Spotted history
Climate sceptics are prone to ignore indicators of global warming when it suits them, but their protagonists can be guilty of a similar process 鈥� suggesting particular research is “flawed” or, worse, by making personal attacks on the researcher.
Stuart Clark did not mention ‘s research when describing David Hathaway’s work in his article on sunspots (12 June, p 30). This would have cleared up the mystery behind the sun’s present lack of get-up-and-go. Landscheidt’s work on the effect of the solar system’s centre of gravity, or barycenter, on the sun’s heat output predicts that Earth will cool until about 2030.
Whether this will overcome the general warming trend, however, is unclear. When this was mentioned to a global-warming guru recently, the reply was that Landscheidt was not to be trusted as he was an astrologer. Then again, so was Kepler.
David Hathaway writes:
鈥� There are many papers that claim to explain solar activity cycles based on planetary motions, the earliest I know of is by Rudolf Wolf in 1859. Many people have noticed that Jupiter’s orbital period is close to that of the sunspot cycle. In a paper in Solar Physics in 1999, Landscheidt tried to connect planetary motions to the solar cycle. He predicted that the next maximum would be in 2011, which seems unlikely at this point.
One of the problems with these studies is that planetary motions are very predictable, whereas the solar cycle is stochastic and chaotic. Additionally, the studies rely on statistics, not physics. Any calculation of the actual forces on the internal dynamics of the sun due to planetary motions shows that they are tiny compared to the buoyancy, Coriolis and magnetic forces that play active roles in the solar activity cycle.
From Des Fourie
The relationship between sunspot activity (or the lack of it) and droughts in southern Africa has been investigated by Will Alexander and others ().
Not withstanding the problems of global warming, they warn of the inability of current climate models to grasp the relationship of this cyclical phenomenon to stratospheric and tropospheric climate behaviour. The same paper posits a relationship and possible cause of sunspot activity to the “acceleration and deceleration of the sun as it moves through galactic space”, and the planets’ paths around the sun.
Johannesburg, South Africa
Not so wonderfuel
Helen Knight’s article suggesting methane as a solution to the energy crisis read like an advertisement from the gas industry (12 June, p 44).
The article mentions nothing about the amount of energy that it takes to free the methane from the rock where it is held. The cost of extracting and burning coal is about 0.64 kilograms of CO2 per kilowatt-hour of energy we get from it. The cost of burning natural gas is about 0.45 kilograms. So if extracting methane requires more than 30 per cent of the energy it yields, using coal would be cheaper and better for the environment.
As to our present energy sources, coal-fired electricity-generating plants don’t have to be “dirty”. Imagine small coal plants, operated by a family of farmers, surrounded by algae tanks and greenhouses that use the waste heat and CO2: this would greatly reduce the CO2 footprint of the generating plant.
It is also wrong to dismiss renewables like solar and wind energy as “unpredictable”. Any excess output can be used to convert water to hydrogen, which can then be stored, and used to generate electricity in a fuel cell when extra power is needed. Solar cells get cheaper by the minute: last year the cost fell below the $1-per-watt mark. We are at the beginning of a solar revolution.
From Jerome Ravetz, Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford
It is reassuring to read that industry is trying to reduce the environmental footprint of shale-well drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking.
As Kara Cusolito wrote recently in , former vice-president Dick Cheney’s “” now means that there is no federal supervision of hydrofracking beyond a voluntary agreement with the companies. Inspection is left to individual states, and can be sketchy. The town of Dimock, Pennsylvania, has already suffered from widespread and diverse forms of contamination.
Since hydrofracking depends on passing large quantities of water and chemicals through the rock, it would seem prudent to assume that the industry needs stronger regulation than it has hitherto had.
Oxford, UK
Mapping knowledge
Discussions of tacit and explicit knowledge, such as that made by Harry Collins (29 May, p 30), often run afoul of the map-versus-territory confusion: the map is an abstraction of the territory, it isn’t the territory itself. The map explicitly shows many features, but it necessarily leaves out other details 鈥� tacit knowledge. It might not show features that are essential to a particular reader in a particular context, such as where a stream is too muddy to cross.
The context principle is at the core of this issue. Traditionally, this states that a philosopher should always ask for a word’s meaning in terms of the context in which it is being used, not in isolation. More broadly: context creates meaning and in its absence there is no meaning.
I find my work on knowledge systems useful in understanding this principle. Domains 鈥� which could be anything from individuals to collections of data 鈥� can only be connected if they have contexts in common: some sort of relation to each other. In terms of computers, this context might be the programming language, hardware or operating system. Common contexts provide shared meaning and open a path for communication between disparate domains.
Explicit knowledge is knowledge that has been represented in a common context, so that it can be effectively communicated between the domains of concern, whereas tacit knowledge is knowledge that hasn’t been represented in a common context for the domains of concern.
It follows that explicit knowledge in one context can be tacit in another. For example, an algorithm that describes how to ride a bicycle might make the knowledge explicit for a robot, but not for a person. However, demonstrating the act of riding a bicycle might be all a person needs.
It should be equally clear that the lack of a map does not mean that a map cannot be drawn.
Kind lies
Dorothy Rowe makes some valid points about the potentially disastrous consequences of lying (19 June, p 28), but she may have spent so much time treating people who are emotionally disturbed that she has forgotten how the rest of us behave. She says we often tell white lies out of fear of being abandoned or rejected but fails to mention that the commonest motives for doing so are empathy and compassion.
“Nice to see you back 鈥� we all missed you. You’re looking much better,” may be a pack of lies, but is not likely to be motivated by fear. “I was there when he was run over. It was very quick and he can’t have suffered at all,” may be far from the truth, but is kinder.
The sociologist Erving Goffman analysed in great detail the many subtle words and gestures with which people in close-knit communities routinely prop up one another’s self-esteem. Far from Rowe’s prediction that we are damaging our brains, he saw it as one of the indispensable bonds holding a society together and keeping it healthy. Lying is a bad habit, but pathologising every aspect of human behaviour is also undesirable.
Observing altruism
I was struck by the juxtaposition of Mark Nelson’s letter, which challenged the value of natural experiments (1 May, p 24), and Mark Buchanan’s summary of the work of Ernst Fehr on human fairness (p 26). Fehr’s experiments will never truly show the influence of fairness on motivation if he doesn’t step out of the lab and into the real world.
In the book, Superfreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner cite a study by economist John List on the behaviour of a group of baseball card dealers. When brought into some back rooms at a convention and run through trading games to test their altruism, they consistently showed themselves to be fair. Out on the convention floor, however, the vendors proved to be every bit as self-serving as traditional economics would predict. This was shown when undercover researchers made offers to the same vendors on the same terms as used in the earlier tests.
People in a formal research environment know they are being observed and will act accordingly. I hope that Fehr’s experiments distinguish between the desire to be perceived as fair and actual altruism.
Pyxis dust
Further to Feedback’s discourse on the subject, it must be the time of year when “differently real” creatures are getting more active (22 May). Last week I had a concordant encounter in my workplace, a psychiatric ward.
A nurse asked me if I could countersign medication she was about to get “from the pixies” for a patient who was going on leave. I thought it was a joke until I saw the high-tech Pyxis MedStation 鈥� an automated drug dispensing machine 鈥� in the clinic room.
It is a clever machine, but I’m not sure if the producer has thought about the impact of the name in the setting in which I work. Perhaps it was for marketing purposes: “Away with the fairies? Take some medication from the pyxies!”
For the record
鈥� When we mentioned the University of Calgary in our article on evolvability we placed it in the wrong city: it is, naturally enough, in Calgary not Edmonton. And apologies to Abby Drake of the University of Manchester, whose surname we got wrong in the same article (26 June, p 46).
鈥� On our map of recent space storms (26 June, p 6), those in 1982 and 1989 were in fact very powerful, not “modest” as we stated, and the signalling problems that plagued the Archangel province in Russia until 2005 started in 2000.
鈥� The Saharan dust fertilising the Amazon (3 July, p 16) comes from the bed of a lake that dried out 1000 (not 6000) years ago.
鈥� Orcas are also called killer whales, but not “orca whales” (12 June, p 40).
鈥� There is no such thing as a 5-hydroxymethyl molecule (19 June, p 37). The entity involved in modifying the expression of genes in the brain is a hydroxymethyl group.