Going off script
I can confirm from personal experience that “typing rather than writing by hand may alter the way we think”, as your recent article suggests.
Twenty years ago I took an exam in which three essays had to be written. In my job I used a word processor daily, and I had become used to typing a rough draft, then going back and editing it until I was satisfied.
In a written exam this isn’t possible, so I had to relearn the discipline of first working out the structure of each essay, then thinking through each paragraph before I started to write.
This wasn’t easy, and I needed to practise. I also discovered that my writing hand needed physical training; at first, it suffered from cramp after writing one page.
High Peak, Derbyshire, UK
For the record
鈥� Up in smoke: our special report on e-cigarettes credited Clive Bates as director of ASH (1 November, p 35). The organisation is currently headed by Deborah Arnott
Redundant delivery
Aviva Rutkin’s article on Google’s same-day delivery service confirms my opinion that we have become a decadent society inhabited largely by self-obsessed idlers (25 October, p 22). In the time it took for her nail polish to arrive she could have gone to a shop and bought some 鈥� she writes from Boston 鈥� not the back of beyond.
Whittingslow, Shropshire, UK
A load of hot air?
Abigail Beall writes that storing excess wind power as compressed air is “not such a bad idea after all” (1 November, p 50). It is one way of easing the peaks between electricity supply and demand, but by itself it isn’t a particularly efficient way of achieving it.
Compressing air requires a significant amount of energy and produces a significant amount of waste heat. Unless that heat is utilised at the time of compression, you will end up storing only a fraction of the energy put in. There will be further energy losses when the compressed air is released to regenerate electricity.
Using gravity to store energy, in the form of water pumped uphill, is probably a more efficient method.
This has been happening at Ffestiniog hydroelectric power station in north Wales since 1963, meaning the technology arrived in the UK 15 years earlier than suggested in your article.
North Nibley, Gloucestershire, UK
Dollar democracy
Laurence Steinberg provides a well-reasoned argument for science to inform voting age (11 October, p 30).
However, voting age is not a scientific issue but a political one, as he acknowledges. The privilege to vote shouldn’t be based on age, but on responsibility. The world has largely replaced “taxation without representation” with “representation without responsibility”, giving voting rights to people in prison, for example, and increasingly to young people who may not have contributed anything to society by the time they cast their first vote.
An old system that let only those who paid taxes vote may not have been perfect either, but at least it gave a say in public affairs only to those who paid the piper.
Were such a system reinstated, it would have the added advantage of also bringing in more tax revenue, as those wishing to have a vote would have to curb their tax-avoiding proclivities.
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Age of ignorance
I wholeheartedly agree with Mike Belton’s sentiments on artificial intelligence replacing the human search for knowledge (25 October, p 31). But I can’t work out if his tongue was firmly in cheek when he asked: “If you could find out anything by typing a question into the internet, would there be any meaning to our lives?”
Surely we are more or less there. I have a number of younger friends and they don’t know anything 鈥� if they want to find something out, they do indeed question a well-known search engine, satisfy their current curiosity and in 24 hours’ time have forgotten what they “learned”.
I find this very sad, but is it deplorable? If we can now find out anything we want to know at the click of a mouse, do we need to know anything, or has knowledge run its course? My tongue is firmly in my cheek, of course.
Reading, Berkshire, UK
Blue-sky thinking
While touting flying machines for individual commuters, did you consider the noise generated by a machine capable of lifting and carrying a human in directed flight? Have you ever listened to a Volocopter? A jet-pack? A plain old ultralight aircraft? What sort of planet would Earth be if the skies were full of roaring, buzzing commuters? Where could we go to escape the racket?
Taos, New Mexico, US
Blue-sky thinking
The Volocopter might beat congestion on the way to work (25 October, p 19), but how many of them could you fit in the average car park? Until these machines can fold up into a space no bigger than the average car, they will remain a niche product, useful in some specialist situations and a toy for the wealthy.
Remember when we were all going to be zooming around in our own personal hovercraft?
Winchester, Hampshire, UK
Memorable flavour
Aviva Rutkin reports that a group of middle-aged people fed 900 milligrams of cocoa flavanols a day showed memory improvements on par with brains 30 years younger (1 November, p 18). But we were told that to get these effects by eating chocolate you would have to consume so much you would damage your health.
This might depend on what type of chocolate you eat, since they vary greatly in the flavanol content, containing up to 1300 mg per 100 grams of chocolate. As the study didn’t include any dose response tests, it is possible that the beneficial effect could be obtained at much lower doses of flavanols.
In the meantime, I will try to limit myself to 150 grams of high flavanol chocolate a day, hard as it is to maintain such a low intake.
West Launceston, Tasmania, Australia
Quarantine state
Your position against banning travellers arriving from the three countries affected by the Ebola outbreak is well intentioned, but I don’t think it is realistic (25 October, p 3). You compare an entry ban to that imposed by the US in 1987 on people who were HIV positive, but Ebola isn’t the same as HIV. It is much more contagious, and if we aren’t careful it could become pandemic.
If the Ebola outbreak becomes pandemic, it could be very difficult to protect yourself, which isn’t the case with HIV. We don’t have any way to detect carriers of Ebola at present, and so we can’t take the risk of allowing it to slip in. We have to protect ourselves now.
The reduction in flights after the terrorist attacks on the US World Trade Center in 2001 delayed the flu season. This shows that reducing flights can work.
It is true that a travel ban will make things worse in the affected countries, but this disease is going to cause great disruption anyway. We must not sacrifice the rest of the world in a vain effort to mitigate the disaster there.
Les Essarts-le-Roi, France
Going off script
I enjoyed Tiffany O’Callaghan’s article exploring whether typing lecture notes aids or hampers learning (1 November, p 40).
Way back in the late 1950s, my college biology teacher Jack Halliday used to repeatedly admonish us to “listen and look” rather than scribble down notes. The sight of 20 or so heads bent over notebooks drove him mad, and with good reason.
Whether students are concentrating on exercise books or laptops, the mechanics of note-taking get in the way of the two-way communication that should characterise face-to-face teaching. Providing handouts or online backup notes for students facilitates attention.
Sheffield, UK
Critical mass
I cannot accept Molly Sauter’s conceptualisation of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as an exercise in free speech (25 October, p 27).
Freedom of speech requires you to be able to declare your political views in a manner that ensures everybody knows you have them and can enquire further. For example, striking workers can parade outside their place of work with placards declaring their dispute, a practice that we allow.
A DDoS is akin to barricading the place of work and physically preventing access by strikebreakers, a practice which we have largely banned for good reason. It runs counter to the notion of free speech, and is a deployment of force to solve problems that should be solved with argument.
Penwood, Berkshire, UK
Power to the people
鈥� We will never know for sure. But it is likely that a critical mass of people as well as energy is needed to reach something we would recognise as an industrialised civilisation.
Power to the people
Examining the possibility of a world without fossil fuels, Michael Le Page comes to the conclusion that global warming may be an inevitable result of any industrialised civilisation, as fossil fuels are an unavoidable phase of that development (18 October, p 34).
He also notes that this might explain the apparent absence of extraterrestrial civilisations despite the high probability that they exist, as each planet offers one chance at transitioning from reliance on finite fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.
Perhaps it would be useful to consider a sentient race that could control its population? If our global population had stabilised at a healthy 7 million, rather than 7 billion and more, it’s perfectly feasible that we could have passed right through our fossil fuel phase without wrecking our planet’s environment.
Hampton, Middlesex, UK
A stitch in time
I was very interested to read the article on innovations that have shaped the evolution of the human species. But one very necessary ingredient seemed to be missing: women.
Your front cover showed the stereotypical male hunter-gatherer and the graphics throughout were clearly male. The only picture to include a woman relegated her to being a passive onlooker while the man held centre stage.
Haddington, East Lothian, UK
A stitch in time
鈥� Necessity is the mother of invention, so they say. Given that our ancestors didn’t make it out of Africa and up to colder latitudes until around 60,000 years ago, they probably had little need for snug-fitting clothes.
A stitch in time
Colin Barras’s article on revolutionary ideas included details of milestones in human evolution (25 October, p 32).
The relation of two events surprised me: we are told that humans started wearing clothes about 70,000 years ago and invented the needle about 60,000 years ago.
Were our ancestors wearing clothes for 10,000 years before someone thought of sewing them up with needle and thread? With the greatest of respect, this isn’t very impressive!
Sandy, Bedfordshire, UK
Quarantine state
鈥� We argued that it is unlikely that Ebola can be contained in West Africa by closing borders 鈥� but such closure might well precipitate the collapse of our ability to control its spread. Given a choice between sporadic cases elsewhere, and uncontrolled spread, the best way to prevent an Ebola outbreak at home is to tackle it abroad.