Editor's pick: We should measure fairness accurately
Ben Collyer reviews three books on the past and future of inequity (29 July, p 42). To improve equity, it will be important to develop more convincing measures of inequity, so we can identify the real trends and deficiencies. Most statistics seem to concentrate on wealth owned or ratios of income, which can be misleading. I am not convinced that someone with $2 billion is twice as well off as someone with $1 billion.
In Australia, there is a factor of 12 financial gap between the top and bottom fifth of the population. But is it not more important to consider the ratio of life expectancy, calorie intake, number of children – or just people reporting a happy life?
The kind of people who accumulate wealth in our society may well value different things to the kind of people who don't. They may, for example, not value having a large family. Even so, it would be fascinating to look at how a variety of measures have changed over the centuries. We might even find that some gaps in some places were closing rather than widening.
Hugh Walton, hero of china clay computing
Feedback mentions a pub in Cornwall, UK, named for William Cookworthy, the 18th-century chemist who discovered china clay in the area (5 August). It would be nice if there were one called The Walton after Hugh Walton, a member and fellow of the Operational Research Society. In 1974, Walton almost single-handedly saved English China Clays from going bankrupt.
He used an analogue computer called the Simutron, which his firm made, to optimise the blending of clays from, I think, 15 clay pits into 50 or so products, each to a specific formula.
Walton's use of the simplex algorithm for optimising planning problems on an analogue machine was astonishingly ahead of its time. There are 1,307,674,368,000 ways of blending 15 clays and it needed to be worked out thrice daily. The firm's mainframe would do it, but it took a week and no one could play with the results. Walton's Simutron did it in seconds. He sold the firm two machines at £84,000 each and also used them to solve a labour dispute.
The editor writes:
• For a photo of the Simutron and more detail, see bit.ly/Simutron
First class post
Nobody funded it. I did it in my free time between caring for cancer patients
Skyler Johnson a Twitterer's “Gee wonder who funded this study” on “alternative medicine” outcomes (19 August, p 4)
Implausible camouflage can be explained
You report that the ankylosaurid Borealopelta markmitchelli was reddish-black on top with a pale belly, and that such countershading helps many animals conceal themselves from predators today (12 August, p 17). Am I missing something? I can understand the logic of this camouflage in aquatic animals and birds on the wing. These can have their predators above and below them. What predator would have seen the ventral surface of an ankylosaur against the sky?
The editor writes:
• It's about . When sunlight hits a body from above, an animal's back is well-lit and its belly is in shade, so this opposite colour pattern is thought to make the animal harder to see.
Sourcing and selling cod in Viking days
You say that the only explanation for the DNA match between “ancient cod” found in northern waters and today's cod from the Viking site at Haithabu, now in Germany, is transportation in freeze-dried form by Vikings (12 August, p 7).
Might the match result, instead, from the migration of the then “northern German” cod to the north-east Arctic, over the intervening centuries, in response to environmental pressures?
Sourcing and selling cod in Viking days
The idea that the Vikings would carry frozen cod 2000 kilometres to “sell in distant markets” is extraordinary. Is it not more likely that they took it on their journeys for food and, when they arrived, unloaded what was left and said words to the effect, “Thank gods we can now eat some fresh fish – let's leave that garbage here for when we're desperate”?
The editor writes:
• We didn't have space to say that the researchers and concluded it was unlikely, not least on the basis that records of the Norwegian fisheries since the 12th century show little change in the geographical distribution of fishing effort. Nor could we find room to say that there is a of a Viking chief coming down to Haithabu from the north-east Atlantic with goods to trade, including walrus tusks for Alfred the Great in England.
Jocelyn Bell deserved a Nobel, Fred Hoyle said
It was interesting to read the account of the discovery of the first pulsar by Jocelyn Bell, and how she reluctantly accepted not sharing the Nobel prize in 1974 (5 August, p 42). If I remember correctly, the astronomer publicly criticised the Nobel Committee for her omission.
When Hoyle didn't share the 1983 Nobel for physics, despite his fundamental contribution to stellar nucleosynthesis being at least equal to that of , some astrophysicists to this stance.
Of course, his unorthodox views of cosmology must have played their part. And he also wrote science fiction…
Does nuclear power count as clean energy?
I agree with most of Michael Le Page's piece on the stalling growth of “clean energy” (5 August, p 22). But he is counting nuclear power in this category. Some people might disagree, since we haven't solved the problem of nuclear waste. If you exclude nuclear, clean renewable energy certainly has gone up in the past 25 years.
And I disagree with the statement that total energy use is “dominated by industries like aviation and shipping”. Transport as a whole forms only of end-use energy. Other industry uses about 54 per cent.
Aluminium isn't very good for energy storage
You report that dousing a novel alloy of aluminium with water could offer a portable source of hydrogen for fuel cells (12 August, p 14). It has never been difficult to persuade aluminium, or its alloys, to react with water, producing hydrogen. Just add alkali. But the hydrogen evolved represents only half the energy inherent in the metal. The rest appears as useless heat – which risks the reaction running out of control, as sometimes happens when preparing spongy metal catalysts from aluminium alloys.
Recycling aluminium oxide back to aluminium, by forming the fluoride and electrolysing it, is also none too energy-efficient.
Quantum entanglement as evidence of simulation
There is speculation that we could live in a simulated universe running on a massive computer (for example 3 September 2016, p 30). Not having a reputation to lose, I am free to wonder if there is evidence we may have missed.
When writing a simulator for a game, it is normal not to waste resources simulating details that the player can't see and that aren't immediately relevant.
So there would be no point in simulating processes at the subatomic scale – unless, of course, that is precisely what the player decides to focus on. Others have suggested we should look for skimping on details done to economise on computing power, such as the states of tiny items being left undecided unless they suddenly become relevant on being “observed”.
But once the state of one of a pair of entangled particles is measured and decided, it would make sense to then set the state of the partner particle while we still have the data to hand. If the perception either of physical separation or of real time were also part of the simulation, the status of the other particle would appear to be decided instantly, which to the observer would seem like “spooky action at a distance”.
Why there is something rather than nothing
Geraint Lewis says in an online comment piece that we can't ignore the possibility that we live in a universe fine-tuned for life (posted 28 June). We know of a long list of parameters that can't vary by much if life is to exist. So is the universe fine-tuned to favour life? No, but it might have selected for complexity.
Why is there something rather than nothing? Because there is only one way for there to be nothing: it is a single permutation floating on a vast ocean of possibilities. From this perspective, a universe favouring complexity is much more likely to exist than a simple universe.
Some eggs may need more pointy ends
Simon Carter wonders whether there may be a relationship between the shape of birds' eggs and the nature of the nest in which they are laid (Letters, 29 July). Pigeons get this wrong by laying a smooth egg with pointy ends in a nest consisting of a few poorly selected twigs. It is not uncommon to find broken pigeon eggs on the ground beneath. They would be better advised to lay a non-slippery egg with sharp corners – a cube or pyramid perhaps – that would catch on the sides of the open lattice. But for the sake of comfort, the delivery process may require attention.
For the record
• Forget the angels: more than 10 trillion (1013) iron atoms, arranged in a lattice with a spacing of between them, fit on the surface of a 1-square-millimetre pinhead (19 August, p 38).
• The researcher whose work on activated charcoal and antibiotics we reported is (19 August, p 7).