Editor's pick: Let's confront some causes of domestic violence
Alice Klein discusses the prevalence and prevention of domestic violence and the treatment of victims and perpetrators (19 October, p 20). Another aspect worth mentioning is the effect of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on behaviour.
As Joshua Goldstein writes in , PTSD typically leads to emotional numbing, recurrent nightmares, substance abuse and, most frighteningly, delusional outbursts of violence.
Think of the preponderance in any nation of those who have felt the trauma of war, racism, rape, colonisation, persecution, dispossession 鈥� refugees, Indigenous peoples and members of minorities 鈥� and domestic violence. Some may later traumatise others.
As a child of a veteran of the second world war who clearly suffered from PTSD, I attest that his irrational, unprovoked rages and physical abuse, often under the influence of “self-medicating” alcohol, belied his evident love for us, adding to our insecurity and hyper-vigilance. To address domestic violence, PTSD has to be central to research into it and the treatment of its causes and effects.
A few solutions to the minimoon conundrum (1)
Leah Crane argues that 214 moons is too many for a solar system because some are just rocks (26 October, p 23). She suggests we only include satellites that are large enough to be roughly spherical: 400 to 600 kilometres in diameter. This limit would remove Phobos and Deimos, at 22 km and 13 km in diameter respectively. I spent so much effort learning about them when young that I insist we find a way to include them.
Phobos is so close to Mars that to a person standing on the planet, it would appear to be one-third the width of our own moon seen from Earth. This is clearly big enough to be called a moon. So how to include it, while excluding rocks?
The largest single rock on Earth is Uluru in the Northern Territory of Australia, which is 9.4 km in circumference.
A moon should be at least 10 km in circumference. This eliminates the tiny rocks that Crane objects to and the that sometimes orbit Earth without being permanently captured.
A few solutions to the minimoon conundrum (2)
Things are getting out of hand with the number of moons in our solar system, says Crane. Perhaps she could go one step further than redefining moons and consider the well-established example of binary stars as a model. Why not binary planets?
The moons Ganymede and Titan are bigger than Mercury. If they occupied independent solar orbits, they would have no difficulty in qualifying as planets. The Jupiter/Ganymede and Saturn/Titan combinations, and even that of Earth/moon, are pairs of planet-sized bodies orbiting around their common centres of gravity. The centre of gravity of the dwarf planet Pluto and its moon Charon lies outside both. Let’s reclassify such pairs as binary planets, or binary dwarf planets.
Our examples of thinking without language (1)
According to David Werdegar, “a composer may internally hear a melody, hum the tune and have a second person hum it too (Letters, 26 October). But developing it for an instrument or an entire orchestra requires much thought, and that thought requires language.” That contrasts with my own experience composing , which I would characterise not as involving “much thought”, but rather as a cumulative process of step-by-step advance, each step involving an idea such as “change to a minor key here”, or “find a good way to end it”. What was principally involved was acting upon feelings deriving from one’s past experience of music, rather than logical analysis or language. It was only at the final stage, when transitioning from use of a single instrument to a kind of dialogue between two, that language-based reasoning might have been involved to a significant degree.
Our examples of thinking without language (2)
Meaning seems to be partially independent of language. Bilingual people can often remember what was said without knowing in which language it was said. Within as little as a minute, my children may have forgotten which language they spoke in, but still be capable of recalling the meaning of what was said.
Our examples of thinking without language (3)
When my son was about 14 months old, we let him sit on the doorstep of our house in the Canary Islands with another child of a similar age, eating ice cream. Then, we heard a cry. We found him on one side of the mosquito net door with his friend on the other. He had bite marks on his shoulder and the mosquito net had kinks on it where his friend had bitten through to him. He was unable to explain what happened, as he couldn’t talk yet.
Some months later, he pointed to the still-kinked netting and said, trying out a new word for the first time, “bite”. It is clear to me that his thoughts and memory of the experience existed independently of and prior to his language skills.
The information rates of speech and of reading
Apparently, speech conveys 39 bits of information per second (14 September, p 17). This is supported by a quick calculation for reading. At a reading rate of 250 words per minute, where each word has an average of five letters and each letter conveys an average of 1.8 bits of information, a reader can absorb up to 37.5 bits per second, close to the rate for speech.
What right do we have to burn away the future?
Andrew Scott suggests we may need fossil fuels to keep warm in the far future (Letters, 12 October). We have to stop thinking of them as fuels. In a future of clean energy, we will still need them to make medicines and plastics. Future generations will never forgive us for burning them.
You can't be a customer if you can't choose a service
You report that the Home Office is using flawed and biased face-recognition technology (19 October, p 12). It shows its attitude by calling the public “customers”. In a healthy market, a customer can choose between providers. Even if I don't use any of its public services, I can't choose not to pay for the Home Office.
Why worry about online fraud and not the weather?
On the day of the UK’s referendum on EU membership in 2016, you asked whether bad weather would have an impact on the vote (online, 23 June 2016). Little has yet been said about the impact that weather could have on the UK election in mid-December.
Instead of influencing the electorate with electronic seeding via the “cloud”, as is now widespread, attention could be given to traditional modes of “cloud seeding”. The challenge for political groups would be to determine which voter segments, in which locations, would be influenced by the weather and to organise cloud seeding appropriately. Achieving freezing temperatures would be more difficult, of course.
With electronic voting, people could vote from armchairs, pubs and cafes at their convenience. It is curious that vulnerability to fraud is held to be the determining argument in favour of traditional polling booths when people are now encouraged, if not obliged, to use the internet for banking.
For the record 鈥� 16 November 2019
鈥� Carbon dioxide emissions from human activities are about 35 billion tonnes of carbon per year (5 October, p 34).
鈥� One song of the white bellbird (Procnias albus) measures 116 dB(a) at a distance of 1 metre (26 October, p 9).