Many voices
Determining a person’s personality from their voice is more complicated than Tiffany O’Callaghan’s article suggests (13 July, p 38).
Although I think I always speak in the same way, I am told that my voice differs depending on whether I am addressing a group or chatting at the dinner table.
Some people appear to have a number of personalities, and the one they subconsciously present, with its attendant voice, is the one appropriate to the circumstance. So, any single test will only reveal a partial picture of such people.
Dark particle
You report on the hunt for dark energy (11 May, p 32). My hypothesis is that dark matter and dark energy are different manifestations of the same particle: an as-yet-undiscovered boson with a force that at galactic scale is attractive but at universal scale is repulsive (a sort of Higgs boson with multiple personality disorder). I dub it the phlogiston.
Look, no hands
I would like to comment on Jeff Hecht’s article on in-car, hands-free communications (20 July, p 24). However momentarily dangerous texting may be, it is very fast. The increase in total risk to drivers over an entire journey is therefore small. A drunk is drunk all the way. In contrast, a text takes seconds, and can be sent when cognitive load is low.
Further, being connected while driving avoids wasted trips and detours, cutting journey times and avoiding hazards. The safest mile is the one not driven. Staying online while on the road is the safe and responsible thing to do.
I would not operate a cellphone while driving. It is far too distracting. Yet I have operated a VHF two-way radio behind the wheel. Although not completely effortless, it is far less distracting.
Much of the reason, I suspect, is that two-way radio use is governed by a communication protocol. It is a more formal exchange of words. Whose turn it is to speak is explicitly controlled by verbal markers like “over”, “out” and “say again”.
With cellphones there is no such procedure, and one must listen to things like the tone-of-voice and inflections. This is much more cognitively taxing.
Forcett, Tasmania, Australia
Free to negotiate
As Bob Ward writes, US president Barack Obama’s long-awaited emissions reduction plans face a rough ride through Congress (13 July, p 32). Amid such possible opposition, .
The EU has the largest emissions reduction effort of developed countries in the Kyoto protocol. The US and Canada, now both outside Kyoto, emit far more per capita. Why should the EU reward them with free trade?
And won’t some European countries demand, likewise, to stay in the free trade zone but opt out of EU-wide emissions controls? The EU must demand that, as an ongoing condition of free trade, the US and Canada make sustained reductions equivalent to the Kyoto requirements. This could help Obama no end.
Wise words?
Ian Hill in his letter compares Lady Churchill’s statement on the need for extravagance rather than thrift to advance science, and which has acquired the character of a proverb, with an opposing proverb on necessity as the spur for invention (20 July, p 29).
It’s worth noting that most proverbs can be matched in this way, from which we can conclude that most proverbs encode no reliable knowledge at all.
No-growth please
In his review of books on the links between environment and economy, Fred Pearce states that “a growing number of business people believe that only by tackling environmental resource issues head-on can they return to prosperity and growth” (6 July, p 42). This is a contradiction.
What business people and the rest of the world must accept is that a new economic strategy of prosperity without growth must be devised. Anything else would be a disaster.
A chance of life
There are several ways in which chance plays a part in evolution. And they are applicable to large organisms as well as the microorganisms that John Bonner focuses on (20 July, p 26). First, selection can only operate on mutations, which are random, as Bonner mentions.
Genetic drift, especially in small populations, is also a random process. It can mean a mutated gene ends up as the only version of that gene.
Even the survival of a species is possible by chance rather than by adaption or fitness.
I am sure evolutionary biologists can quote many other examples of chance in evolution. However, its existence does not undermine Darwin.
Bonner argues that there is a tendency for changes to persist, rather than be selected out, in small organisms. Is it not more the case that small changes persist, but are more noticeable in small organisms?
After all, nobody is really worrying too much about what might be the ecological niche for sticky-out ears.
Prestwood, Buckinghamshire, UK
3D or not 3D?
So the BBC is to stop producing 3D television programmes (13 July, p 23). The problem with 3D TV and its (arguably) waning popularity is that existing viewing systems are imperfect. But it’s likely that one day they will have improved and become much more appealing.
All media go through experimental and development stages. So the BBC should take the long view and record as many programmes in 3D as it can. The technology will catch up.
Data footprint
After reading that data centres will surpass the aviation industry in carbon emissions by 2020 (6 July, p 38), I couldn’t help thinking that most internet users fail to realise the environmental cost of their activity.
It seems ironic that storing millions of cute kitten videos, tweets and “status updates” might contribute to the extinction of big cats.
Conscience offset
Fred Pearce and subsequent letter writers are right to question the merits of eco-offsetting (22 June, p 26). It is hard enough to replicate habitats for wildlife in situ, let alone remotely.
The elephant in the room is the UK’s planning system, which fails to say no and mean it when a site is too valuable to be disturbed, or to police and enforce ecological conditions when consent for development is granted.
I have lost count of the wasted opportunities to integrate biodiversity enhancements because of this. Offsetting is a weasel word for a defective get-out being misleadingly promoted as a sop to our conscience. We need nature on our doorsteps.
Counter measures
In his letter L. Clark seems to think the recently revealed massive surveillance by the US National Security Agency and others is justified by the threat of terrorism, and that anyone who disagrees has lost all sense of perspective (13 July, p 32).
In 2011, : nearly a 9/11 death toll every month. Surveillance could easily reduce this. So how about a campaign for mandatory GPS tracking of all vehicles in the US so the government can detect and punish all bad driving?
Surely such surveillance is justified to identify and punish poor drivers, since they’re a much bigger threat than terrorists. Or maybe we could have a civilised discussion about what’s a sensible response to a given threat.
Baby boom
Andy Robinson is right in noting that those people who produce the most offspring will increase their genetic representation in future generations (20 July, p 28). We seem to face an intractable dilemma. Malthusian predictions of collapse in the face of unconstrained population growth may have been delayed, but they seem unavoidable.
Dust's a devil
Nigel Henbest focuses on human issues associated with a permanent Mars settlement (13 July, p 43). There are of course many major technical issues to be overcome, such as providing oxygen, water and food, all of which require serious engineering solutions. A lot of equipment will have to be flown to Mars.
Then there is also the issue of long-term maintenance of this infrastructure. One thing Mars does have in abundance is dust 鈥� and dust is the enemy of moving parts, particularly for long-term colonisation. Machinery, no matter how carefully designed and built, will suffer.
Hail David
Science educator David Muir’s experiments to determine the sometimes painful effects of raindrop impacts are the work of genius and should not go unrewarded (The Last Word, 20 July). Will you be nominating him for an Ig Nobel prize?
For the record
鈥� We must have been feeling a little giddy when we said the GPS-free car navigation system developed in Chicago (13 July, p 23) used motion sensors. It doesn’t.
鈥� Oops. In our story on musicians jamming while up to 3000 kilometres apart (13 July, p 21) we may have inadvertently broken the speed of light. Rather than the overall delay in the connection, it is the encoding and decoding of sound that takes just 5 milliseconds.