No to boycott
In his defence of Stephen Hawking’s support for an academic boycott of Israel, Jonathan Rosenhead compares the boycott to those that once targeted the institutionalised oppression in apartheid South Africa and racial segregation in the US (15 June, p 28). This comparison is unfair.
He overlooks the wider context of the academic boycott, which is that of a concerted attempt since 1948 to destroy Israel. For example, there have been calls for the expulsion of all Jews from the land; Iran explicitly threatens destruction of the state of Israel; and there are continual rocket attacks from Gaza and Lebanon.
Boycotts, and particularly academic boycotts, can only deepen divisions and reduce the chance of a negotiated peace.
The underlying assumption of Rosenhead’s article is binary: that the Israeli government is wrong and the Palestinian governments are right. This is politically naive, but more importantly it lacks the dispassionate analysis that is fundamental to science.
There is much, in my view, that the Israeli government does or allows to be done that is wrong. However, the same applies to the Palestinian governments.
Like Rosenhead, I am appalled at the ongoing military occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel. Hopefully, like me, he also believes that Israelis are entitled to live in peace within the pre-1967 borders of their state.
The problem with the academic boycott is twofold: most of those it punishes are equally opposed to the occupation, and many boycott supporters deny the right of Israel to live at peace within its borders. Incidentally, Hawking’s distinction in cosmology adds no weight to his opinions on the complex issues of the Middle East.
German efficiency
Bernard Ingham criticises Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear power (8 June, p 30). Fission is arguably one of the most expensive means of producing electricity. In the UK it has required massive subsidies.
Inferring that German industries are planning to relocate to the US as a consequence of energy costs is muddying the water. Why would they leave if the prospects at home are lower fuel bills relative to others in the longer term? The Germans are forward-thinking. When they set out to achieve something it is based on cost efficiency, and they generally succeed.
Error prone
It is alarming to read that the next generation of programming languages might resemble Microsoft Excel (8 June, p 36). I have built a career on spreadsheet correctness in a software field in which errors are more common than usual.
My focus is financial models, written by intelligent and diligent finance professionals using Excel. And yet experience 鈥� and most research 鈥� suggests that fewer than 10 per cent of these spreadsheets are error-free.
The proliferation of computer languages described in your article may be a problem within the industry but it also raises the bar for entry. This ensures that programming remains a professional discipline from which the general Excel user has much to learn.
The struggle for software reliability has indeed generated a plethora of languages. The struggle will continue and we will approach, if never quite reach, the goal. But eliminate all human error? As author Michael Brooks admits: never. Enable Joe public to program a road vehicle? Ouch!
Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, UK
Silent speech
Psychologist Steven Pinker proposes that the “mentalese” of our inner voice does not require language. Your article offers a better explanation 鈥� that it is external speech without the articulation (1 June, p 32).
As a quadrilingual person I can confirm that in order to speak a given language properly, one must think in that language. For some people, their halting delivery reveals their inner translation process, as they try to go from one language internally, to speaking in another.
Shifting climate
I would like to respond to your report that the Earth is undergoing a “beneficial greening” as a result of human-made carbon emissions (8 June, p 14). In part, greening of subtropical regions, such as the southern Sahara, may be attributed to and a rise in humidity. The increase in humidity and in rainfall in subtropical and subpolar regions is consistent with a trend toward Pliocene-like conditions, an epoch in which temperatures were 2 to 3 掳C higher than today.
This shift of climate zones towards the poles results in droughts in temperate zones where the bulk of farming takes place, examples being southern Europe, the central US and south-west Western Australia.
These factors, coupled with more extreme weather events in most climate zones, which are harmful to agriculture, hardly justify a view that carbon emissions are beneficial.
Just an illusion?
Nice try by neurologist Peter Ulric Tse to argue for the existence of free will, but unless everything we think we know is wrong, we live in a causally determined universe (8 June, p 28).
The generation of acts of volition may well be neurologically more complex than was thought, but for those neurons involved to fire without a cause is logically impossible. That cause will have a cause and that cause will have another cause, all the way down, and where is the free will in that?
Tse had no choice but to advance his hypothesis. He should just get over it and enjoy the illusion of free will.
Early life
David Holdsworth argues that extraterrestrial life is unlikely because life on Earth “descended from a single ancestor cell” despite an abundance of suitable habitats (18 May, p 28). This is misconceived.
Firstly, life as we know it descended from not one but two cells 鈥� the proto-archaean, which provided the host cell, and the proto-eubacterium, which provided some organelles such as mitochondria. Then there are viruses. While not getting into the debate as to whether viruses are alive, there is no doubt about their contribution to evolution.
Bit by bit
Further to your Instant Expert on nuclear fission and objections to the idea of radioactive waste disposal via a rocket fired into the sun (1 June), I have a suggestion.
The risk of atmospheric contamination posed during launch could be reduced by transporting the waste to an orbital collection point in many small payloads. In the safety of outer space these could be combined before being fired towards our star.
Time vs space
Anil Ananthaswamy concludes his article on the mismatches between various fundamental theories on the importance of space and time (15 June, p 34) by rhetorically asking which will triumph: “Space, time, both or neither?” He betrays maybe a little bias when he closes with the phrase: “Perhaps only time will tell.” He could have chosen: “Watch this space!”
Chance of life
Your look at more sophisticated attempts to define the habitable zone around stars 鈥� and Earth’s delicately balanced position within the solar system 鈥� leads me to wonder how this new approach affects the Drake equation, which aims to estimate the number of alien civilisations out there (8 June, p 40).
If, over x billion years, a planet has to orbit within a shifting Goldilocks zone, as its sun slowly increases its heat output, then the chance of life elsewhere must become a longer shot. A planet now has to be born and then remain within this shifting band long enough for life and then evolution to have a chance. The solar system’s habitable zone has moved considerably, and Earth’s achievement in having remained within it seems commensurately more impressive.
History repeating
Rebuilding on flood plains, as the ancient Egyptians did in their administrative centre Heit el-Ghurab despite numerous soakings, does not have to make sense (8 June, p 11). With bean counters it is same old, same old.
In the Australian state of Queensland, especially in Brisbane, there has been repeated catastrophic flooding recently. Commonwealth/State funding rules allow replacement of existing infrastructure but not innovation. Is 4500 years long enough to make bean counters imaginative and flexible, or for our rulers to lose their self importance? I think not.
Famous face
In trying to explain my prosopagnosia, or face blindness, to a friend, I pointed out that I couldn’t bring Brad Pitt’s face to mind and that I wouldn’t recognise him in the street. So I was amused to read that Pitt says he is face blind (1 June, p 7).
For the record
鈥� We played a little fast and loose with our units by saying cheetahs “accelerate up to 3 metres per second and decelerate by 4 mps in a single stride” (15 June, p 18). The units should of course have been metres per second per second (m/s2)
鈥� It was a case of nominative misdescription in Feedback’s look at scam conferences (15 June). Marine biologist Phil Clapham, not Phil Graham, informed us of his spoof paper on using giant rodents to generate power