- Email: [email protected]
In the beginning…
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particularly to “help the elderly with fetching and carrying things around, memory and entertainment” (6 August, p 22). Many of my relatives have lived well into their 90s, including an aunt who drove fast and well on her 90th birthday. In my experience the real problem for elderly people comes with incontinence. Few people talk about this subject. No doubt the scientists designing this programme and the volunteers are too young to consider it. Surely what is really needed is a friendly, comforting robot to take people to the bathroom and deal with whatever has happened, wash and dress them. This is no doubt very difficult to achieve. Would that not make it an admirable goal for designers of robots? Claygate, Surrey, UK
In the beginning… From Bill Hyde Nigel Depledge notes that: “Prior to 1859, the diversity and intricacy of life were often cited as ‘evidence’ for the existence of God” (23 April, p 29). Imagine an early man who has just about got language. He’s resting on a rock noting a distant tree, silhouetted against the last moments of the setting sun. He thinks – that tree wasn’t in that place a few evenings ago. So he makes some marks on a stick at arm’s length. And he continues observing and noting, like Gregor Mendel looking at his
peas, Tycho Brahe looking at the stars, and many more. He is the first scientist. He goes through the winter solstice, then summer, and guesses the cycle repeats. But he’s also the first entrepreneur, or conman. So he says to the laypeople: “I will make the sun set, over there.” And it does! Afforded deference and respect, he becomes the chief, king, god, priest – he leads impressive ceremonies. Unified, the tribe prospers. They ask him to make various other things happen, and by dint of keen observation, plus luck, it goes well, until he goes too far, into areas where he hasn’t done the research. They catch him out and are peeved. “It’s not me,” he says, “it’s Him up there, I’m just an intermediary. But I’ll tell you how to get back into His good books.” But it soon goes wrong again, and they kill him in a ritual manner. But by now they cannot do without a chief/king/priest, so after a due interval, a new leader is appointed. And who better than a son, fathered by the old king in his fertility role, with the same name as his father: the king/god is risen from the dead. Do read the Old Testament. God evolved from man, not vice versa. Offham, Kent, UK
destroyed by being blown up. Perhaps a truly massive “wall” of bubbles could force a wave to break much further offshore, thereby losing much of its energy, or even divert it to a point where it does no harm. Bristol, UK
Bubble power
From Steve Gisselbrecht I get frustrated by the discussion of the idea that physical parameters were “fine-tuned” for life (23 July, p 34). I feel that the people who promote this idea have missed the deep significance of Charles Darwin’s thought, and also confuse “life” with “life as we know it”. Of course the precise parameters of the physical laws of our universe are fine-tuned for life as we know it, because life as we know it is an emergent property of those parameters. It is easy to say that if we change the numbers, we wouldn’t have stars
From Jonathan Seagrave Your article on using a series of columns fixed to the seabed to dissipate wave energy and protect a coastline against tsunamis suggests an alternative concept (4 June, p 14). A curtain of bubbles can also damp waves. Usually such curtains are generated from compressed air which is piped to the seabed, and they are used commercially for special situations – for example, as protection for marine life when old munitions are
Row for victory From Julien Glazer Reduce carbon dioxide emissions from shipping by a billion tonnes a year (23 July, p 5)? No problem. Remove the diesel engines
and carbon; but much harder to say what we would have instead. Boston, Massachusetts, US
Call of nature From Ed Jarzembowski, Maidstone Museum Steve Wilson’s comment on the prehistoric brain pondering life, the universe and everything suggests what I always suspected: all of us would be better off going out to do natural history, it’s what brains evolved for (21 May, p 24). Must go. I’m meeting some guys at my local watering hole. Maidstone, Kent, UK
For the record
from the world’s existing fleet and convert them into galleys. Conscript everybody whose body mass index is too high to pull the oars. Two problems are thus solved in one stroke. Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, UK
No tuning required
n The reader who alerted Feedback to the startling age of the motor car (6 August, p 64) – “125!” or 10209 years according to a Mercedes-Benz ad – is really named Cooper Jeffrey n The DOI for the paper mentioned in our story about airborne dog faecal bacteria (13 August, p 16) is 10.1128/ aem.05498-11 n The journal referenced on the use of sump water, a heat exchanger and storm drains to cool the London Underground (6 August, p 38) should have been named as the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers; and the resistors underneath the carriages are (also) used to control the current through the motors as the train starts n In the clumpy universe story (25 June, p 8), we meant to say that the light detected as cosmic microwave background radiation was emitted 370,000 years after the big bang, not “light years”. Whoops! Letters should be sent to: Letters to the Editor, New Scientist, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS Fax: +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 Email: [email protected] Include your full postal address and telephone number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters. Reed Business Information reserves the right to use any submissions sent to the letters column of New Scientist magazine, in any other format.
27 August 2011 | NewScientist | 31
particularly to “help the elderly with fetching and carrying things around, memory and entertainment” (6 August, p 22). Many of my relatives have lived well into their 90s, including an aunt who drove fast and well on her 90th birthday. In my experience the real problem for elderly people comes with incontinence. Few people talk about this subject. No doubt the scientists designing this programme and the volunteers are too young to consider it. Surely what is really needed is a friendly, comforting robot to take people to the bathroom and deal with whatever has happened, wash and dress them. This is no doubt very difficult to achieve. Would that not make it an admirable goal for designers of robots? Claygate, Surrey, UK
In the beginning… From Bill Hyde Nigel Depledge notes that: “Prior to 1859, the diversity and intricacy of life were often cited as ‘evidence’ for the existence of God” (23 April, p 29). Imagine an early man who has just about got language. He’s resting on a rock noting a distant tree, silhouetted against the last moments of the setting sun. He thinks – that tree wasn’t in that place a few evenings ago. So he makes some marks on a stick at arm’s length. And he continues observing and noting, like Gregor Mendel looking at his
peas, Tycho Brahe looking at the stars, and many more. He is the first scientist. He goes through the winter solstice, then summer, and guesses the cycle repeats. But he’s also the first entrepreneur, or conman. So he says to the laypeople: “I will make the sun set, over there.” And it does! Afforded deference and respect, he becomes the chief, king, god, priest – he leads impressive ceremonies. Unified, the tribe prospers. They ask him to make various other things happen, and by dint of keen observation, plus luck, it goes well, until he goes too far, into areas where he hasn’t done the research. They catch him out and are peeved. “It’s not me,” he says, “it’s Him up there, I’m just an intermediary. But I’ll tell you how to get back into His good books.” But it soon goes wrong again, and they kill him in a ritual manner. But by now they cannot do without a chief/king/priest, so after a due interval, a new leader is appointed. And who better than a son, fathered by the old king in his fertility role, with the same name as his father: the king/god is risen from the dead. Do read the Old Testament. God evolved from man, not vice versa. Offham, Kent, UK
destroyed by being blown up. Perhaps a truly massive “wall” of bubbles could force a wave to break much further offshore, thereby losing much of its energy, or even divert it to a point where it does no harm. Bristol, UK
Bubble power
From Steve Gisselbrecht I get frustrated by the discussion of the idea that physical parameters were “fine-tuned” for life (23 July, p 34). I feel that the people who promote this idea have missed the deep significance of Charles Darwin’s thought, and also confuse “life” with “life as we know it”. Of course the precise parameters of the physical laws of our universe are fine-tuned for life as we know it, because life as we know it is an emergent property of those parameters. It is easy to say that if we change the numbers, we wouldn’t have stars
From Jonathan Seagrave Your article on using a series of columns fixed to the seabed to dissipate wave energy and protect a coastline against tsunamis suggests an alternative concept (4 June, p 14). A curtain of bubbles can also damp waves. Usually such curtains are generated from compressed air which is piped to the seabed, and they are used commercially for special situations – for example, as protection for marine life when old munitions are
Row for victory From Julien Glazer Reduce carbon dioxide emissions from shipping by a billion tonnes a year (23 July, p 5)? No problem. Remove the diesel engines
and carbon; but much harder to say what we would have instead. Boston, Massachusetts, US
Call of nature From Ed Jarzembowski, Maidstone Museum Steve Wilson’s comment on the prehistoric brain pondering life, the universe and everything suggests what I always suspected: all of us would be better off going out to do natural history, it’s what brains evolved for (21 May, p 24). Must go. I’m meeting some guys at my local watering hole. Maidstone, Kent, UK
For the record
from the world’s existing fleet and convert them into galleys. Conscript everybody whose body mass index is too high to pull the oars. Two problems are thus solved in one stroke. Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, UK
No tuning required
n The reader who alerted Feedback to the startling age of the motor car (6 August, p 64) – “125!” or 10209 years according to a Mercedes-Benz ad – is really named Cooper Jeffrey n The DOI for the paper mentioned in our story about airborne dog faecal bacteria (13 August, p 16) is 10.1128/ aem.05498-11 n The journal referenced on the use of sump water, a heat exchanger and storm drains to cool the London Underground (6 August, p 38) should have been named as the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers; and the resistors underneath the carriages are (also) used to control the current through the motors as the train starts n In the clumpy universe story (25 June, p 8), we meant to say that the light detected as cosmic microwave background radiation was emitted 370,000 years after the big bang, not “light years”. Whoops! Letters should be sent to: Letters to the Editor, New Scientist, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS Fax: +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 Email: [email protected] Include your full postal address and telephone number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters. Reed Business Information reserves the right to use any submissions sent to the letters column of New Scientist magazine, in any other format.
27 August 2011 | NewScientist | 31