Editor's pick: Have a nice day now and how do you vote?
Ron Baker declares that the best voting system so far devised is the single transferable vote (Letters, 16 December 2017). One cannot choose the best or worst voting systems without making subjective decisions. When the electorate is almost equally divided, should the power of the government be equally divided, or should it strongly reflect the most popular view? It appears the UK electorate prefers the latter, judging by reactions to power-sharing governments and the referendum on an alternative vote proposal. This is what first-past-the-post delivers.
In 1998, the of the UK Independent Commission on the Voting System the choices offered by single transferable vote to “an over-zealous American breakfast waiter going on posing an indefinite number of unwanted options… both an exasperation and an incitement to the giving of random answers”.
I do believe in electoral reform, but I also suggest that such subjective issues are for political rather than scientific debate.
British views of Russian science and its invisibility
James Harkin recounts how “bumbling British boffins” have become a standing Russian joke (23/30 December 2017, p 53). In the 1980s, I was visiting an aunt in Soviet-dominated Poland when it was under martial law. She – a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences – asked my view, as a chemist, of Russian research publications. I said that they had uses, but weren't places one looked for imagination.
If a Russian laboratory owned a spectrometer, you could be sure that it would publish painstaking compendia of spectra for ordinary inorganic compounds. If I needed to find such a frequency, I could be sure that a Russian would have published it.
This answer apparently resonated with my aunt. I knew that she had been granted the opportunity to do research in Moscow in the 1960s, and asked what she had got from it. Her answer: “Tuberculosis”.
First class post 鈥� 20 January 2018
“We should probably first teach adults how to use social media too!”
Taryn O'Neill to the proposition that we should teach kids how to use social media, not scare them off (13 January, p 23)
Basic biology and better government as a cure
Luke Allen argues that the cure for winter crises in the UK's National Health Service is to shift the focus “upstream” towards preventative measures (16 December 2017, p 24).
As a long-retired medic, I am often surprised by questions I get asked by otherwise intelligent people. I have long thought that we should go further upstream to teach wider understanding of human biology and pathology. This would enable people to better evaluate what they read on the internet about health matters.
And surely better provision of local facilities and healthy food, as Allen suggests, is the province of government? I can't imagine many doctors being happy to take on that role as part of the day job.
Cannabis complexity county by county
As you note, US federal law on cannabis conflicts with states such as California making it legal (6 January, p 7). Since then, the federal attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has .
It's also more complicated than that. The state of California passed responsibility for regulation to city and county governments. Butte county, for example, has banned recreational cannabis; yet the city of Chico, in Butte county, has legalised recreational cannabis but doesn't allow it to be sold in shops – you can apply for a licence to grow it for personal use.
Pain is necessary to health and wellbeing
Jessica Hamzelou reports genetic research on a family that doesn't feel pain (23/30 December 2017, p 14). This is important for people suffering from injuries and could help stop the opioid crisis. But there is a huge downside to losing the sense of pain. A member of my family has type 2 diabetes and lost sensation in his foot. He fractured it without realising and kept walking, causing so much damage that it was amputated.
No longer a cruel and unusual punishment?
You report on the difficulties of finding replacement drugs for executions and hence the off-label and experimental use of fentanyl (16 December 2017, p 7).
For many decades, barbiturate drugs have been used for humane euthanasia of pets. I note that the sensation of succumbing to general anaesthetic may even be enjoyable. Using these drugs to provide a beautiful and relaxing way to end life would prevent criminals faced with the death penalty from using a defence of “cruel and unusual punishment”.
Can't we pass on the panspermian favour?
The suggestion that we should deliberately seed life through the cosmos alarms Richard Swifte (Letters, 23/30 December 2017). When the astronomer Fred Hoyle championed panspermia – life reaching Earth from elsewhere – I do not recall hearing that this “alien” life was a “contaminant” that shouldn't have arrived, despite it ending up with humans being, eventually, in control of the planet. If Hoyle was right, then what sort of alien “ethics” decided upon our existence? Should we not repay the compliment?
A 19th-century Neptune row rumbles on
In his excellent article, Richard A. Lovett correctly states that Urbain Le Verrier suggested that wobbles in the orbit of Uranus revealed an unseen eighth planet, which led to the discovery of Neptune (16 December 2017, p 36). This was in November 1845.
But in September that year, Cambridge astronomer John Couch Adams had communicated similar calculations to the director of the university's observatory, James Challis, who ignored his work. Then Le Verrier's announcement started an international planet hunt.
On 8 August 1846, Challis observed Neptune but failed to identify it as a planet. It was Johann Galle of the Berlin observatory who made the discovery on 23 September 1846.
The editor writes:
• This is the subject of continuing dispute. Adams himself insisted Le Verrier be given full credit.
Surely seismometers go back further than that
I was surprised to read that “in the early 20th century there was no seismology [and] no accurate location data for earthquakes” (25 November 2017, p 40).
We may discount the seismometer developed by Zhang Heng in AD 132 because we don't understand how it worked (see 3 December 2016, p 42). But back in 1969, James Dewey and Perry Byerly listed, at my rough count, at least 15 earthquake recording instruments developed between 1703 and 1889 (Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, ). And the Seismological Society of Japan was founded in 1880.
There is no queen of England, so show respect
Graham Lawton would have difficulty addressing the “queen of England” (16 December 2017, p 31). The post has been vacant for over 300 years.
An inclination of the head is not sycophancy: it shows acceptance and acknowledgement of the titular head of the country, as agreed by Parliament. This may not always be the case. It is very doubtful, for example, that Camilla Windsor will be so accepted through marriage to Prince Charles. More dramatically, monarchs have been deposed, exiled or even executed.
The editor writes:
• Monarchs have indeed been deposed, exiled or executed, but that does not disprove the idea that the current queen is the beneficiary of prestige bias rather than earned dominance.
We corrected the time for which the post of “queen of England” has been vacant.
Seeking research on a gender effect in research
I enjoyed the Christmas edition this year, so thank you all. Some articles involve thinking about why creatures behave in certain ways (23/30 December 2017, p 69), or how hominins behaved in the distant past (p 32). This makes me wonder: does the gender mix of a research team affect the ideas or interpretations it generates? In business, mixed teams work as well as or better than single-sex teams. Has anyone analysed the make-up of the most-cited research teams?
When a childhood calendar is for life
Caroline Williams discusses calendar synaesthesia (23/30 December 2017, p 74). For me, the months of the year are placed around a square, with June, July and August at the top, September, October and November down the right side, December, January and February heading left along the bottom, and March, April and May rising up the left side. This is not because my brain is different. It is how the calendar on the wall in my kindergarten class looked.
For the record – 20 January 2018
• Call that a creature? Australia's crocodiles are bigger predators than the Tasmanian devil (cover and contents page, 6 January).
British views of Russian science and its invisibility
Having read every issue of 快猫短视频 for the past two years, it is almost as if Russia has ceased to exist as a force in world science. As a Russian speaker and former student of Soviet science policy, I frequently spot Russian names in your reports, but nearly all of them are based outside Russia.
It would be interesting to know what has caused this virtual disappearance. Has science there suffered a catastrophic reduction in funding? That would lead to a brain drain, and a concentration of effort in defence and security. Or is the reason more prosaic – that not enough of it is published in English?