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Race to metric
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new phenomena, hitherto unnoticed. Perhaps we will never know, but while we wait for the answer, philosophers are justified in claiming that a proper explanation of consciousness cannot come from any possible rearrangement of the kind of physics we already have. We should be pleased: even if space and matter yield their secrets to the Large Hadron Collider, we have something even more fascinating to investigate. Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne and Wear, UK
Feel the music From Georg Pedersen, Sydney Conservatorium of Music The list of obscure or little-studied emotions in Jessica Griggs’s article (16 January, p 26) barely scratched the surface. As any music-lover knows, there is a world of intense emotions out there that are impossible to verbalise or conceptualise. To experience music is to experience a separate universe, one created entirely by humans. The deeper we penetrate this world, the more subtle it becomes and the harder to describe.
glory, a passion, an intensity that constitutes a marvellous synthesis of both intellect and emotions. Sydney, Australia
Weather isn’t climate From Michael Payton Michael Le Page roundly turns on anyone who dares to suggest that the current severe winter conditions throughout the northern hemisphere put a question mark over the existence of global warming (16 January, p 20). If that were right, he says, the sceptics would have to accept that a spell of hot weather would mean the climate was getting warmer – equally nonsensical, since extreme weather proves nothing about climate change. Yet don’t those who subscribe to the idea of climate change regularly fall into the same trap, using extreme weather scenarios – or the lack of them – to make their case? For example, in 2000 David Viner, then of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, claimed a consequence of global warming would be that within a few years children in the UK “just aren’t going to know what snow is”. Would Le Page also dismiss Viner as “intellectually challenged or plain dishonest”? London, UK
scientific magazine such as yours condones the continued use of this anachronism? Palmerston North, New Zealand The editor writes: ■ “The 1609.3 kph car” would have lacked charisma. The teams we reported chose 1000 mph as their target, so just this once, for ease of comparison, we used miles per hour throughout the article.
Apple Mac users would voluntarily install unknown software.” I must assume that this expert either works in academia, where the world may look different, or has had little exposure to commercial security testing. There is little evidence that Apple Mac users are any more security conscious than anyone else. Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK
Blink of a butterfly
Pizza perfect
From Bernie Mason I was astounded to read in The Last Word piece about how high butterflies fly (16 January) that commercial airline pilots have reported seeing monarch butterflies at between 3000 and 4000 metres. What I would give for eyesight that good: commercial airlines cruise at about 250 metres per second. How do pilots manage such feats of observation? Flowerdale, Tasmania
Race to metric
Perhaps in trying to understand our experience of music we are faced with the same kinds of problems we encounter when trying to understand consciousness – in other words, we have little idea how it comes about or even how to talk or think about it. But for anyone who listens to music, there is a
From Ross Richdale I was disappointed by David Cohen’s article about the 1000 mph car (21 November 2009, p 38): surely in this day and age you could use metric units. In New Zealand and Australia we gave up the archaic imperial measurements about 30 years ago. I know that the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK insist on staying in the dinosaur age but how can they be expected to join the rest of the world if a
Mac attack From Kevin Sheldrake In Paul Marks’s article on the dangers of hackers using networks of computers to eavesdrop on conversations on your laptop or smartphone (16 January, p 17), an anonymous “security expert” claimed that such attacks are too crude to pose a serious threat. “It is unlikely any worthwhile target will use Windows unpatched,” he says, “and few
From Michael Shaw As an employee of a chain of pizza restaurants, I initially found Stephen Ornes’s article on the mathematics of preparing perfect pizza portions highly insightful (12 December 2009, p 48). However, as soon as I began to attempt the method it described I floundered. This only appears to work with margherita pizzas and others with a strictly uniform distribution of toppings. Alas, I found it of little help when sharing pizza with my fellow employees. Bristol, UK
For the record ■ Possessing a “grid” of brain cells that helps us to navigate might explain why some people are better at finding their way around than others (23 January, p 15). Although these cells provide a virtual grid on which locations in the world can be represented in the brain, we should have made it clear that the cells themselves are not arranged in a physical grid. 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.
6 February 2010 | NewScientist | 27
new phenomena, hitherto unnoticed. Perhaps we will never know, but while we wait for the answer, philosophers are justified in claiming that a proper explanation of consciousness cannot come from any possible rearrangement of the kind of physics we already have. We should be pleased: even if space and matter yield their secrets to the Large Hadron Collider, we have something even more fascinating to investigate. Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne and Wear, UK
Feel the music From Georg Pedersen, Sydney Conservatorium of Music The list of obscure or little-studied emotions in Jessica Griggs’s article (16 January, p 26) barely scratched the surface. As any music-lover knows, there is a world of intense emotions out there that are impossible to verbalise or conceptualise. To experience music is to experience a separate universe, one created entirely by humans. The deeper we penetrate this world, the more subtle it becomes and the harder to describe.
glory, a passion, an intensity that constitutes a marvellous synthesis of both intellect and emotions. Sydney, Australia
Weather isn’t climate From Michael Payton Michael Le Page roundly turns on anyone who dares to suggest that the current severe winter conditions throughout the northern hemisphere put a question mark over the existence of global warming (16 January, p 20). If that were right, he says, the sceptics would have to accept that a spell of hot weather would mean the climate was getting warmer – equally nonsensical, since extreme weather proves nothing about climate change. Yet don’t those who subscribe to the idea of climate change regularly fall into the same trap, using extreme weather scenarios – or the lack of them – to make their case? For example, in 2000 David Viner, then of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, claimed a consequence of global warming would be that within a few years children in the UK “just aren’t going to know what snow is”. Would Le Page also dismiss Viner as “intellectually challenged or plain dishonest”? London, UK
scientific magazine such as yours condones the continued use of this anachronism? Palmerston North, New Zealand The editor writes: ■ “The 1609.3 kph car” would have lacked charisma. The teams we reported chose 1000 mph as their target, so just this once, for ease of comparison, we used miles per hour throughout the article.
Apple Mac users would voluntarily install unknown software.” I must assume that this expert either works in academia, where the world may look different, or has had little exposure to commercial security testing. There is little evidence that Apple Mac users are any more security conscious than anyone else. Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK
Blink of a butterfly
Pizza perfect
From Bernie Mason I was astounded to read in The Last Word piece about how high butterflies fly (16 January) that commercial airline pilots have reported seeing monarch butterflies at between 3000 and 4000 metres. What I would give for eyesight that good: commercial airlines cruise at about 250 metres per second. How do pilots manage such feats of observation? Flowerdale, Tasmania
Race to metric
Perhaps in trying to understand our experience of music we are faced with the same kinds of problems we encounter when trying to understand consciousness – in other words, we have little idea how it comes about or even how to talk or think about it. But for anyone who listens to music, there is a
From Ross Richdale I was disappointed by David Cohen’s article about the 1000 mph car (21 November 2009, p 38): surely in this day and age you could use metric units. In New Zealand and Australia we gave up the archaic imperial measurements about 30 years ago. I know that the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK insist on staying in the dinosaur age but how can they be expected to join the rest of the world if a
Mac attack From Kevin Sheldrake In Paul Marks’s article on the dangers of hackers using networks of computers to eavesdrop on conversations on your laptop or smartphone (16 January, p 17), an anonymous “security expert” claimed that such attacks are too crude to pose a serious threat. “It is unlikely any worthwhile target will use Windows unpatched,” he says, “and few
From Michael Shaw As an employee of a chain of pizza restaurants, I initially found Stephen Ornes’s article on the mathematics of preparing perfect pizza portions highly insightful (12 December 2009, p 48). However, as soon as I began to attempt the method it described I floundered. This only appears to work with margherita pizzas and others with a strictly uniform distribution of toppings. Alas, I found it of little help when sharing pizza with my fellow employees. Bristol, UK
For the record ■ Possessing a “grid” of brain cells that helps us to navigate might explain why some people are better at finding their way around than others (23 January, p 15). Although these cells provide a virtual grid on which locations in the world can be represented in the brain, we should have made it clear that the cells themselves are not arranged in a physical grid. 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.
6 February 2010 | NewScientist | 27