In medicine only aphorisms survive
Dumping ineffective medical treatments is nothing new. Hence the expression, “Yesterday's heresy is today's orthodoxy, is tomorrow's fallacy.”
London, UK
Why gods keep on coming back at us
For the record
• It was John van Aardenne from the who observed that “In theory, if a forest is felled for biofuel, it should be reported in the EU's greenhouse gas inventory” (24 September, p 20).
• Elephants can make 200-litre puddles, but only with multiple footprints (3 September, p 12).
Cocky pundits trumping reason
James Hoggan says of the rhetoric of US presidential candidate Donald Trump that “People are mainlining… a cocktail of absolute certainty, strong opinion and talk of control… People turn to such versions of reality because it's mentally more comfortable than dealing with uncertainty and anxiety” (16 July, p 18). We have been here before.
In the aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis you reported research showing that people prefer advice from a confident source, even forgiving a poor track record (6 June 2009, p 15).
What about them Minoans, then?
Was the Indus civilisation as unique as Andrew Robinson suggests (17 September, p 30)? Parts of his article could have been describing the Minoan society of prehistoric Crete, extant at about the same time.
There is little evidence of warfare in Minoan society; no memorials of battles or powerful leaders; nor are there examples of weaponry beyond the symbolic. The Minoans traded exquisite carved seal or gem stones around the eastern Mediterranean.
Their housing showed little in the way of hierarchy, with most living in 5-roomed dwellings. They appear to have kept stores of food, olive oil and wine that we think were used to feed the population in leaner periods.
Women were as frequently portrayed as men in the images we have discovered, and appear to be taking at least an equal part in the ceremonies shown.
Grave messages for future readers
The New York Times on the Tsunami Stones, some 600 years old, in the Sendai area of Japan. They warn people not to build anything below them lest it be destroyed by a tsunami.
Grave messages for future readers
Jonathon Keats, reviewing Time Travel: A history, states that “only since the 20th century have we sought ways to communicate with the future” (10 September, p 42). Those of us who survey churchyards and record memorial inscriptions know that this desire goes back much further. Here, for example, is part of an inscription in St John's Kirkheaton, West Yorkshire, clearly addressed to future readers: “… Also of Sarah daughter of the above named Mark and Ann Fisher… What we are now so you must be, therefore prepare to follow me.”
Why gods keep on coming back at us
Graham Lawton states: “The only coherent and rational position is agnosticism.” He has neglected ignosticism, defined formally as the theological position that all other theological positions 鈥� including agnosticism 鈥� make too many unquestioned assumptions about the nature of godhood.
You cannot have a fully rational discussion about any subject without first establishing an agreement as to what the terms you’re using actually mean. And when you ask that question, you rapidly learn that most people can’t actually answer.
Why gods keep on coming back at us
Like Schr枚dinger’s famous cat, God simultaneously exists and does not exist until the observer (each of us) opens the box. The elegant beauty of metaphysics is that it presents us with this divine box and then challenges us to figure out a way to open it.
Why gods keep on coming back at us
Maybe one of the reasons that the concept of God, or gods, keeps entering into your scientific discussions (3 September, p 28) is because she/he/it/they really do exist, by our own definition. When we first learn maths at school we are taught that “5 take-away 7” “can’t be done”. Later, the minus sign is introduced as a sort of error message. Putting a magnitude on the error opened the way for us to do mathematics with negative numbers. Later we are taught that 5 divided by 0 is erroneous; but introducing an infinity sign led to the notions of countable and uncountable infinities and more, and some ability to manipulate those quantities.
Maybe the concept of God or gods is just our natural way of symbolising all that is beyond our reasoning, and thus a tag with which we can then start to reason about it all.
Editor's pick: More perverse biofuel incentives
Michael Le Page doesn't describe all the problems with biomass energy in the UK (24 September, p 20). The government's pays businesses to get their heat from renewable sources. We have a half-megawatt, woodchip-burning boiler, which cost about £250,000.
We received no capital grant towards the boiler, but are paid 5.2 pence per kilowatt-hour of heat we use – slightly more than the cost of the woodchip fuel. Businesses that joined the scheme earlier get paid up to twice as much. The payment is index-linked and guaranteed for 20 years.
In the past we were constrained in how much fuel we used by the cost of the oil. Now that is no longer the case, there is no incentive to burn less fuel. The scheme is not helping to reduce carbon emissions in the UK. The best way to cut them must be to cut energy use, not to get paid more to use more energy.
In medicine only aphorisms survive
Your article on reversals in medical practice struck a chord (27 August, p 34). In the late 1960s I was taught by Henry Miller, then professor of neurology at Newcastle University. His aphorism, confirmed throughout my medical career, was: medical facts (things we know to be true) have a half-life of five years
Other paths for blood bacteria
Debora MacKenzie reports two routes of entry for bacteria into the bloodstream: the gut and the gums (17 September, p 8). Long-term covert bacterial infection can enter the body in other ways, for example, through the genital tract, through injured skin or via insect bites.
Most bacterial conditions are treatable, but in many it is impossible to guarantee a complete cure. Someone unfortunate enough to acquire systemic MRSA infection may always carry a low level of it. Both syphilis and the Borrelia bacteria that cause Lyme disease are known to be capable of making a reappearance even after treatment was deemed adequate.
Many different types of bacteria can hide in the body, with the potential for low levels to leak into the bloodstream. It may be necessary to cast the net more widely than just gut bacteria to fully study the effect of these possibly not-so-dormant bacteria.
Cold fusion creates cold comfort
I read with interest that the US Naval Research Lab and the US House Committee on Armed Services are interested in cold fusion. The US armed forces have form on interesting notions. I'll skip lightly over Ronald Reagan's Star Wars, and instead mention Project Stargate. This was the US Army's 1980s psychic warfare project under the command of Major General Albert Stubblebine. It was immortalised in the film The Men Who Stare at Goats starring George Clooney, based on a book by Jon Ronson.
Cold fusion creates cold comfort
The major takeaway I had from this report was how similar “cold fusion” is to New Age quackery. You discuss sincere people who believe that with just a little more work and funding we can make some real breakthroughs; but there are also people who at least behave like classic hucksters.
Regular readers of your Feedback column may find it all very familiar. I firmly support other people's money being spent on this, and may you become fabulously wealthy, but I won't be holding my breath.
First class post
I used to have bat fish in a saltwater tank… I never thought to listen!
by our report of bat fish recorded singing dawn choruses with others (1 October, p 16)
Reasons not to play Russian roulette
You mention the “Quantum Russian roulette” test for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, in which the spin of a photon determines whether an experimenter gets a bullet or a blank fired at them (3 September, p 36). If still alive after 50 rounds, they can assume they live in a multiverse.
But this repeats an error that occurs in much “reasoning” about multiverses. It may seem that the outcome is the result of many trials. In fact, this is an attempt to reason probabilistically about a sample size of just one – because we observe the results only in one universe. In fairness, the nature of randomness is deeply confusing.
The flaw is clearer if we strip away the dramatic set-dressing of the researcher and the gun, and consider only the photons. Of the approximately 1015 possible sequences of 50 shots, exactly one must occur, though any given sequence is highly improbable. One-in-a-billion chances happen all the time, because one of them has to.
And the experiment fails to clear the hurdle of falsifiability. If the colleagues of an experimenter who gets a bullet aren't justified in concluding that there is no multiverse – and I doubt anybody would argue that they are – then the experiment proves nothing.
Editor's pick: More perverse biofuel incentives
To get an overall view of the effect of reducing CO2 emissions, just take a look at the “” of concentrations in the atmosphere measured at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. If you look carefully you should be able to see where the curve starts to turn down as we reduce our emissions. Can't see where that happens? No, neither can I.
Kimberley, Nottinghamshire, UK