Editor's pick: Sizing up the Superman stance
William Lee Adams described the confidence-building possibilities of the so-called Superman stance (20 June, p 40). During a recent visit to Hampton Court Palace in Greater London, I realised that portraits of King Henry VIII and some of his contemporaries show a very similar powerful stance.
I wondered whether this stance could be found in earlier examples of portraiture. Internet searches for portraits of preceding English monarchs, and for classical statues of rulers and mythological figures, suggested, oddly, that Henry VIII was the first person to appear in the Superman stance.
Even portraits of the hero-god , while heroically muscled, appear in a position of relative repose, usually supported by a club or other prop. So how much of this supposed confidence-building stance is a cultural, rather than a physiological, construct? Or may we gain similar confidence by leaning casually on a traffic bollard in the posture of a classical Hercules?
Wigsthorpe, Northamptonshire, UK
Honouring heroes of the virus battle
We have come a long way in our understanding of the Ebola virus since it was first identified in 1976. But the most profound aspect of the recent outbreak in West Africa isn’t the resulting improvement in medical procedures or even the discoveries made about where the virus can persist in the body.
Instead, it is the remarkable heroism shown by doctors like Ian Crozier (6 June, p 26), who risked their lives under the most perilous conditions in order to save others. Medical personnel on the front lines not only slowed the spread of the virus to neighbouring countries, but also bought more time for researchers to develop treatment options and perhaps one day find a cure.
Syracuse, New York, US
It should be confusing: we have to use our brains to interpret what is being seen
joins on the film Interstellar after Jacob Aron’s report on it (ow.ly/OFG18)
Reasons not to shun the sun
Richard Weller examines the relationships between sunlight and health benefits (13 June, p 26). I couldn’t help wondering whether sunlight exposure is merely a side effect of being active outdoors? Are we missing the obvious here?
Taroona, Tasmania, Australia
Reasons not to shun the sun
Thank you Richard Weller for trying, at last, to put the record straight: it isn’t just the popular press that tends to treat skin cancer as one disease.
It is more than 30 years since it was recognised that there is a relatively low incidence of malignant melanoma in agricultural workers compared with office workers 鈥� while the reverse was true for another skin cancer, squamous cell carcinoma. This led some to suggest that fluorescent lights emitted an ultraviolet wavelength that was particularly hazardous for malignant melanoma.
The truth is more prosaic. Melanin is the best sunscreen to protect the proliferating cells that are vulnerable to becoming cancerous, including the melanocytes that produce it. Sunlight induces the proliferation of melanocytes in the lower dermis, and continual low-level exposure gives the melanin time to spread to the upper layers of the skin. But infrequent intense exposure is dangerous because there is no time for this to happen. Slow, steady tanning is preferable to slapping on artificial sunscreen.
Finally, thank you Richard for suggesting that my extensive small solar keratosis might be an indicator of a longer life.
Corton Denham, Somerset, UK
Your sea may go down as well as up
Michael Le Page gives figures for the sea level rises that will follow the melting of the vulnerable Antarctic ice sheets and the Greenland ice sheet (13 June, p 8). These assume that rises will be the same everywhere. It has been reported, however, that when an ice sheet melts, the sea level rise isn’t uniform (4 May 2013, p 36). It is smaller close to where the ice sheet had been, where levels may actually fall; and greater at large distances. That’s because the gravitational attraction of ice sheets makes the sea level abnormally high near them, an effect that vanishes when the ice sheet is no longer there.
Thus we in the UK have relatively little to fear from the Greenland ice sheet, but much to fear from the Antarctic ones: the rise we experience will be more than the figures given. Even if temperature rise is limited to 2 掳C, it seems that not just coastal cities but also some of those inland will be lost in the not-too-distant future. Very expensive sea defences will be required if they are to be saved.
East Wellow, Hampshire, UK
The improbability of anything being
The continuing discussion of whether or not the universe is fine-tuned for life (most recently in your letters column of 30 May) inspires another thought. You could just as well say that the universe is fine-tuned to allow for the existence of a randomly chosen asteroid with its own size, shape and composition.
Because we happen to be alive, we naturally think that life is a big deal. But the truth is that anything at all could claim that the universe is fine-tuned to allow for its existence. Make a few small changes in the fundamental parameters of physics, and I’m sure that particular asteroid would also no longer be around.
By applying this argument to bigger and bigger objects and volumes of space, you could even say that the universe is fine-tuned to allow itself to exist, whatever that may mean.
New York, US
Conservatism and compassion
Simon Jones makes some outrageous and fallacious comments regarding the politics of conservatism and socialism (letter, 13 June). For example, he claims that “conservatives regard the general public as… stupid”, whereas in fact the opposite is true. Conservatives believe in giving people the right to make up their own minds, whereas socialists aim to take from everyone and then determine how to plan society.
Lowton, Greater Manchester, UK
Conservatism and compassion
I was fascinated to read Simon Jones’s letter referring to socialist belief and wondered whether he was speaking as a believer or as an outside observer. I suspect the latter is the case.
Just as there are as many versions of any religious faith as there are practitioners, so there are multiple versions of socialism, and very brief summaries can be rather misleading.
As a lifelong socialist, I don’t recognise his statement that we “see people as naturally communal”. Whether or not communality is an inherent human trait I shall leave to the anthropologists.
If it isn’t, and if tribalism is the norm, then that tribalism needs to join all the other “natural” behaviours that we willingly suppress in the name of civilised conduct.
I would prefer to say that, given the nature of the way we occupy this dot in the universe, unless we adopt ways of working along socialist 鈥� and green 鈥� lines we are probably condemning ourselves to centuries of severe hardship, if not oblivion.
Glasshouses, North Yorkshire, UK
Disappearing the unemployed
In his letter saying that robots are all tax avoiders, Martin van Raay touches on one of the biggest failures of a free market (30 May). The economics of business treats ex-employees as “externalities” 鈥� that is, as ceasing to exist.
The automation of a task may be profitable for an industry, but once we accept that we don’t leave our citizens to starve, freeze or die of treatable ailments, we find it’s not profitable for the economy as a whole.
Poll taxes and payroll taxes exacerbate the problem. The rational arrangement would be that everyone receives a minimum wage from the government, with earned wages being a taxable extra. This would reduce the per-employee cost of businesses, encourage hiring and benefit the economy overall.
Sydney, Australia
Disappearing the unemployed
Martin van Raay asks “When you replace a tax-paying taxi driver with a driverless car, who is going to pay the unemployment benefit of the former driver?” In a free enterprise economy, competition will make driverless taxis less expensive, and the passenger’s savings will be spent on other services that create employment for the former driver.
Surrey, British Columbia, Canada
Wireless power not quite right yet
Your report on power transmission via Wi-Fi contains the chilling statement that “the team designed software that broadcasts meaningless data across several Wi-Fi channels when no one is using the internet” (6 June, p 18). This is a terrible idea in so many ways. The frequency space used for Wi-Fi is increasingly saturated already. Adding contentless broadcasts simply exacerbates the problem and reduces the data bandwidth for everyone else in the neighbourhood.
Such devices are acting very much like radio jammers. If one must use non-directional broadcast radio waves, it would be far better to use a dedicated device that transmits at frequencies not used for data.
But even then, it will always be a wasteful way of delivering power. There are far better alternatives under development that involve more efficient wireless transfer, either by directional beaming or by tuned induction.
Ringwood, Hampshire, UK
Multiple perception and existence
In his review of the book The World Beyond Your Head, Mike Holderness alludes to the philosopher Ren茅 Descartes saying “Cogito, ergo sum“, “I think, therefore I am” (9 May, p 45). Philosophers and many scientists are bound to the notion of “being”. Are we all real, or is only one of us real?
To the philosophers, and to Descartes, I respond: I perceive you and the universe in so many ways that therefore you and the universe also exist. The universe does what it says on the tin: it looks real, it feels real, so it is real.
Barnsley, South Yorkshire, UK