Editor's pick – The effects of pandemic across the social gradient
Jessica Hamzelou reports that the risk of dying from covid-19 rises with age, diabetes and heart disease, with around half of deaths from the infection involving people with underlying diseases (14 March, p 9).
But when it comes to age, calendar age isn’t the only way to look at this. People age, biologically speaking, at different rates. Those lower down the socioeconomic scale may be more vulnerable to ageing faster in this sense.
Differences in life expectancies have across this “social gradient”. The average age of death of homeless people is 47. Deprivation ages people and lessens resistance to illness.
On a large scale such differentials could have significant demographic, and therefore political, effects. Is anyone working out what these effects could be for the coronavirus?
There are many shades of autism (1)
It is a noble thing to celebrate the emergence of young autistic activists like Siena Castellon who embrace autism as an intrinsic part of their identity (7 March, p 56). But for many on the autism spectrum, it simply cannot reasonably be considered to be a bright thread in the rich tapestry of neurodiversity.
While Castellon’s success as a self-advocate is laudable, there remains a significant subset of people with autism who rely entirely on the care of others for their entire lives. Many will self-injure and will have to wear protective helmets. Others will experience difficulty bathing or completing simple tasks such as buttering bread or tying shoelaces. Far from conferring any cognitive advantages, their autism hinders them so severely that they live in a permanent state of dysfunction.
This reality runs contrary to the trend to celebrate neurodiversity, and is therefore increasingly glossed over in contemporary autism discourse. A result is that the most severely affected autistic people, many of whom can’t speak and so have no voice in advocacy, are being marginalised as a result of a focus on those with above-average intellectual gifts.
For the sake of fairness, the other side of autism must be highlighted as a counterbalance to those narratives that only accentuate the positives of this complex and varied condition. Otherwise, the cognitive divide in the autism community will only continue to widen.
There are many shades of autism (2)
I am a 64-year-old man with an autism spectrum disorder. This has impaired my ability to make a living, prevented me from ever having a girlfriend, and has given me problems with fine motor coordination, phobias and a voice volume I can’t control. It has made my life hell. As the neurodiversity movement gains greater traction, people may be less encouraged to find solutions for the many for whom this is a grave problem.
Thoughts on surviving being lost in the wild (1)
Michael Bond’s report on the behaviour patterns of people who find themselves lost in the wild shows how many will panic and make unsafe decisions (29 February, p 40). But that may not tell us everything about how all people react.
Most of those who get lost are never reported missing for the simple reason that they manage to find their way back before that happens. Many may have sensibly retraced their steps. Others may have carried on for hours 鈥� against the standard advice 鈥� until they found a landmark or path that helped them reorient themselves.
The lesson from social science studies is that, to understand the outcomes of all people’s choices, it is vital to include in your sample not only those for whom a situation went wrong, but also those who managed to rectify it.
Thoughts on surviving being lost in the wild (2)
Bond notes that people lost in non-urban spaces tend to keep on the move, making it more difficult to find them. I suggest that the reason for this goes beyond fear. It is difficult to keep warm without a fire 鈥� or very good camping gear 鈥� in any cooler climate, at night, or when it is wet. Staying on the move keeps you warm.
Thoughts on surviving being lost in the wild (3)
I have to take issue with Bond’s statement that “millions of years of evolution have taught us that the experience [of being lost] tends not to end well”. It may be possible that epigenetics are affected by experiences of this sort, but evolution takes place through creatures that survive and reproduce, not those for whom the experience hasn’t ended well.
That said, I think there is a link between a fear of being lost and a fear of being hunted, possibly inherited from ancient ancestors.
Promising to plant trees isn't enough for climate (1)
I read Adam Vaughan’s discussion of several initiatives to plant or protect a trillion trees around the world with interest (29 February, p 20). But, like all the pieces I’ve read on the subject, it seems to address only part of what is required to make this effective.
Surely there should be a strategy to lock away the carbon from mature and felled wood. Burning it or letting it rot away just returns the carbon to the atmosphere.
Nature offers several solutions for this, including preserving wood in peat bogs or lakes. On very long timescales, this can lead to the formation of oil and coal.
Promising to plant trees isn't enough for climate (2)
I am curious to know what percentage of the promised newly planted trees will survive to an age at which they can be considered to be “established”.
For example, in the 2019 UK general election, parties proposed tree planting to counter domestic carbon emissions. But if many new trees don’t get established, then the net effect would be a lot less than advertised. Are there any studies that provide estimates for tree planting success rates?
Semi-autonomous cars are the worst of both worlds
Anna Zee says motion sickness would be an issue for people deprived of a sense of control in autonomous cars (Letters, 8 February).
The problem she raises of a driver potentially having to take over a semi-autonomous vehicle when afflicted in this way is just another good reason why semi-autonomous vehicles are less safe than those that are manually driven or those that are fully autonomous.
If we live in a simulation, we can't debug its code
Ed Subitzky, New York, US
Reading the recent letters about whether or not we live in a computer simulation led me to think about the matter of software bugs if this were true (Letters, 22 February).
Every piece of software of any complexity contains them, and presumably the software engineers who coded the simulation in which we may live also left a few (or perhaps more than a few) in their creation. But what is or isn’t a bug can depend upon one’s point of view.
To the software engineers, a bug is computer code that produces an unintended result. But, being inside the simulation, we couldn’t recognise such a bug because, to us, it would simply be a part of the basic structure of our universe. It would be a brute fact or “law of nature”. Or perhaps we could recognise it as an anomaly that doesn’t make sense in terms of the rest of our universe (quantum physics, anyone?).
Perhaps I, or at least some of my traits, could be the result of a bug. Perhaps this letter to 快猫短视频 could be the same.
From within the simulation, we naturally couldn’t examine the code responsible for our existence, nor, most likely, be smart enough to understand it.
Part of the reason for that state of affairs is that, undoubtedly, the software engineers wouldn’t want to make us as bright as they are, even if that were possible.