Space oddity
The idea of copyrighting music for “the world and solar system” is not as daffy as it might seem (17 September, p 72). The crew of Apollo 9 sang Happy Birthday to You on 8 March 1969 from Earth orbit. This was televised worldwide. Few realise the song was copyrighted in the US in 1935, which is why For He/She’s a Jolly Good Fellow is sung in films and on TV instead.
The question of whether NASA or any TV company owed money for the Apollo 9 singalong would presumably depend on whether copyright extended into orbit or not. Extending it to the solar system will probably do until 40,000 years from now, when Chuck Berry’s estate will probably stop the inhabitants of Ophiuchus from listening to Voyager 1’s recording of Johnny B. Goode until they cough up. If they can cough.
Grey-sky thinking
Your editorial on field trials to investigate potentially risky technologies, including geoengineering (10 September, p 3), was right to highlight the importance of carefully designed experiments to assess their risks and benefits.
Given the slow pace of efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, and the seeming lack of international political will, we may need to geoengineer the climate to counteract the effects of greenhouse gases. If that day comes we will need to know which technologies, if any, would be effective and, just as importantly, safe. Critics of such research fail to recognise that a principal aim of the trials is to identify technologies that would be dangerous, so that they may be avoided.
Geoengineering is controversial, and rightly so. The idea that we may have to manipulate our world in such a fundamental way is disturbing for many. The UK’s Royal Society believes that scientists have a responsibility to communicate the purpose of their research, and to participate in an ongoing public dialogue about it.
The society is currently working on the , a project to develop guidelines to ensure that such research is transparent, responsible and environmentally sound. A crucial feature of this is engagement with international organisations concerned with science, governance and legal issues, as well as environmental and development NGOs, industry and civil organisations.
Projects such as these are needed to ensure that the public can make informed judgements in an increasingly scientific world.
Atlas angst
Climate change is a very serious issue and must be treated with respect and scientific integrity. In an effort to promote the sale of a very expensive book, the publisher of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World appears to have resorted to sensationalism by reporting that the Greenland ice sheet has shrunk by 15 per cent since the atlas was last published (24 September, p 6).
Any scientific editor would have been alarmed at such a huge change and checked its sources. By deviating from sound scientific principles they have caused serious damage to the climate change debate.
Testy times
Even allowing for a simplified explanation, the panoply of mistakes and assumptions in the universal intelligence test is staggering, and I would suggest glaringly obvious to anyone with a smattering of intelligence (10 September, p 42).
For example, the fact that it is untimed, because a computer would outpace a human, is ridiculous. If a creature took years to make a decision, would that indicate intelligence or a lack of it? If it takes a week for a dolphin to do something, but a whale takes a month and a chimp 10 years, does this not indicate something?
Also, we are told that a circle in a box represents whoever or whatever is taking the test. Really? Has anyone any idea how much and what sort of intelligence is needed to grasp that, and how human-centric that concept is?
From Patricia Zura
The universal intelligence test appears to be nothing more than a simplified/glorified video game to spot patterns. How would this test dog intelligence, which might involve following a molecular trail, or dolphin intelligence, which might involve locating prey with sonar and coordinating with the pod how best to corral dinner?
I have never passed level one on video games Myst or Angry Birds, but I can pick one green leaf out of 10,000 and tell you whether it is edible or poisonous. This is clearly pattern recognition. So what exactly measures intelligence?
Berkeley, California, US
In a spin
We would like to lay claim to the first quantum tidal turbine 鈥� the description of the Kepler Energy turbine in “Rising tide” (17 September, p 48) suggests that its blades “can rotate in both directions at once”! In fact, and more prosaically, the turbine can rotate in the same direction in both directions of the tidal flow without the need for pitch-changing mechanisms.
Further, we do not recognise the illustration of the turbine used. A picture of our transverse horizontal axis water turbine is shown on the website at .
We have a problem
I expect that all your readers, especially those in relationships, will be wondering what happened to “we” in the list of the 20 most used words in the English language (3 September, p 42).
For the record
鈥� In a review of Jeanne Guillemin’s book American Anthrax (10 September, p 52), the anthrax threat in the US in 2001 should have been referred to as “Amerithrax”.