State of violence
Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai argue that most violence arises from morality, not a lack of it (29 November, p 30).
But they omit to say anything about state violence, which is also often driven by ostensibly moral reasons. The moral justifications for state violence are usually concocted with great efforts expended to sell the fiction.
I wonder if the authors have considered whether the individual’s moral justifications for violence might arise similarly? Recent work has demonstrated the brains ability to rationalise almost anything, and without any conscious awareness of the wild mental gymnastics involved.
Canyon Lake, Texas, US
Machine martyrs
Chris Baraniuk addresses the use of robots in armed conflict not only from a technical point of view, as he also considers the ethical, political and social consequences (15 November, p 38).
Unfortunately he doesn’t give greater consideration to what happens when combatants ignore international conventions. Here issues of terrorism or genocide become central.
We move from technical fail-safe systems and the requirement for a human to make an ethical decision before issuing that “kill order”, to autonomous suicide bombers or indiscriminate attacks on civilians. A robot suicide bomber cannot become a holy martyr, but I doubt that will stop someone trying to build one.
London, UK
Costing the Earth
I read with interest Josh Tetrick’s plans for creating eco-friendly mayonnaise by substituting pea protein for eggs (22 November, p 31).
Whilst agreeing with his statement that “the vast majority of food we buy today is bad for our bodies and destructive for the planet”, I feel that his product is rather missing the point.
Mayonnaise is not a staple food, it is a luxury item that has been turned into a staple food through industrial production methods.
Mayonnaise treated as a luxury item is bad neither for humans, chickens nor the environment. The real goal should be a re-evaluation of the way we produce and consume food, not simply finding new ways of carrying on as before.
Tetrick’s aims are laudable but he does not say how much land would be required to produce his plant mayonnaise, land that could perhaps be better used for developing products that really would deliver positive change.
Edinburgh, UK
Data freeze
Bravo to the physicists at CERN for making their data freely available online (29 November, p 6). Can we hope that climate scientists will be inspired to follow suit?
One might think that helping solve the world’s climate problems is a more pressing issue than finding new types of boson, but basic observational data on the world’s climate is still frustratingly difficult and expensive to get hold of.
Many countries can be criticised, but the UK is one of the worst offenders, where climate data access and use is restricted by Crown copyright, and the Met Office has a team dedicated to trying to sell information on the climate.
London, UK
Out of the fire
Perry Bebbington makes a very important point in his letter when he says that oil used to make plastics should be referred to as “plastic ore” rather than fossil fuel (29 November, p 32).
But he doesn’t take this line of thought far enough. Can you imagine modern civilisation without plastics or steel? Plastics need petroleum 鈥� although other alternatives may be developed 鈥� and steel production needs coal, for which no potential alternatives are in sight.
How irresponsible is it to burn these precious resources for energy when alternative energy sources are available.
Sydney, Australia
Carbon's sting
Arguing against divestment from fossil fuels, Paul Younger suggests we should exploit the access that investing in fuel companies gives us to company leaders (15 November, p 26).
I would suggest rather that we remind ourselves of the story of the frog that agrees to ferry a scorpion across a river. Midway, the scorpion stings the frog, dooming both to drown. When the frog asks why, the scorpion replies: “because I am a scorpion”.
Trading investments to get close to fuel companies will end the same way. Of course, we will all be boiling alive rather than drowning. We must learn to use less and share more equitably and take back control of our planet.
Glasgow, UK
Propeller heads
Owen Mooney makes good points about the need for fossil fuels as part of an effective energy portfolio (22 November, p 34).
I would add that we have the technologies to make dirty coal clean. Most energy plants are single-pass processes and at best 30 per cent efficient. Waste energy is discharged into the atmosphere.
Why not capture most of the waste heat generated and use it in second and third-pass processes that add to the efficiency of coal? We have the technology to do this but the power companies do not have the incentive.
Then there are the exhaust gases. Again we have the biological technologies to utilise these to create usable products. Once they are cooled by the added processes in the plant, they would be usable for other technologies.
With photosynthesis we can create fuel oils, plastics, fertilisers and more. We do not need to discharge it into the atmosphere.
I hear you say “it is not economical!” Well, when Earth’s atmosphere is loaded with carbon dioxide, will you still be saying that? It is our responsibility as a community to clean up our use of fossil fuels and leave the world cleaner for our children.
Brisbane, Australia
Propeller heads
Owen Mooney writes that if the aviation industry had advanced as little as the nuclear industry, “we would still be flying propeller aircraft”. We are.
The ATR 42 and ATR 72 aircraft built in Toulouse have been experiencing a resurgence of interest in recent years. Over their operating range of about 1500 kilometres, the difference in flight time between these and fan jet aircraft is of little importance, but the much better fuel economy of propeller-driven aircraft gives them a clear advantage.
He might also note that in the UK, the Royal Air Force has started to take delivery of Airbus A400 military transport aircraft, these are also propeller driven.
Blagnac, France
Code monkeys
The screenshot illustrating your story on computers that can program themselves (1 November, p 21) shows PHP code in which the main method begins with an instruction to print the word “banana”, followed immediately by an “exit” clause, which makes the rest of the code redundant.
Have the programmers already been replaced by a roomful of monkeys with web access?
Dublin, Ireland
Cloud control
Andy Coghlan examines a number of geoengineering proposals that could be applied as panaceas for the global indecisiveness around climate change (29 November, p 8).
All of those included seem a long way from being realised as viable projects, and some could have serious side effects, notwithstanding the impact of failure and lost time.
But who chooses and who takes responsibility for such projects? The United Nations is light years away from being in this position.
There is another solution 鈥搑educing carbon emissions 鈥� but that is tragically beyond the grasp of bickering primates.
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
First in class
Your article by Aviva Rutkin highlighted the marked difference between the language of children from poor and more affluent backgrounds (29 November, p 14).
This difference was identified in landmark research by Basil Bernstein at the University of London’s Institute of Education more than half a century ago.
He characterised the language of working-class children as “limited code” and that of middle-class children as “elaborated code”. A 10-year study of interactions between mothers and children from the two social backgrounds was subsequently led by his sometime colleague Ruqaiya Hasan, later of Macquarie University in Australia.
St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK
Deadly dessert
Regarding your special report on chemical additives, “pesticides” is not a chemically meaningful classification (29 November, p 34).
Since the natural world is the battleground for chemical warfare fought constantly between species, it is filled with pesticides.
Many of the pesticides we exploit are natural in origin, such as antibiotics, strychnine and nicotine. At this time of year, let us consider the cyanide in our Christmas cake. Synthetic cyanide is sometimes used as a crop fumigant, but that is not how it finds its way into our food.
Many plants produce cyanide, probably as a larvicide. The plum family does, for example, which includes the almond and cherry.
Traditional marzipan includes poisonous bitter almonds in the recipe. I also fancy I have tasted cyanide in parsnips, another seasonal favourite.
Kenilworth, Warwickshire, UK
Radioactive purge
Paul Collins is correct in saying that tritium is an unstable isotope of hydrogen (6 December, p 33). However to call it “very dangerous” is misleading.
Externally, it presents no hazard, the radiation does not penetrate the dead layer of the skin. It can indeed be incorporated in body fluids, but the body turns over its water content rapidly, and so you quite quickly get rid of it.
Years ago, radiation workers who ingested tritium were sent down the pub for a few beers, to turn it over faster!
The low-energy beta particles that tritium produces are rather ineffective at doing biological damage, even when inhaled or swallowed.
In fact the “permitted body burden” for tritium is far higher than for any other isotope I know of. So tritium, while certainly not to be treated lightly, is probably the safest radioactive isotope there is in routine use.
Southampton, UK
Well-heeled
Corrinne Burns’s article on how altering the sound of your footfall can change how you feel reminds me that in Canada during the 1950s there was a fad for metal strips on the bottoms of shoes (22 November, p 40). These made loud clicks as you walked.
Their wearers affected conspicuous clothing and an insouciant gait. I thought all these features were components of a specific style, but Burns’s article indicates that the clickers were perhaps driving the other features of the style.
The fad quickly faded when people realised the damage metal clickers did to hardwood floors.
Deep River, Ontario, Canada
Follow that bee
In his letter defending the invasive plant Himalayan balsam, Granville Tunnicliffe Wilson mentions that bees return to his hive covered with its characteristic pollen, but he doesn’t know where they have found it (20 September, p 31).
Perhaps he should observe the famed bee dance of returning workers. This will give him direction and distance to the plant in question.
Wellington, New Zealand