Editor's pick – Lessons can be learned from the covid-19 crisis (1)
David Adam argues that even the “best science” doesn’t have the final word on covid-19 28 March, p 23. Still, we should applaud the willingness of some politicians to respect the best advice the scientific community is able to offer. I hope that this is extended to other areas of policy, particularly climate change. The political responses of most of the world’s leaders to it have fallen somewhat short of what the overwhelming majority of scientific advice requires.
Editor's pick – Lessons can be learned from the covid-19 crisis (2)
Perhaps the readiness to adopt big lifestyle changes in the face of covid-19 can prompt the realisation that the climate threat isn’t going to go away unless we take similar drastic action. Countries that tried to go on with business as usual during the outbreak seem to be having worse outcomes than those that were decisive and took swift, large-scale action.
Editor's pick – Lessons can be learned from the covid-19 crisis (3)
The crisis would be significantly lessened if governments adopted a universal basic income programme for the duration. The cost could be reclaimed through taxation when earnings resume. Research in Finland has found that such schemes confer health benefits (16 February 2019, p 10). Adopting one could also show how they compare with “universal credit” approach used in the UK.
Thank you for providing us with the facts
Thank you to all the staff at 快猫短视频 for giving us the facts about covid-19. You are amazing. We were travelling in Italy and the Netherlands in February and early March. Language was no barrier to making informed decisions, but the lack of facts was.
We were surrounded by misleading anecdotes, biased and unscientific information, misinformation and missing information. Facts help you make informed decisions when all you feel is confusion, fear and anger. Access to 快猫短视频 articles and podcasts has been invaluable to us. Thank you for making a difference.
The relative merits of running and walking (1)
Your cover suggests that Steve Haake will tell us whether running or walking is best for your health (14 March, p 34). His answer seems to be that they are both good, though running can let you take more exercise in a given time.
But for a 20-minute jog, say, this doesn’t account for the time needed to change into running gear then have a shower and get changed afterwards. That quick jog would take up most of your lunch break, whereas I can zip out of the door and take a brisk, 20-minute walk without needing to get changed before or after.
So if you are time-poor, then a few brisk walks may be easier to fit in than jogging.
If you enjoy walking fast, then you can exercise just as hard as a runner would in the same time. It all depends on what you enjoy doing.
The relative merits of running and walking (3)
You ask about the relative merits of running and walking. I am 82 years old and consider myself to be reasonably fit. I haven’t been to a gym since my schooldays and I don’t go running. In my younger days, I cycled to work 12 kilometres each way five days a week and did a lot of hillwalking and mountain climbing. Until the coronavirus put a temporary stop to activities, I enjoyed Scottish country dancing and 8-kilometre walks in the Peak District twice a week.
I am fairly active in my garden, including occasionally lifting weights, such as bags of compost. How does this compare with the benefits discussed in your article, including bone build-up?
The relative merits of running and walking (2)
Besides running and walking, there is a comparatively new kid on the block, namely “Nordic walking”. This is walking with poles, derived from Nordic skiing. Like walking and running, it can be practised at various levels. It can also allow people who are elderly or frail to remain active while protecting them from falls. The poles act as a climbing aid when going uphill, and dampen impact on joints and the spine when going downhill.
The upper body is more actively engaged in propulsion than it is in running or walking. To derive the greatest benefit, a course of instruction is advisable.
Organic farming's impact is even more complicated
Christel Cederberg and Hayo van der Werf are no doubt right that broad comparisons of the environmental impact of conventional and organic agriculture are prone to be overly simplistic (21 March, p 25). Both systems operate under rules and regulations designed, in part, to mitigate environmental effects.
Organic production adds an additional layer of prohibitions, particularly on the use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, but still permits the use of inorganic pesticides. It is true that global pesticide use has risen in the past 30 years, but this is mainly due to declining costs to farmers and the greater geographic spread of crops like bananas and grapevines. The main trend is for declining use of pesticides on a weight-per-hectare basis as new synthetic products replace less potent ones.
Because synthetic pesticides aren’t permitted in organic agriculture, some crops remain reliant on the use of inorganic fungicides such as copper, first introduced in 1885.
While the average rate of fungicide use is , the use of inorganic fungicides now averages more than 2.5 kilograms per hectare. The European Food Safety Authority has the potential environmental toxicity of copper, whereas all new synthetic pesticides must pass stringent modern safety tests.
We have the free will to declare anything illusory
Luce Gilmore states that the problem of free will vanishes once it is accepted to be illusory (Letters, 21 March). Of course it does, and so does any other problem that is treated in the same way.
Why don’t we declare covid-19 to be illusory? Then we can all go back to normal life.
Honeywell is no stranger to advanced computing
Your report on the Honeywell company working on quantum computing would come as little surprise to some readers with long memories (7 March, p 12). In the 1960s, Honeywell was one of the big names in commercial computing.
At the time, I worked for an electricity supply company. It had a massive Honeywell 800 computer to do its billing, housed in air-conditioned rooms with tape drives and punched card input. Software engineers were allowed an hour or so in the night to do our studies. Each alteration to our programs was put onto punched cards and batch-processed overnight. If you made a mistake or needed to tweak your programming, you started again.
My grandmother's experiments on gulls
I was very interested to read Jason Arunn Murugesu’s report of gulls preferring food that has been touched by humans (7 March, p 18). In the 1950s, my grandmother lived in Bridlington, on the Yorkshire coast of the UK. She was inclined to feed the gulls on the town’s promenade with laxative chocolate for her amusement. The gulls would catch the pieces as they were thrown up to them. I don’t believe she stayed around to see the effects.
For the record 鈥� 11 April 2020
鈥� Cosmosoma myrodora is in fact a moth; an example of a pollinating wasp is the European paper wasp (21 March, p 41).