tightly defined by the Society of Petroleum Engineers and the World Petroleum Congress, and accepted by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US for calculating a company’s assets.
Proved reserves are defined as those quantities that “geological and engineering information indicates with reasonable certainty can be recovered in the future from known reservoirs under existing conditions”.
Probabilistic addition of reserves within a portfolio is not permitted.
The “existing conditions” include current market prices, operating costs and (where applicable) future capital expenditure, taxes, royalties and production-sharing agreements.
Uneconomic oil, oil that will only break even if prices rise in future, and oil whose extraction depends on technology which is not currently employed in the immediate area must not be included. This conservatism is justified by a history of rash announcements by overenthusiastic exploration companies, but more importantly it provides a common baseline for an industry that is widespread geographically and diverse in its application of technologies.
As your report acknowledges, most companies use a range of measures for their internal accounting and for planning future developments. However, some of the risk factors bias the results in the same direction for all the projects in a portfolio. The current problems in the market for housing finance result from an assumption that the values of mortgages could be aggregated as if they were all statistically independent.
Gay abandon
I am worried by the tone of your editorial “It’s a queer life” (21 June, p 5). In this instance, biology has given us the desired result by demonstrating that sexual preference is hard-wired, and that it is therefore incorrect to claim it is “unnatural”. The research mentioned is interesting and surely of value. But if, however, we go on to use “naturalness” as the basis for our definition of what is and is not “right”, trouble lies ahead.
Suppose we never find a hard-wired biological cause for transgendered people. Would the lifestyle preference of this group then be open to endless criticism and repression?
Or suppose that we found evidence for the infamous hypothesis put forward by biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig Palmer that all men may be biologically hard-wired to rape. Would this demonstrate that rape is in fact every man’s right?
As evolutionary and other biological accounts become ever more prevalent in explaining social behaviour, the naturalistic fallacy is becoming a greater and greater problem.
From Graham Mounsey
You rightly expressed concern about the views of Iris Robinson, chair of the Northern Ireland Assembly Health Committee, who believes that homosexuality is not natural and should be treated by psychiatrists.
Equally concerning is the fact that her husband, Northern Ireland’s first minister Peter Robinson, recently appointed Sammy Wilson as his environment minister.
Asked in an Assembly debate to provide “a detailed, peer-reviewed paper in a respected scientific journal” that validates his climate change scepticism, Wilson declined because his evidence would take 10 minutes to present and “would bore the House stiff.”
According to the he went on to say, “it is feared that if we use wind power, seals or fish may get sucked into the turbines.”
Holywood, County Down, UK
Value added tact
Paul Clarke concludes his letter on conversion of cellulose waste into liquid fuel (14 June, p 20) by wondering if he is missing something. Well, yes, he is.
Sorry, but it is most briefly explainable in business-speak: each conversion “adds value”.
In ordinary language, this means the introduction of additional troughs, into which more directorial snouts can dip.
Let's not make a deity
I am surprised that your correspondents let Stuart Kauffman off so lightly (7 June, p 22). Surely a glaring flaw in his article (10 May, p 52) was the ambiguity of “creativity”.
Creativity in both science and the humanities is a consequence of individual reflection on experiences and sensations, past and present, as well as on the future. Creativity is deliberate and has objectives, such as love, communication, enlightenment, pleasure or money-making.
Natural selection is a random, purposeless process, which has by chance generated a biosphere which, rightly, seems marvellous to us humans. Equally, the abiotic environment we see around us, and which we so rightly find awe-inspiring, is the fortuitous product of energy fluxes. Creativity has not played and does not play any part.
Kauffman ascribing “ceaseless creativity” or “lawless creativity” to such natural processes adds nothing but a touch of mysticism. It is like ascribing a principle of “aquosity” to explain the nature of water, to recycle the Victorian biologist T. H. Huxley’s put-down of vitalism.
Bias bias
I was one of the people interviewed for the UK’s Institute of Physics report on “gender friendliness” mentioned by Elizabeth Pollitzer (14 June, p 20). The experience suggested to me that the panel had firm, preconceived views about what makes a department “male-friendly” or “female-friendly”, based on out-of-date stereotypes.
They assumed that a member of staff wanting to take time off to meet children from school, or to look after a sick family member, would be female. But when I was a head of department, I received requests for such absences proportionately more from men than from women.
The way forward is to abandon this dichotomy between males and females, and to make departments friendly to individual scientists.
What price more food?
The analysis underlying Debora MacKenzie’s article “What price more food?” (14 June, p 28) disappoints. You “asked the world’s leading agricultural experts what it will take to boost yields”. The main answer you reported was: “invest in the science that can increase yields and in the infrastructure that can get the resulting technologies to the farmers who need them”. Yet the and the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development Report (5 April, p 8) laid this “technology supply push” thinking to rest.
True, the evidence does point to the need to increase the productivity of smallholders in developing countries. But what these people lack most is opportunity, which is denied them by skewed global trade and markets, and by inadequate institutions: credit, tenure laws, water rights, political representation, links to markets and so on.
Higher crop prices benefit small farmers and rural labourers more than they harm poor consumers, making it more effective to provide safety nets for consumers than to deny small farmers a good price for their produce.
From Gabriel Stecher
Your diagram comparing yields of milk and meat with the quantity of grain needed to produce them is an over-simplification. Australian production of meat is dominated by grazing and foraging with low animal densities in parts of the continent unsuited to grain production. Sheep, goat, camel, emu and kangaroo are entirely free-range, and so is the bulk of beef.
Of far more potential impact is the diversion of grains for ethanol production. As far back as 1979 I presented an analysis, later published in the volume Energy and Agriculture, that showed that making ethanol from wheat has a negative energy balance under most conditions.
Carboor, Victoria, Australia
From Jody Mark Huston-Hall
Is it not absurd that the human race depends on only four food groups 鈥� rice, maize, wheat and potatoes 鈥� for the majority of its calorie intake?
As a permaculturalist I practise diversity, not only in the foods that I grow but also in the foods that I consume.
Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, UK
We're so special
Tim Douglas is correct in saying that only humans think they are superior (21 June, p 26). We cats know we are superior.
Plutoid cream
NASA’s Alan Stern is quite right to complain that “plutoids” sounds far too much like “haemorrhoids” (21 June, p 6). Doubtless he can count on support from other students of the solar system: “asteroids” is, if anything, even worse, so we should all start referring to them as “minor planets”.
Perhaps he can enlist the help of mathematicians, who are needlessly embarrassed by having to say “rhomboids” in public; and indeed palaeoanthropologists, who blush at the mere mention of “hominoids”. I imagine it will be much easier to rename the medical condition. Then Stern can turn his attention to the delicate question of Uranus.
Solar moonshine
Shawn Domagal-Goldman suggests that photovoltaic cells on the moon “could help solve the climate crisis” (26 April, p 17). Perhaps I’m missing something obvious, but wouldn’t burning vast amounts of rocket fuel to get the cells up there rather negate the potential benefits?
'Extinct' languages
Andrew Robinson’s review of Peter Austin’s 1000 Languages (21 June, p 55) cites Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Hittite, Sanskrit and Latin as “extinct”. Sanskrit and Latin are no longer spoken in their classical forms, but only because they changed naturally and gradually into the multiple languages that we now know by other names, such as Hindi, Gujarati and Punjabi, or French, Spanish and Italian. These forms of “modern Sanskrit” and “modern Latin” have many millions of speakers.
Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian and Hittite, on the other hand, really are extinct 鈥� the communities that spoke them dwindled, and switched to speaking the languages of conquerors or culturally dominant groups. This is the process that killed off the hundreds of extinct American and Australian aboriginal languages over the past few centuries and (closer to home for European readers) threatens languages like Gaelic, Breton and Basque. This is also the process that may lead to the loss of 90 per cent of today’s languages during this century.
School democracy
Lawrence Krauss points out the dangers of allowing “intelligent designers” free rein to mandate the scientific curriculum in the US state education system (21 June, p 56). This is a fair point; however, his solution is worse than the cure.
He suggests that only suitably qualified individuals should sit on these boards and take these decisions. He then suggests that “school board members should not be beholden to those who have elected them, nor should they represent political constituencies. They should instead be appointed by elected officials following thorough vetting and peer review”, a system that would ensure, in short order, that only those candidates who subscribe wholeheartedly to the prevailing orthodoxy are appointed. Too bad if the prevailing orthodoxy is intelligent design.
I agree that “intelligent designers” are wrong-headed, but so is suppressing dissent, which would be the result if his method of appointing school board members were adopted. Perhaps he would like to come up with a solution that would ensure that a latter day Darwin gets a look-in, please.
Try THISP for size
You ought to start a competition for THISPs. You have reported proposals to seed the sea with iron filings to stimulate algal growth (14 June, p 7), putting solar reflectors between the Earth and the sun (spangles in space), releasing sulphur particles in the upper atmosphere to foster cloud growth (both 21 July 2007, p 42) and cutting down trees to bury carbon (3 May, p 32).
These are all examples of a THISP 鈥� Truly Horrible Idea for Saving the Planet.
I’d like to propose a THISP of my own. Polystyrene packaging 鈥� there is no shortage of it 鈥� should be crushed to particles about the size of a grain of rice, mixed with common salt, coated with a slow-dissolving, non-toxic resin or binder, and released in massive quantities into the Gulf Stream in the Caribbean.
The white particles will greatly increase the albedo of the ocean.
As the binder dissolves, the salt will be released. The resulting cooler, denser water will sink earlier than otherwise, keeping a great deal of heat from reaching the Arctic, and preventing total failure of the ocean circulation.
Harvesting the salt and treating and releasing the particles will provide much-needed employment in some very poor countries.
True, the particles will end up on the beaches of western Europe and North America.
But this will allow fisherfolk, caught between falling fish stocks and increasing fuel prices, to find employment gathering them.
When, inevitably, an oil spill occurs, the oil will cling to the particles, making it easier to clean up.
Who’s going to give me a few million to do a study and prepare a report? Someone from the packaging industry, perhaps.
Trust him, he's a lawyer
Tracy Ambler points out the legal qualifications of Ben Stein, the host of the film Expelled: No intelligence allowed, which promotes intelligent design (31 May, p 23).
Stein’s law qualifications have no bearing: to most Americans, he is known as an actor and game-show host and he plays on this celebrity in promoting the film. Even in the trailer it is obvious that he has at best omitted much research or, at worst, deliberately sought to mislead. He makes an issue of evolutionary theory not explaining the origin of life, which is a schoolboy error 鈥� evolution is a theory about biological change, not about origins 鈥� and is a common rhetorical trick among anti-evolutionists.
He also makes much of God being excluded as even a potential explanation for natural phenomena. This misses the claim that intelligent design is science and not a religious proposition at all 鈥� made by his fellow proponents of ID during the trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005, in which they failed to secure the teaching of ID in school science classes.