Editor's pick: A revolution powered by crops
Bob Holmes states that people in the highlands of Borneo began to grow domesticated rice only after the second world war (31 October, p 31).
I led the anthropological part of a recent in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo. Earth cores show that domesticated rice has been grown there in both wet and dry forms of shifting cultivation for a minimum of 400 years.
What happened after the war is that rice was first grown there in permanent, wet fields.
The adoption of cultivation of staple crops needs to be understood in the context of their social and cosmological roles, and how these are grounded in their physical properties 鈥� such as being easily quantified, stored for relatively long periods and distributed.
I agree that the large-scale cultivation of staple grain crops was not a “revolution” in the sense of a sudden discovery that it is possible to cultivate plants.
But it did involve another kind of revolution: it transformed human society. The focus on certain staple crops established a basis for hierarchy and for social and economic differentiation. It arguably set up a different relationship with other living species and with what we now call the natural environment.
London, UK
Reliable software has its price
Timothy Revell reports on efforts to develop software that can tolerate bugs (5 December, p 40). A major cause of buggy software is the attitude of some programmers and, rather more significantly, their managers.
In the 1980s, I was a utility programmer, producing software to automate much of our team’s work. Before allowing it to go live, I would always hand my code over to Pete. Pete had the most amazing talent for doing what no programmer would ever imagine anybody would do with a program; once my software was Pete-proof I could be confident it was going to work well.
By contrast, in the 1990s my job was to test a business-critical, complex and very unstable suite of code. Whenever I flagged up serious bugs that should have been showstoppers, I came under pressure to sign the release off so it could go live on its target date.
I made myself very unpopular by refusing to comply 鈥� especially among senior managers, who no doubt had bonuses riding on the schedule. I was shuffled off to another role so someone more compliant could take over.
Ipswich, Suffolk, UK
Reliable software has its price
It sounds great at first to be able to stop a computer from crashing by offering up a random number to a program when the required value is undefined or won’t fit in the computer’s memory.
It may work some of the time, but many glitches are caused by an incorrect value, not an actual computer crash. The proposed method will increase the risk of incorrect values, possibly without alerting the user that this has been done.
I hope that the method will at least store a log file somewhere, so that when our planes fly off course, cars crash and missiles land in the wrong place, we will still be able to find out why.
West Launceston, Tasmania, Australia
<b>First class post</b>
This is the most punk thing I have ever seen
Harrison Ritchie-Yates Soviet-era roentgenizdat, gramophone records made from X-ray plates (12 December, p 24).
Don't mess with safety systems
I agree with much of what Lee Tien and Jeremy Gillula said about how companies should win back our trust in the software that runs so many aspects of our lives (12 December, p 26). But one of their suggestions has the potential to cause much harm.
The idea that the source code for safety-critical systems should be open to inspection by regulators is a good one. However, how safe will our roads be if people are able to install their own software, complete with new “features”, on to the brake control system of their car?
Wootton, Bedfordshire, UK
How best to police domestic violence
You report that partners of domestic violence suspects who were arrested were 64 per cent more likely to have died within 23 years of the event than partners of those who were merely warned (7 November, p 10).
Some have interpreted this to mean that arresting the suspects resulted in harm, possibly due to increased stress.
Would police not have been forced to arrest the more serious offenders, skewing the results of the trial?
To use this evidence to support the theory that one should not arrest perpetrators of domestic violence is a misuse of science that could have serious consequences for victims.
Klemzig, South Australia
How best to police domestic violence
鈥� The researchers randomly assigned suspects to be warned or to be arrested: two-thirds were arrested overall. So something is going on, though only three of the 91 deaths were murders. Full details of the study are at .
The climate cost of glacier advocacy
You interviewed Tim Jarvis about him climbing the world’s vanishing equatorial glaciers to highlight what climate change is doing to them (5 December, p 27). He has already reached peaks in Ecuador, Uganda and Indonesia.
However, to complete all intended climbs, he will need to do a bit more intercontinental air travel. This highlights a key driver of climate change 鈥� carbon-intensive lifestyles. After all, why fly long-distance when pictures of most receding equatorial glaciers could be taken by local people?
Wachenheim, Germany
Wake up to your binary planet home
Stephen Battersby reports a new definition of planets that would include our moon (21 November, p 9). I have long thought that Terralune is not a planet-plus-satellite, but a binary planet system. The sun’s pull on the moon exceeds that of Earth on the moon at every point in the latter’s orbit. So it is true to say that the moon orbits the sun, with its orbit being perturbed by the Earth, rather than the other way round. This is not true of any satellites of other planets in our solar system, as far as I’m aware.
Astronomers shy away from this description by pointing out that the centre of mass of the combined Earth-moon system lies within Earth, and therefore Earth dominates the moon somehow. But this has no physical significance. As the moon gets further and further from Earth, that centre of mass will eventually exit Earth’s interior, and there is no special energy barrier to prevent it doing so.
Hamilton, New Zealand
Wormholes point way to dark matter
I found Anil Ananthaswamy’s article about possible links between quantum entanglement and distortions in the fabric of the space-time continuum provocative and informative (7 November, p 30). If quantum entangled entities are indeed bridged by wormholes, then Einstein could well have been very satisfied.
Quantum entanglement would no longer be “spooky action at a distance”: the seeming physical distance between the entangled entities is closed by the distortion in space-time that we call a wormhole. So the entities would still be in close contact 鈥� or may even be different manifestations of the same entity.
Further, assume that the wormhole and quantum entanglement are two aspects of the same phenomenon. Perhaps we can then explain the phenomena that we call dark matter and dark energy.
I would hazard that these are distortions in the fabric of space-time and also manifestations of quantum entanglement 鈥� trans-stellar and even trans-galactic entanglements that have endured since the birth of the universe.
Napier, New Zealand
Judge me by the speed of my feet
Masayo Soma says it’s a mystery why blue-capped cordon-bleu finches need to communicate using super-fast tap-dancing (28 November, p 20).
May I suggest that the pitch of the buzzing sound produced may give the female an indication of the male’s weight? Thus the speed of the tapping may, together with the length of his song and dance, indicate his level of fitness.
Orpington, Kent, UK
Chemical and biological risks
Debora MacKenzie says it is unlikely that there will be chemical and biological attacks by terrorists (28 November, p 30). But there have been incidents apart from the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s attacks with home-made sarin in Japan (11 May 1996, p 3), which she mentions. For example, there by the followers of the guru Rajneesh, involving salmonella.
Islamic State is a more powerful group than either, and has attracted many skilled engineers from all over the world.
Les Essarts-le-Roi, France
Do not fold, staple or 3D print
You report the use of 3D printing to make extra bits for old objects (14 November, p 21).
I await with bated breath the first occasion when a repair or improvement made with a 3D printed component results in a failure or accident because the newly empowered “engineer” did not appreciate the design parameters of the device they were modifying.
Who will be first to spot any small print specifically disclaiming against 3D repairs or alterations?
St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK
Live long and have the last word
It was wonderful to see the informed words of Jon Richfield back in print in The Last Word (5 December) after a significant absence. It would appear that the report of his death was, like Mark Twain’s, an exaggeration.
Park Orchards, Victoria, Australia
<b>For the record</b>
鈥� The cave-dwelling olm is known in Slovenian as 膷love拧ka ribica 鈥� “human fish” (5 December, p 38).
鈥� The “birthday paradox” is in fact that in a group as small as 23 people one shared birthday is more likely than none (12 December, p 30).