But what would a 'climate CERN' institution do?
You ask whether it is “dewy-eyed idealism” to imagine international research institutions dedicated to climate change, modelled on CERN (Leader,23 November). It would indeed be dewy-eyed to suggest that scientists are inherently more tolerant and cooperative than anyone else.
Accelerators large enough to push the frontiers of physics are fantastically expensive. Particle physicists desperately want to reach those frontiers, so they are forced to pool their resources and collaborate on an international scale. The spirit of tolerance and cooperation that prevails at CERN is real, but it is a learned behaviour based on economic necessities.
Now that the era of accelerator-based discoveries is coming to an end, it could make sense to redirect CERN itself towards the problem of climate change. To preserve the collaborative spirit, the objectives of “climate CERN” would need to be picked carefully.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is successful at reaching a consensus on climate science and doesn't need to be duplicated. Big engineering projects are the obvious choice. Maybe climate CERN should develop modular fission reactors, grid-scale battery storage or geoengineering.
Practical steps to take back control of our deaths (1)
Daniel Cossins describes the complex, sometimes surprising things that we should think about before we die (23 November, p 38). is a charity that offers free advice and help with living wills and lasting powers of attorney. If we put off the practical steps that go along with thinking about the inevitable, when the time does come, our wishes won’t be known and therefore can’t be respected.
Practical steps to take back control of our deaths (2)
Your feature on The End was very entertaining. I hadn’t heard of alkaline hydrolysis before, and would have liked to learn more.
My long-preferred funerary option, cremation, has recently been shown to be somewhat ecologically irresponsible. A woodland burial in a cardboard box had previously seemed like the best choice. But have you seen the fees expected? On a plot-by-plot basis, the price of land that is otherwise fairly unusable is positively extortionate.
Why wouldn’t it be possible to legislate to permit families to reclaim properly certified dead relatives for burial in private gardens, under a sapling of choice? This is accepted when the body has been reduced to ashes 鈥� why not just cut out the burning bit?
Alternatively, we could allow local authorities to establish civic disposal facilities as a communal recycling service.
Alkaline hydrolysis sounds more expensive than woodland burial. No self-respecting churchyard would accept my corpse. I guess, reluctantly, cremation it will have to be.
Old systems aren't perforce obsolete things
You observe that “pagers used by the UK’s National Health Service are leaking medical data over radio waves, possibly to the 1980s, where pagers belong” (in print only, 9 November, p 19). I appreciate that this was in jest, but I wouldn’t like my hospital to use, for example, SMS text messages to contact staff in an emergency. Although these usually appear almost instantly, they offer no guaranteed level of service, either for timeliness or for delivery at all. The same goes for messages including multimedia, email and all internet messaging services.
Pager systems can be designed to ensure reliable, timely message delivery at quite a modest cost, and the devices can be very low-powered. The software in them is much simpler, so they are far less likely to crash or lock up than a phone. I would highlight the debacle of the UK government’s Emergency Services Network project, which is trying to provide the features and reliability of the existing low-tech Airwave system over the public mobile network infrastructure. It shows how unwise it is to think that newer technology is always better than older methods.
A way to see a meteor shower come sun or cloud
Abigail Beall offers tips for observing meteor showers (16 November, p 51). I would like to share an alternative way to see them that works when it is cloudy and even in daylight.
There is a very powerful space surveillance radar station in France called . When a meteor burns up, the trail it leaves behind reflects radio waves. It is possible to pick up these reflected signals across most of Europe.
To see them, I use a wide-band discone antenna on the roof of my garden shed, with a software-defined radio (SDR) inside the shed, controlled by a computer in the comfort of my house. You do need a bit of technical know-how to , because the SDR software lets you change just about everything, and that can be quite confusing.
If artificial intelligence could explain itself… (1)
Donna Lu describes an artificial intelligence system that can detect problems in electrocardiograms and predict early death (16 November, p 19). The system can do this despite there being no clues in the data that cardiologists can pick up on.
This situation highlights a major problem with deep-learning neural net systems. They may be practically useful, but they are deeply unsatisfactory from a scientific point of view. We need explainable AI. If we can’t understand how such systems make their decisions, perhaps we need to go back to thorough human investigation, possibly supplemented by good old-fashioned AI.
If artificial intelligence could explain itself… (2)
A reflex will pull your hand away from a flame. It is our ability to know this has happened that means we know we are conscious.
When an artificial intelligence system makes a prediction that someone will die in the next 12 months, but neither it nor its programmers knows how it has come to that verdict, we can say that it is making an unconscious decision. If it could explain or demonstrate how it arrived at that decision, surely that would be indicative of consciousness.
Another hazard of using mosquito nets in fisheries
The use of mosquito nets for fishing can have destructive consequences for food security and coastal ecosystems by the removal of juvenile fish, as Brian Owens reports (16 November, p 9). The pyrethroid insecticides that are often used to treat the nets pose a further threat.
They are highly toxic to aquatic insects, crustaceans and fish. Treated nets have been a boon to malaria prevention, but their safe disposal must be afforded higher priority if unintended outcomes are to be avoided.
The real odds on winning various games of solitaire
As Dana Mackenzie notes, a renowned mathematician once played 2000 games of solitaire and “won only 36.6 per cent (23 November, p 12). Later, computers won more than 80 per cent.” But the computers in which they knew the location of all the cards that were face down or still in the deck. When people play, they don't have that information. So the result says that you can win 82 per cent of the time if you are both good and lucky, whereas 18 per cent of the time, there is no way you can win.
Your important package has been in a bit of a scrape
Edd Gent reports on parcel delivery drones piggybacking on buses (9 November, p 14). Low bridges would cause untold hiccups to this system.