Confronting climate
In your editorial “Don’t cloud young minds” you play straight into the hands of those seeking to perpetuate a confrontational agenda on climate change (25 February, p 3). You cite a 2010 study, , that similarly mis-frames climate science as a bipolar confrontation.
There are more constructive ways of framing climate change. It is a risk issue, not one that pits one group of scientists against another. The uncertainties concern how large the risks are and how to attend to them, and climate science has not discovered (and cannot “discover”) that it is the libertarians’ “lifestyle [that] is leading the world into danger”.
Attending to lifestyle choices may be one legitimate response to the risks posed by climate change, but there are many others. You have conflated a particular reading of scientific evidence with a specific cultural response. Your readers are not well served by your role as accomplice to the adversarial positioning of climate change promoted by libertarians.
From Robin Tucker
If US libertarian think tank The Heartland Institute wants balance in the climate change debate (25 February, p 6), surely it should seek to contrast the minority sceptical view with the equal and opposite minority view – not the mainstream. I am sure the views of the 3 per cent most “alarmist” scientists would make an interestingly apocalyptic comparison. And yet, given the conservative nature of the scientific process, the most alarmed scientists may still be giving a more accurate reflection of the future.
Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK
From Ian Davies
Pressure groups’ attempts to take misinformation about climate change into US schools means that this battle is going to become very serious indeed. The main difference between this and the battles over creationism appears to me to be that whereas creationism is obviously a religious argument, conflict over climate change is about vested interests defending the status quo for industry, just as happened with Big Tobacco.
Port Talbot, Glamorgan, UK
For art's sake!
Your article on computer art focused on Simon Colton (14 January, p 42), who says his Painting Fool program will “wake up in the morning and look at the newspaper headlines” and so produce art that is meaningful to the audience, because it is essentially drawing on the human experience. I suspect the folk in computer science who are struggling to get computers to extract meaning from natural language will find these claims as dubious as I do.
Colton refers to me as “the founder of machine fine art”, and says my program Aaron “still only creates one kind of artwork; people in a room with pot plants”. This is incorrect.
My program drew people and potted plants for a small part of its 43-year history, and it hasn’t done so in the last decade.
But what if it had? Would it have come as a big surprise to Jackson Pollock or Henri Matisse to learn that they were supposed to do different “kinds” of art? Colton asks us to move away from comparison with human art. Is this a demand for critical amnesty for computer art? I am not sure it is wise to announce how far your journey will take you before taking the first step. It seems to me that, so far, Colton has done nothing more than mimic the appearances of whatever he imagines art to be.
91av should stop applying different standards to its treatment of art and the sciences. Art is intrinsic and indispensable to the culture, as it always has been, and as science is in our own time. Please treat it seriously.
Hyperhistory
Computer-supported hyperlinks were around 20 years before Bill Atkinson’s HyperCard (18 February, p 42). The hyperlink was invented in the early 1960s by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, for a revolutionary multi-user computer collaboration system called NLS. He demonstrated the concept – and also the computer mouse and screen-based computing – in a famous . This was arguably the most influential demonstration in computing history.
Engelbart gives equal credit for the concept of the hyperlink to , a computing visionary who coined the word “hypertext”.
From Gwydion Williams
You give the “1980s web” Viewtron in Florida as an example of technology ahead of its time. What about the UK’s Prestel – the same basic idea – in the late 1970s? And there’s the French , which was a commercial success from 1982, but lost out to English-language systems.
Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, UK
From Geoffrey Clark
I was interested in the item on defunct technology describing the Message Pad as dying because of its fiddly and troublesome pen, among other things (18 February, p 46). On page 15 of the same issue Samsung advertises its new Galaxy Note phone with… a pen.
Douglas, Isle Of Man
What equation?
You do a disservice to Ian Stewart and your readers by not even labelling each of the seven equations that his witty and craftily written piece elaborate on (11 February, p 34). You usually make a point of accompanying articles with boxes and insets that clarify points the average reader may not be familiar with.
Publishing an article on equations without any description, or even a label, of what the equations are and what the symbols in them represent is not just a bad idea; it is bad science and terrible science journalism. Worse, it gives the appearance of endorsing the sadly extensive notion that “math is scary” and that readers should somehow be shielded from it.
Judge bread
If Roy Baumeister and colleagues are correct that judges are more self-controlled after lunch (28 January, p 30) then lord help anyone who has to face a judge on the Atkins diet, which induces a state of low plasma glucose and ketosis, driven mainly by a reduction in carbohydrate intake.
But for those not on an Atkins diet, a glass of lemonade will not change plasma glucose very much. What will change are some of the hormones involved in plasma glucose regulation, such as insulin. In some tissues, such as skeletal muscle and liver, insulin stimulates glucose uptake from the blood; but brain glucose uptake is generally thought to be independent of insulin.
Could this finding mean that there are willpower neurons hiding in the brain that do require insulin for glucose uptake?
Approaching zero
You mention attempts to save the “cyclic” eternal universe model by allowing each iteration to be larger than the last, thereby preventing an increase in disorder per unit volume so disorder doesn’t reach a maximum, which would leave us with a cold, featureless universe unlike the one we observe (14 January, p 6).
You say, however, that prior iterations of the universe being smaller implies a point at the beginning that has zero size and is a “start of everything”. Does this not overlook the possibility of an asymptotic regression leading to infinitesimally small universes “tending toward” a volume of zero, yet reaching it only after infinitely many iterations?
Turn up the bass
I was surprised that Sally Adee, describing a “fast track to pure focus”, did not mention techniques other people use for finding “flow” (4 February, p 32). I am a biological electron microscopist: my colleagues and I are in constant pursuit of this “Zen” state while slicing material thinner than a wavelength of visible light, using eyelashes on sticks to manipulate the slices.
My technique for “getting in the zone” requires a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and electronic music of the genres dubstep or drum and bass. Bizarrely, this is not my usual taste in music – which is far more subdued and folky – but hearing a heavy rhythm and rich bass helps me attain the focus that I cannot otherwise achieve.
Doubtful diagnosis
Accurate diagnosis is essential if one plans to follow Linda Geddes’s method of accessing medical expertise though Google Scholar (4 February, p 47). I dread to think of my fate had I done this when it diagnosed me with chronic fatigue syndrome. I remembered some unusual bites and realised Lyme disease or a similar infection was possible.
I decided not to follow even the most prominent opinion on treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome, but instead to take antibiotics – and made a robust recovery. There are still areas of medicine where uncertainty abounds, and even Google Scholar will not necessarily help.
Land, sea and…
When you say “Most fish in the sea evolved on the land” you evidently mean in fresh water (11 February, p 9) – and you are once more excited about rediscovering old news.
In my undergraduate days in the 1960s I was taught that marine (and other) bony fish evolved in fresh water, which is why they are hypotonic to sea water – loosely, they’re less salty – and have to work hard to pump all that salt out.
It is also why people cast adrift on the sea can squeeze drinkable water out of any (bony) fish they can catch. Déjà vu, all over again.
For the record
• The GridION device will be capable of sequencing a human genome in several hours, while the smaller MinION USB sequencing device is not designed to sequence entire genomes, contrary to the over-optimistic numbers we reported (25 February, p 23).
• The phrase “right to pursue happiness” appears in the US Declaration of Independence, not in the Constitution as we claimed in an earlier correction (11 February, p 33).
• Oops: salt doesn’t evaporate at terrestrial temperatures. We should have reported geologist Paul Knauth as saying that only once “large quantities of salt were safely locked away in land-based deposits could complex life take off in the oceans” (18 February, p 6).