Looking forward to the time after the virus (1)
Adam Vaughan says the coronavirus pandemic is unlikely to have a significant direct effect on climate change, but I think there is still some cause for hope, even as the impact of the infection unfolds 4 April, p 10.
My optimism is drawn from the fact that the outbreak has demonstrated that the changes necessary to slow climate change are possible, and can be enacted extremely quickly. There is no doubt that life will return to something like normal once the pandemic wanes, and maintenance of current restrictions is economically and socially unsustainable in the short term, though these may illuminate what some aspects of a sustainable lifestyle could look like within a decade or so.
We need to work out how to translate our current experience into a longer-term plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to figure out what a healthy economy looks like in a world where consumption is limited.
Looking forward to the time after the virus (2)
Within weeks, covid-19 has achieved what few people could have believed possible. Governments previously focused on austerity have deluged their citizens with money, and those citizens have, for the most part, readily acquiesced to the most stringent curbs on their liberty seen outside wartime.
These changes have been driven by fear: of getting the disease, of killing our loved ones by passing it on to them and of health services failing under the load. It is striking that many shifts 鈥� the almost complete stop to air travel, drastically reduced commuting and the collapse of the fast fashion industry 鈥� are exactly those required to achieve the carbon dioxide reductions we know we need to make, but have hitherto shown little sign of adopting. Is it too much to hope that governments may be bold enough to make some of the changes to which we have become accustomed permanent, in order to defeat the larger threat from global warming?
Thank you for breadth, depth and reliability (1)
You email me to describe contingency plans for subscribers. 快猫短视频 is my best source for detailed, authoritative, accessible science information in general, and as I plan to survive this outbreak, I enthusiastically support whatever measures are necessary to ensure the safety and health of all its employees and business partners. You are all doing a very good job. 快猫短视频 is unique in its breadth, depth, accessibility and reliability.
Thank you for breadth, depth and reliability (2)
In the past few weeks, I have discovered the joy of print magazines. In the cacophony of constant breaking news about covid-19, the physical medium has provided a much calmer reading experience 鈥� and, in many cases, a window into the world as it was only recently, when everything made just a little bit more sense. 快猫短视频 has been a big part of this, bringing a trustworthy, well-reasoned voice into a messy conversation.
Once-in-a-century events will keep happening
You call the current pandemic a “once-in-a-century event” (28 March, p 20). True, that is the elapsed time since the “Spanish flu” outbreak of 1918 to 1919, but this is no guide to the future. Since then, our population has quadrupled. The United Nations estimates that it was only in 2007 that the majority of humanity came to live in cities rather than the countryside. For much of the century, we couldn’t fly across the world in hours.
The production of animals for food has massively intensified, increasing the chances of new pathogens emerging, as we have tragically seen. The dangerous effects of climate change, those with the potential to disrupt ecosystems and societies in a way that creates more opportunities for the spread of diseases, have started to be experienced in the past 20 years.
If I had to guess, I would say that a return to “business as usual” will result in another major pandemic within the lifetimes of most people reading this. Of course, we now have the science and technology to cope with almost any pandemic. Yet current events are proving that we are very reluctant to make even the most basic pandemic preparations.
Vitamin D could explain viruses' summer retreat
You report on the beneficial effect of vitamin D on the innate immune system, our defence against primary infection with viruses such as the coronavirus (28 March, p 44). Research has shown that vitamin D protects against viral infections of the upper respiratory tract.
Might this, rather than temperature, be the main reason why such infections trail off in the summer months? Summertime is also when we produce the most vitamin D because there is more sunlight and we spend more time outdoors.
The paradox of efficiency and consumption
Edd Gent discusses an approach to thermodynamics that may improve the energy efficiency of data processing (14 March, p 40). This reminds me of work on steam engines in the 18th and 19th centuries, which led to the study of thermodynamics. The Stanley Jevons noted that consumption of coal in England soared as improvements were made to steam engines. This is the Jevons paradox: increased energy efficiency increases consumption. The solution to the environmental issue isn’t greater efficiency. It is reduced consumption.
That's not why I want to curb the internet of things
Hugh Cooke is concerned by the carbon emissions of the rockets used to launch satellites to provide internet services, and the energy required to run the “internet of everything” (Letters, 21 March). Yet pushing electrons is vastly cheaper than pushing people or goods.
Granted, launching satellites is polluting, but I am convinced that this is small compared with the pollution caused by international air travel. If we can replace such travel with videoconferencing, that would lead to a big net drop in emissions. I do agree with Cooke on one thing, though: we don’t need everything to be connected to the internet, for reasons including security, privacy and reliability.
Is complexity a clue to our place in the universe?
Richard Webb says that free will is “often seen as the opposite of determinism” (15 February, p 34). Surely, though, it is randomness that is the true opposite of determinism.
It seems to me that free will is balanced on the knife-edge boundary between these states, in a way that is analogous to liquid existing on the line between gaseous and crystalline states.
Many articles in 快猫短视频 have commented on the special nature of this boundary between stasis and randomness, and the interesting and counter-intuitive chaotic behaviour that it leads to.
I see quantum mechanics, too, as positioned on the boundary of self-organised criticality between classical physical behaviour and weird interconnectedness (26 February 2011, p 36). Could there be a glimmer of a theory of everything here?
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that fast enough
Layal Liverpool mentions modern digital voice assistants being “ready to respond rapidly to any command” in contrast to the opinion expressed by one IT expert in 1990 that speech control would be slower (14 March, p 27).
It seems to me that, for most people, screen-based user interfaces are always going to be faster than speech for anything more complicated than a simple request to turn a light on or find the nearest coffee shop.
The speed at which we speak, coupled with the linear, one-speaker-at-a-time nature of the user interface provided by voice assistants, means that this will always be the case, regardless of how good voice assistants get at understanding what we are asking them to do.
Further felicitous factors for footpaths (1)
From
From Peter Reid, Plymouth, Devon, UK
Let people decide which way to cross new grassed areas, says Frank Bover (Letters, 21 March). It that, during the Peninsular war against Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 19th century, a British general called John Moore, stopped his men laying out paths in a camp set up for a force of 30,000 soldiers in Portugal.
He told them to wait a week to see where the men walked 鈥� and then they would know exactly where to put the paths.
Further felicitous factors for footpaths (2)
I have seen Bover’s idea in action at the UK secondary school that I attended from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s.
It had an older teaching building and a recently built modern one that consisted of interlocking square sections. The pathways around the modern buildings were laid out in wide curves connecting the doorways of the sections of the building.
The students rushing to their next class wouldn’t take the long, sweeping curves of the pathways, but would go in straight lines instead. Pretty soon, there were tracks across the grass, which meant they were very muddy in the damp winters of south-west Somerset.
We couldn’t understand why the pathways were laid out in such an inefficient manner. One day, during a clear-out of a storeroom, an architect’s model of the school was found and later this was put on display in the library.
Looking down at the model, I finally understood: the curving pathways simply looked good on the model.
A few years later, we returned to school, coming back one September. We found that a set of ugly, but efficient, straight-line concrete paths had been laid down.
Presumably, someone had finally become totally fed up with all the muddy footprints and decided to follow the paths laid down across the students’ chosen routes.
Organic agriculture will still promote deforestation
Christel Cederberg and Hayo van der Werf say that the relationship between the lower yields of organic agriculture and additional demand for land is unclear (21 March, p 25).
They point out that in Brazil, agricultural intensification coincided with increased deforestation, and say that this supports their argument.
But it is clear that if agricultural output had been increased by the same amount using organic farming, then an even larger amount of forest would have needed to be destroyed.
For the record 鈥� 18 April 2020
鈥⒙燭he alcohol in wine evaporates faster than the water, and this creates a difference in surface tension and “legs” in the glass (4 April, p 16).
鈥⒙燝erm谩n Martinez works at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas (4 April, p 15).
鈥⒙營nvestigations continue into whether the initial level of virus that infects a person, rather than the average infectious dose, correlates with disease severity for covid-19 (4 April, p 8).