Many ways to stay safer amid the pandemic (1)
I write regarding Adam Vaughan’s excellent article on why the UK has one of the highest death rates per million from covid-19 in Europe (6 June, p 8). I live in Berlin, where face masks have been mandatory for more than a month on public transport, in shops and in any place where people might gather. Even a bandana will do, but it must be in place before entry.
It is clear that the UK is and was behind the curve in so many ways concerning its pandemic response. A benefit of this belatedness might be to learn from others.
However, not to have already introduced the mandatory wearing of face masks in all situations where social distancing is almost impossible is tantamount to wilful neglect鈥� or did I miss something?
Many ways to stay safer amid the pandemic (2)
I have made a “ so that I can keep my distance from my fellow citizens. It is very simple and cheap; the hat uses a reversing sensor from a car mounted in half a globe and is powered by batteries from a broken robot vacuum cleaner.
The sensor cost 鈧�20 and the globe was a broken one that I found in the trash. As the sensor’s range starts at 1.5 metres, it is perfect for warning when people get too close. As Sweden was never locked down, social distancing is very important.
Green hopes may yet hit a red light
In your interview with World Meteorological Organization head Petteri Taalas, you consider the positive impact of the covid-19 pandemic on reducing carbon emissions (30 May, p 30).
This crisis has given governments a great opportunity to reduce emissions, but whether they will capitalise on it remains in doubt.
We must also consider how the pandemic may hinder progress. I am concerned that the large costs incurred due to measures to stop the virus will mean that governments are less willing to invest in green energy technology. The need to put money into rebuilding businesses is likely to lead to governments prioritising cheap energy over clean energy.
An alternative way to look at our fifth appetite
I was pleased to see the variability of human appetite explained as a combination of five separable components related to key nutrients (23 May, p 30). Could I suggest an amendment?
About a decade ago, I was monitoring my own nutrition and thought it would be interesting to compare it, in some detail, with diets reported from elsewhere. After a trawl through the scientific literature, I settled on three: a modern Western diet, the observed diet of modern hunter-gatherers in East Africa and an early neolithic diet.
I was shocked when I tried calculating the amounts of various chemical elements consumed. All three of these reported diets had, to within reasonable error, the same total combined intake of sodium and potassium.
The difference was that the hunter-gatherer and neolithic diets had almost an order of magnitude more potassium than sodium, whereas the Western diet was the other way around.
My idea to explain this was that we have a capacity to sense amounts of some individual dietary components, but that we lack the ability to distinguish sodium from potassium.
Perhaps this suggests that public health advice would be much more successful if it stressed increasing potassium rather than decreasing sodium.
I would love to see this exercise repeated by someone with full access to all the modern literature. Meanwhile, I suggest that the sodium appetite, one of the five suggested in the article, should really be called the potassium appetite.
Could we go diving for space rocks too?
I was stimulated by your article on searching for meteorites in Antarctica and a thought occurred to me (30 May, p 41). Could meteorites landing on Antarctic glaciers make their way to the ocean?
While many would travel with icebergs into the open seas, a significant proportion would be deposited near where glaciers meet the sea and fracture.
This process would have been occurring over thousands of years, so there may be relatively rich deposits in these often shallow waters. Would it be worth taking a look using remotely operated vehicles or even hardy divers?
The philosophers strike back
Sam Edge offers us the perfect example of the problem of consciousness (Letters, 30 May). He is colour-blind, but I am not, so I can never comprehend his subjective experience of seeing a rainbow, nor he mine.
All the optical and neurological science in the world can never change that. The matter is wholly inaccessible to natural science. In failing to appreciate his own predicament, it is he, not the philosophers, who is missing the point.
It is, in fact, some 2500 years since significant progress was last made in this area by philosophers. During that interregnum, they helped shape mathematics and the natural sciences. Now those disciplines are, at last, catching up and demonstrating in their own ways what Siddhartha Gautama, Lao Tzu and Parmenides understood so long ago, that consciousness is just a complex stream of delusory information, the perceived self just a construct within the stream.
To a philosopher, the natural scientist and the mathematician are something of teenagers still, scornful of their parents’ wisdom yet unwilling to accept their own limitations 鈥� and a good deal less patient.
Our simulation might be an alien's search for clues
I have been following the debates in 快猫短视频 about whether we are all living in a simulation (6 June, p 30). It would certainly explain some of the cosmological issues that we are still struggling with, those highlighted in the recent article by Jim Peebles, “Have we got the universe right?”.
We may well be trying to analyse an imperfect universe simulation, and the more we go digging in cosmology, the more inconsistencies we will find.
A disturbing thought also occurred to me: the simulation may have been created by a different species to humans. Perhaps a species that is trying to analyse the fate of a dead planet that it discovered on its voyages.