Key Pirate - OPINION LETTERS

Standards of success
From Maureen Norrie The overall thrust of Michael Bond’s feature on how to succeed (8 March, p 30) seems to be that success is related to high positions in socially prestigious occupations, and to world-changing deeds, such as those recognised by the Nobel committee. Linking such positions and achievements with intelligence relegates those roles on which we rely for survival to the less intelligent. Examples quoted are the police, craftsmen and clerical workers. Perhaps we should redefine success as the ability to do what our hearts’ desire – and doing it well. Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, UK From Charles T. Ross When it comes to judging the achievements of those in education, the one-size-fits-all approach of exams and league tables is convenient for administrators and politicians,  so we are unlikely to see much change any time soon. However, the internet will constructively destroy the existing education behemoth. Distance learning  and freely available online courses are the future. The message to the younger generation is to go out and grab the future, don’t expect the older generation to hand it to you on a plate. Nowadays they do not know how to. Devizes, Wiltshire, UK

Slow life
From Peter Inkpen Michael Slezak reports that the tools for cellular fusion may  have been co-opted from viruses (1 March, p 16). Why then did it take around 2.7 billion years for cells to incorporate and adapt these viral genes for their own use? This Precambrian period is an unimaginably vast span of time representing many trillions of cell generations. In comparison to the most recent 600 million years, characterised by the enormous diversification of  plant and animal species, it  seems as though life was stuck  in an evolutionary slow gear for most of the Precambrian. Little Chalfont, UK

Off radar
From Harry Hopkins The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 (15 March, p 6) brings the disadvantage  of secondary radar to the fore, which is that the aircraft has to be “cooperating” to be seen. Primary radar is primitive, but it gives a picture of everything in the air around. The nuisance of the primary radar beam reflecting off rain-bearing clouds was one of the main reasons it was relegated, and now its main civilian role is to keep an eye on the development of these storm clouds. There are primary radars around the Gulf  of Thailand, it is surprising and disappointing that useful data on the vanished flight’s path did not quickly become available. Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK

Cave calendar
From J. Malcolm Wilkinson Reading a book on Stonehenge and other prehistoric structures by Gerald S. Hawkins, I came across some doodle-like patterns that resembled the ones shown in Alison George’s article on cave art and the origins of intelligence (23 November 2013, p 36). The examples from caves in Canchal de Mahoma and La Pileta in Spain show a series of spots and lines that have been interpreted as recording the phases of the moon. Could the same explanation, a primitive record of the moon’s phases and seasons of the year, apply to the drawings from El Castillo in your article? Perhaps the world’s oldest calendar? Chesterfield, Derbyshire, UK

Green bills
From Paul Sax I am surprised to see an important point missed in Reg Platt’s discussion of energy-saving policies (15 March, p 28). The  more consumers save energy,  the less profit that private energy companies would make, therefore prices would rise to maintain profit levels. That is just one reason these companies sabotage those government-led energysaving policies now referred  to as “green crap” by UK prime minister David Cameron’s “greenest ever government”. Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, UK

Welcome weed
From Bill Alexander Your article on New Zealand’s shake-up of its drug laws showed how it is leading the way on drug prohibition (8 March, p 40). If only the country would decriminalise people growing marijuana plants for their own use, as several parts of Australia have done. It used  to grow wild on the roadsides in New Zealand and was so easily available that it was sometimes sneaked into commercial cigarettes by tobacco workers. In the late 1960s, because of the tax potential, the effects on lowering alcohol consumption and the proliferation of “hard” drugs, marijuana was reclassified as a “dangerous” drug. At the time I was the national police reporter for the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation’s radio and television news. A high-ranking officer in the Wellington Drug Squad told me that the police were not worried by young people’s use  of marijuana but had a growing problem with “hard” drugs sourced through what they described as medical “professionals”. Ottawa, Canada

Vanishing brains
From Guy Cox The topic of Boltzmann brains  is raised once again in Joseph Silk’s look at the philosophical challenges facing modern cosmology (8 March, p 26).  But he doesn’t mention that in Boltzmann’s time the universe was seen as static. In such a universe, with infinite time,  any interaction can take place.  We now know that the universe  is expanding and this seriously changes the picture. The further apart particles are, the less likely any particular interaction becomes. This expansion is accelerating, so with the passing of time it becomes less and less likely that Boltzmann brains could form. If there aren’t any around now, the probability is against there being any in the future. Bye-bye Boltzmann brains. Sydney, Australia From Adrian Ellis Silk’s article mentions both the fine-tuning problem and Boltzmann’s “well-ordered universe” problem. There is a logical conclusion that resolves both these problems: that the universe is a construction. This answer may look to be a theistic cop-out, but it does seem scientifically sound. Hampton, London, UK

Stock movement
From Steve Dalton I struggled to see anything novel in Lisa Grossman’s story on how Brownian motion can describe stock market movements (8 March, p 11). In 1973, Fischer Black and Myron Scholes published what is now known as the Black-Scholes-Merton model, whose central assumption is  that stock prices are driven by  a Brownian motion stochastic process. Since then, enormous amounts of time have been  spent by financial quantitative analysts comparing actual  market behaviour with that model. Refined models have  been proposed that allow the modelling of jumps to reflect markets reacting strongly to  good or bad news, which can be impossible to model sensibly  with Brownian motion alone. Chipstead, Kent, UK

Giraffe autopsy
From Rohan Chadwick I cannot avoid responding to Peter Monck’s letter regarding the cull of the giraffe in Copenhagen Zoo (8 March, p 28). I personally think the zoo did an excellent job of ensuring that the best was made of an unfortunate situation. The meat wasn’t wasted, and the public autopsy was a great way of educating those present. I think you did a good job of telling the facts and allowing us to make up our own minds on whether it was right or wrong. Bristol, UK From Peter Hohmann When I die I would donate my body to science where it could  be dissected to train the next generation of doctors, benefiting my species. So perhaps the giraffe dissection should have been performed in front of veterinarian students, because interacting with live giraffes would be more likely to inspire young children. Thornlie, Western Australia

Fusion fuel
From Eric Kvaalen Clive Semmens is right that current fusion reactions require the production of tritium fuel (15 March, p 32). The hope is that most of the tritium can be produced from the neutrons given off during the reaction,  but some would need to be produced in fission reactors. However, there are other options, including deuterium-deuterium fusion. This requires a somewhat higher ignition temperature and produces less power per unit volume at a given pressure, but  it does not require tritium. Les Essarts-le-Roi, France

Worrying lines
From Katrina Murray Your review of John Brockman’s book What Should We Be Worried About? made me think it would  be a very interesting read (1 March, p 53). But I think most people have quite enough on  their plates without more to think about. I suggest a slightly more optimistic topic for his next book, What we can do about it. Woking, Surrey, UK

Open minds
From Ian Gammie Further to the discussion about whether other countries should mimic free-thinking schools in Venezuela in letters by Jonathan Fanning (1 March, p 32) and Derek Williams (1 February, p 32). The conundrum is surely that the protesting students of San Cristóbal, some of whom have been shot down in the streets, are presumably the product of freethinking education, while the government is run by economic boneheads who have failed  to invest in the country’s longterm well-being, and preside  over the highest inflation in  South America and one of the highest murder rates in the  world. Perhaps the free-thinking should have started with the politicians. St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK

No war
From Ian Gregory You have confirmed my suspicion that there may be no quick and easy solution to the crisis in Ukraine (8 March, p 6). Certainly no reasonable Ukrainian will  want us to get into a shooting match with Russia just for the sake of sovereignty. That would be like setting a car on fire in protest at someone smoking inside it!  The tide is against militarism  and Russian adventurism. The advance of democracy towards Moscow must be managed patiently, with some genuine sympathy offered to the Russians, else this recent episode will lead to a new cold war which will benefit only the arms manufacturers. Pontypridd, Mid Glamorgan, UK

Tater trials
From Andrew Sanderson The Sarpo potato varieties that Frank Fahy recommends may be sold as blight-resistant, (8 March, p 28), but that does  not tell the whole story. Following many years of being plagued by blight, I planted Sarpo Una and Sarpo Mira, and was given some Kestrel by a friend. That year I suffered from blight  in the Sarpo varieties, but the Kestrel remained unaffected. Spennymoor, County Durham, UK

Emergency lights
From Nich Woolf As a New Scientist reader who often works at music festivals, I found my imagination blending together two articles in the same issue. One mentioned an app that turns a phone into a Wi-Fi beacon that can broadcast an SOS message in an emergency (1 March, p 22). The other was about a festival stage connecting wirelessly to all the phones in the audience and making them flash their lights (p 21). As a certified dreamer, I had  the idea of someone in the crowd calling emergency services about a casualty, and all the other phones flashing to point out where  the call was made from. Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, UK