Editor's pick: Getting sceptics to warm to the truth
As I am sure many others do, I occasionally hear people making remarks along the lines of: “I don't believe all this global warming nonsense. What do you think?” I appreciate the point about “expertise” making sceptics dig in their heels (2 July, p 5).
The trouble is, there don't seem to be any snappy answers. I can rattle on about graphs of hurricane frequency and intensity, but that just raises a storm of indifference.
I can point out that the North-East Passage is now open on a regular basis for the first time in at least 500 years, but that doesn't cut any ice (sorry) with those who haven't heard of Willoughby and Barents.
If I mention that the south of England now has a wine industry, some bright spark then points out that the vine was cultivated and wine made in southern England in the Medieval Warm Period.
I note that the BBC has officially forbidden its journalists from “presenting both sides of the debate,” on the grounds that there is no other side. But that just leads to a digression into BBC salaries.
Surely there must be some obvious natural indicator that I can point to? Perhaps concerning butterflies. Or hedgehogs. Hedgehogs would be nice, everybody loves hedgehogs.
Feeling for meaning of empathy
I was interested in Penny Dunbabin's response to the idea of training caring professionals in compassion (Letters, 18 June). She sees empathy as a “feeling of individual connection or attachment.” I do not.
There is increasing confusion about the meanings of words relating to our responses to others' experiences and feelings. I think some standard definitions are needed and suggest as follows.Sympathy: shared understanding of a situation and emotions, an emotional connection often aided by parallel life events, without internal experience of the other's actual current feeling. Empathy: the ability to physically and emotionally share the feelings of another. Empathetic: using standardised techniques to appear empathic. Compassion: deep sympathy with pity, kindness, caring, and a willingness to help. May involve a degree of empathy.
Comments made by the few truly empathic people I have met make me prefer training people to use more compassion and less empathy. From my experiences with empathetic professionals, it would deliver better client experiences, too.
First class post
It's when a visual signal goes to the memory part of your brain. It's just your brain doing goofed
Olivia James to Facebookers who want their déjà vu to be mystical, despite our report (20 August, p 9)
GM rice isn't so wonderful
A manifesto signed by more than 100 Nobel prizewinners, claiming that the environmental group Greenpeace threatens food security (9 July, p 7), was much reported. It seems that the signatories were prompted to act by Greenpeace's criticism of the genetically modified vitamin A enhanced “golden rice”.
I would question why , the organisation funding the meeting that produced the manifesto, is focusing on golden rice, which accounts for just 0.1 per cent of the area cultivated with genetically modified organisms. Herbicide-resistant soya, and maize containing the Bt toxin to combat caterpillars and other insects make up more than 99 per cent of the GMOs consumed in the world.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization that children aged from 1 to 3 get 0.2 milligrams of vitamin A per day. A kilogram of golden rice of the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene, and we need 6 mg of beta-carotene to get 1 mg of vitamin A, so a child would need to eat about 750 grams of golden rice daily to get the level advised.
By contrast, a kilogram of sweet potato, a cheap and abundant food for poor populations worldwide, has of beta-carotene.
Natural selection has provided plants with a balanced genetic make-up for their habitat. This warns us not to neglect natural biodiversity and existing natural genetic resources. Biodiversity provides us, inexpensively, with the genes that we need.
Corporations that gain from the manufacture of GM crops want us to forget that.
Is Schrödinger's human alive yet?
Jon Cartwright discusses the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, in which observation causes a quantum wave function to collapse (16 July, p 30). As is often the case in such articles, this is often stretched to speculation that human consciousness is an important factor in this. But there's no experimental evidence that any different results would be achieved by non-conscious observation. There does in fact seem to be no reason in principle why a conscious observer couldn't be part of a quantum set-up.
Schrödinger's cat may indeed be such a thought experiment. But, given the slightly ambiguous status of cats, a better and more explicit version would surely be “Schrödinger's human”.
Is Schrödinger's human alive yet?
A problem with the Copenhagen interpretation is that there are of it. The physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg each had their own. This does not mean that the observer has no role to play. The observations are interpreted as such by the observer.
Is Schrödinger's human alive yet?
You report that Daniel Sudarsky and Elias Okon showed a decade ago that it was inevitable in the early universe for the wave functions of matter to collapse and for things to be able to form. But was it inevitable before they discovered that?
Farm policy is not about environment
Michael Le Page discusses how UK environmental laws might improve post-Brexit (9 July, p 19). But agricultural policies were and are about food rather than land management. This stems from the long-established fact that agricultural commodity markets are inherently unstable.
Commercial agriculture can only be profitable when demand exceeds supply. The cheap food that so many of us have enjoyed for more than 50 years is directly down to agricultural policies that have allowed farmers to keep producing at a loss.
If we want areas managed for reasons other than the production of food, fuel, timber, fibre and recreation, then we should be prepared to pay for this without expecting, as in the past, to get it by default from farmers.
Your computer may be commandeered
Some companies want to use your computer itself, not just your data (23 July, p 26). Microsoft, for example, uses peer-to-peer file transfer to update the Windows 10 operating system. This means that update files stored on your hard disc can be sent to other computers on Microsoft's command, which may entail a cost to you. You can opt out by going to the “Choose how updates are delivered” section in the computer's Update settings.
How omega–3s got their true name
Your article on “superfoods” refers to some fatty acids as “omega 3s” (6 August, p 27). The correct name is “omega-3”, the “-” being a minus sign. In these fatty acids there is a double bond between the third and fourth carbon atoms from the “omega” carbon at the end of the chain. Correct terminology might even prevent any misconception that omega-6 fatty acids are twice as good for you.
The saga of the last common ancestor
It is interesting that the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all living organisms was adapted to life in undersea vents (30 July, p 12). But we cannot assume that this proves that life originated in such an environment over 3 billion years ago. Life might have originated anywhere, and some of it then adapted to undersea vents. Perhaps only this form survived the frozen snowball Earth period some 700 million years ago, and thus became our ancestor.
It is a search for impossible galaxies
The idea that we could detect aliens by observing galaxies that they cause to disappear seems to be flawed (9 July, p 15). A galaxy could only disappear over a period greater than the time it takes a signal to cross that galaxy. Even the smallest of galaxies, 3000 light years across, would take 1500 years or so to disappear if aliens were so inclined.
Red Hill, Queensland, Australia
The editor writes:
• Yes – but the researchers are indeed (or nearly impossible) in conventional astrophysics.
Catpocalypse for NZ feral creatures
You report a plan to exterminate vermin to protect New Zealand's birds (30 July, p 7). Feral cats are also a major problem: are they included? And to prevent them becoming re-established, controlling the domestic cat population will be necessary.
London, UK
The editor writes:
• Feral cats : mentioning them in the policy announcement was described as “electorally impossible”.
A prescient poet hinted at evolution
Derek Hough draws our attention to Patrick Matthew setting out the principles of evolution in 1831, before Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin (Letters, 6 August). Jalaluddin Rumi, the Persian Sufi teacher and poet who died in 1273, seems to have come close when : “I died from minerality and became vegetable / And from vegetativeness I died and became animal / I died from animality and became man.”
For the record
• By 2019, the world will have spent $18 billion to eradicate polio (6 August, p 16).