Some more equal
Your graph of income inequality in the US since 1920 (28 July, p 37) shows the top 1 per cent receiving more than 15 per cent of total income during the Depression before about 1930, then the proportion slowly declining to half that rate mid-century and rising back toward it from around 1980. This seems to support the old adage that the best time to make money is during a depression.
I suggest a simpler explanation. The rich are insulated from fluctuations in the economy at all times, whereas the lower economic orders prosper during boom times but are impoverished during depressions, enjoying a greater share of the total income only during the booms.
Deborah Rogers claims that “For tens of thousands of years, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were widespread” and “anyone who made a bid for higher status or attempted to take more than their share would be ridiculed or ostracised for their audacity” (28 July, p 38).
There may have been less inequality in a hunter-gatherer society than in an agricultural one, but I doubt that hunter-gatherers were anywhere near as egalitarian as Rogers claims.
Look at any human society in existence today, and you’ll see chiefs and leaders.
Arlington, Massachusetts, US
Banking on air
Philip Penton implies that the mortgage debacle occurred because of people lying on their loan applications (7 July, p 31). He appears to overlook the fact that nobody was holding a gun to the bankers’ heads to force them to make loans.
Once upon a time, banks made mortgage loans and held the paper, so if the loan went sour, the bank lost money. With the advent of collateralised mortgage obligations, the bank no longer held the loan but bundled it and sold it to investors. If the loan went sour, the bank no longer lost money. Bankers were making so much money packaging and selling the loans that they encouraged brokers to generate an increasing number of loans without worrying about quality.
Trouble at pit
Your look at the increasing automation in mining and quarrying (28 July, p 18) discusses how machines can improve safety standards for workers. It neglects to mention that the principal way in which automation improves worker safety is by making the workers redundant.
I am not advocating a return to medieval mining: but it has to be recognised that if the future of mining is one person controlling many machines from a desk, that also means many unemployed people sitting at home, albeit in improved safety conditions.
Cycles come around
Peter Turchin’s “cliodynamics” method of predictive history (18 August, p 46) was predicted in considerable detail by Isaac Asimov in his classic novel Foundation – although Turchin may be early, since that was set 24,000 years in the future.
An important principle stated early on is that the predictive power of cliodynamics – which Asimov called “psychohistory” – is fatally damaged if the detailed predictions are known to more than a few.
Turchin’s 50-year cycle may be a rediscovery of the 70-year economic cycle .
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
“There is a tide in the affairs of men” (William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 4, scene 3).
We fail again and again, however, to learn from the past: and now history is a discipline in decline due to lack of interest.
Buderim, Queensland, Australia
Life on Mars
The sentence, “Curiosity begins its epic search for signs of life” on the front cover of your magazine (11 August) is misleading. The aim of Curiosity is not to search for life on Mars. It is not loaded with the suite of instruments that would pursue that goal, unlike, for example, the Viking landers. Curiosity was to assess whether Mars had ever had an environment able to support small life forms.
In other words, its mission is to determine the planet’s “habitability”. The search for habitability is not synonymous with a search for life.
Sweet smell of fungi
In light of reports about microbiomes and the positive effects of certain bacteria and fungi in our environment (for example, 28 July, p 32), I have an anecdote to share. Some time ago, I had the misfortune to contract thrush, for which my partner and I took oral anti-yeast tablets. Within 24 hours of taking the tablets we noticed that our characteristic smells (of which we were both quite fond) had disappeared: from breath, skin and other more intimate parts.
The effect was so profound we even noticed a slight diminution of sexual attraction towards one another, though being aware of the cause we laughed about it and kept our fingers crossed it would pass. Fortunately, it did, and our personal scents made a welcome return after a week or so.
I recall suggestions that finding another’s smell attractive may imply you have complementary immune systems (23 July 2005, p 12). I wonder whether there is a more direct reproductive advantage to certain beneficial components of the microbiome in terms of sexual attractiveness.
After Higgs
You write about the euphoria following the likely discovery of the Higgs particle (14 July, p 3) but send a negative signal that the young generation of physicists could run out of problems, since finding the Higgs particle marks “the end of the road”.
However, most theories and models in particle physics have assumed its existence, and this is just one particle, albeit the final piece of the standard model. Thus, since the standard model is not the whole story, there are still many opportunities for young scientists to make important contributions in searches for new physics such as supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and the nature of dark matter, of which we have no signs so far. Indeed, there is much to discover and construct theories and models for.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the woods above CERN, Dr Spooner and his team are still searching for the elusive Hoggs Bison.
• Oddly, the Fermilab accelerator site in Illinois .
Ranking algorithms
I was surprised that in your look at the simplex algorithm (11 August, p 32), the list “2000 years of algorithms” does not include the well-known (published in 1959) for finding the shortest path through a weighted graph. This is the basis for internet routing protocols and thus a challenger for the title “the algorithm that runs the world”.
I always thought that the ultimate algorithm was the one that enables us to count, by testing whether an integer is equal to, greater than or less than another. Without this we really don’t get much beyond a proto-caveman looking for his first cave.
Northmoor, Oxfordshire, UK
For the record
• We misquoted Jeff Youngblood as saying that nanocrystalline cellulose is 2 nanometres long: it is 200 nanometres long (18 August, p 24). We also incorrectly said that it has eight times the tensile strength of stainless steel – that should have been the strength-to-weight ratio. Sorry.
• The dieting that may produce ketosis is , not the fat-free kind (18 August, p 30).