When men conspire
I agree with Oliver and Wood that “The brain did not evolve to process information about industrial economies, terrorism or medicine, but about survival in the wild. This includes a tendency to assume that unseen predators are lurking or that coincidental events are somehow related.”
I have, however, also noticed an assumption by intellectuals, cognoscenti 鈥� and also by those who can’t be bothered 鈥� that anyone who raises an issue such as institutional racism in the police, widespread child abuse by the church, or a cover-up after an event like the Hillsborough football stadium disaster, is mad and not to be believed. This isn’t helpful either.
What has been shown by recent events is that concerns should neither be believed automatically nor be brushed aside as a conspiracy theory, but impartially investigated by those with the responsibility and salary to do so. While running the charity , I have found that one of the hardest things to do is raise concerns about any problems in an industry or profession.
Seaview, Isle of Wight, UK
For the record
鈥� The illustration accompanying our story on deep-sea life was a little murky: bottom-dwelling amphipods are shrimp-like, but not shrimp (6 December 2014, p 46)
鈥� Our article on educational robots (6 December 2014, p 22) loses marks: Nanyang Technology University is actually in Singapore.
鈥� And Martin Bojowald is at Penn State University’s University Park campus (13 December 2014, p 34).
鈥� We should have spelled the name of vice-admiral Robert FitzRoy, promoter of the storm glass, as he did 鈥� with what would now be called an InterCap (20/27 December 2014, p 68).
Eyes in the sky
Thank you for the image of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (13 December 2014, p 12). And, hey, I immediately saw this face…
Niwot, Colorado, US
Shedding the pounds
鈥� We were expecting a subtle joke there. But it was just wrong.
Shedding the pounds
Am I missing something in Michael Blumlein’s short story “Y(ou)r q(ua)ntifi(e)d s(el)f” (20/27 December 2014, p 80)? Or can I reset my scales to kilograms and lose 1 kilogram of weight more quickly than I can lose half a pound? This sounds to me like a great New Year weight loss plan.
Brecon, Powys, UK
Black diamonds
Guy Cox says it is irresponsible to burn precious resources (20/27 December 2014, p 42). At a seminar in the late 1970s, Arthur Scargill, then leader of the UK’s National Union of Mineworkers, spent some time describing the range of uses to which coal can be put. He concluded that the very worst thing we can do is throw it on a hearth and set fire to it.
Glasshouses, North Yorkshire, UK
Librarians rule
As a librarian and information scientist 鈥� and one continually being told how “obsolete” my field is becoming 鈥� I was gratified to read Laura Dattaro’s article on the importance of data scientists (US edition, 6 December 2014, p 52. See bit.ly/EWData).
Dattaro is correct in saying that cataloguing and classification are essential to large data sets, and that librarians are essential parts of science teams. We have indeed, as Nancy Ritchey is quoted as saying, been in the business of making information available and searchable for centuries.
Highland Park, New Jersey, US
Management-speak
Neither the authors of Fuckology: Critical essays on John Money’s diagnostic concepts nor your reviewer Simon Ings (13 December 2014, p 48) could be aware that the word “fuckology” was used and possibly coined by John Sorohan, director general of RT脡, Ireland’s public service radio and TV broadcaster, in the late 1980s. He had come up through the engineering ranks and was, therefore, a fairly straight thinker.
He was of course referring to management-speak, faffing around and in general not sticking to the point. His catchphrase was “we’ll have no fuckology around here.”
Kilmacanoge, Co. Wicklow, Ireland
Snooze alarm
鈥� It can happen. But you can also wake when you stop snoring due to sleep apnoea, which .
Snooze alarm
I notice that the 快猫短视频 book Question Everything is being promoted with the question “Why doesn’t your own snoring wake you up?” I can assure you from personal experience that my own snoring can wake me up.
Lerwick, Shetland, UK
Microbe menace
Hacking viruses to fight cancer cells sounds like a great idea (13 December 2014, p 28). But what happens when these synthetic viruses, to which we humans have presumably evolved no immunity, escape into the environment? Could a viral cancer cure, individualised to one person’s needs, become a killer or a cause of illness in others when it escapes into the wild?
The interview with Andrew Hessel gave no consideration to these matters, merely stating that “regulatory concerns are the last of your worries” in compassionate use. In responsible medical science, shouldn’t the potential for negative impacts and collateral damage beyond the patient be considered?
The eventual availability of small-scale “dollar a dose” virus printing equipment raises the prospect of putting production of bioweapons into the hands of those who would use it against humanity. Time for a rethink?
Bristol, UK
When men conspire
Is belief in conspiracy theories due solely to human psychology and emotional reassurance, as Oliver and Wood say? They report more than half of people in the US believing in conspiracies. What are the comparable statistics for Europeans? It seems to me that many in the US believe in irrational things, such as creationism and alien abduction.
Might there be some cause specific to US culture 鈥� perhaps a “better safe than sorry” outlook? In an enormously powerful yet relatively young and insecure nation, might it seem safer to hedge your bets and believe in things that may not be true, rather than not to believe in something that 鈥� if it turned out to be true after all 鈥� could spell total disaster, such as alien conquest or the wrath of God?
Dalguise, Perthshire, UK
When men conspire
Eric Oliver and Tom Wood discuss people’s willingness to accept conspiracy theories (20/27 December 2014, p 36). In my experience, people find it easy to overlook them too.
I was a law instructor for a UK police force in the late 1980s. Someone in my department mentioned that Cyril Smith, then the member of parliament for Rochdale, had many offences of gross indecency with children on file. Even after I did some of my own research I still doubted the information, as covering it up would have required a conspiracy between the police Special Branch, the Security Service, senior lawyers and members of parliament. This seemed farcical.
Allegations of a child abuse ring involving British MPs have now come to light, as has testimony that investigators were prevented from bringing cases against Smith. Perhaps the question for Oliver and Wood should be: why did so few people believe this conspiracy theory at the time, and why did I and others dismiss it so easily?
Burgess Hill, West Sussex, UK
Sprucing up the US
Fred Pearce describes Chinese efforts to hold back the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts through tree planting (13 December 2014, p 13). This mirrors work in the US during the 1930s to construct the , a 160-kilometre-wide swathe of 220 million trees stretching from Canada to Texas.
The work was carried out by the , a work relief programme that employed 300,000 men annually. The Shelterbelt was intended to help control the Dust Bowl by reducing soil erosion.
The clouds of dust that turned midday skies dark as far away as Washington DC became a thing of the past.
Hastings, East Sussex, UK
Cosmic coincidence
I am less than impressed by the table titled “Symmetries of 37” in Christopher Kemp’s article on the putatively portent number (20/27 December 2014, p 61).
The pattern is a by-product of 10 being our chosen base for counting. The base itself is arbitrary rather than inevitable, and has probably arisen because of the number of digits attached to our hands. It hardly represents evidence for a message sent by extraterrestrial intelligence before we evolved.
Burwash, East Sussex, UK
Problem spelled out
Aviva Rutkin writes that by the age of 3 children from affluent families have heard some 30 million more words than their impoverished counterparts (29 November 2014, p 14).
The article goes on to discuss the consequences of this disadvantage in terms of brain development. But has anyone thought to ask how and why this relative deprivation occurs in the first place?
The article seems to take such a state of affairs as a given. But if it is as serious a disadvantage as the article suggests, surely the root cause needs to be addressed, not merely responding to the consequences on a post-hoc basis?
Limassol, Cyprus
Only if reversible
Regarding schemes to combat global warming by large-scale geoengineering projects, not only is there the vexed matter of who decides which should be tried (20/27 December 2014, p 43) but, even if this can be agreed, there is the small matter of getting it right first time.
Surely the key property of any such scheme is that it should be reversible. We are already well into one accidental geohack 鈥� burning fossil fuels to raise the global temperature 鈥� and that seems pretty hard to stop or reverse.
But even if we had the means to pause or reverse a geoengineering project, what makes anyone think it will be any easier to apply these than to do so for global warming? There will be huge financial, industrial and political interests vested in the effort by the time we realise we got it wrong.
There is no planet B!
Cartmel, Cumbria, UK
The very first crypt
I was struck by Catherine Brahic’s report of the fabulous find of early hominin fossils in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa (29 November 2014, p 40). This could perhaps be the most important archaeological site yet found.
If the chamber is as remote and inaccessible as she describes, and is knee-deep in bones without evidence of occupation or them having been dragged there by predators, is it possible that the many skeletons were placed there deliberately by the deceased hominins’ relatives and friends? Could this be the earliest tomb yet discovered?
If so, do we need to rethink the cultural life of some of our remotest ancestors?
Hungerford, Berkshire, UK
Microbe menace
鈥� There are good questions around safety, to which we do not yet have answers. On the subject of malicious use, Hessel says: “People worry about the hacking of digital technology to make viruses that could be dangerous. But I am not inventing any of these tools; they are all here today and accessible. It’s about time we started using them in productive ways.”