Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1152 Editor's Choice: 107
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Like can collecting
[Read the article: The bionic eucalyptus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If eucalyptus oil could be efficiently turned into fuel, people would have an incentive to go after the trees with all the vengeance of collectors in places that give refunds for return of bottles and cans.
Fifty thousand years has shown that no species can avoid coming under our thumb if there's any way for us to profit from its demise. I'm not saying eucalyptus should be exterminated, but if the chief complaints against it are that it grows very aggressively and its oil is very energy-dense (and therefore highly flammable), it seems like there's a way forward in heterogeneous biomes where eucalyptus is "taking over."
If genetic engineering experiments of the sort described here can make eucalyptus profitable for scavengers, they would address both issues as effectively as refundable deposits addressed the problem of discarded cans.
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Debate ad absurdam
[Read the article: Autism debate, Take 5,832]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The perverse thing about debates like this one is that they very quickly get twisted around until you get people saying that vaccination of any kind is wrong, or that thimerosal is good for you and mercury is perfectly harmless.
Mercury is poisonous. There's a reason why we don't use it anymore in vaccines. That's not something that can really be sanely debated. Whether a given study proves that it causes autism or anything else in particular is beside the point.
Would I let my kids receive thimerosal-based vaccines if it was my only choice? Yes (despite the temptation to hide behind herd immunity). Given that it's not the only choice, should anyone be using them? No.
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Non-negotiable
[Read the article: I want a perfect wedding, but my in-laws are trashy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As much as Baffled might want to push away the unpleasantness of her finacé's background by shunning his family, she can't. His brother and his brother's girlfriend and everything about them and where they come from that drives her crazy are going to be a part of her family from the moment she says, "I do."
Okay, that's not completely true. She could exclude them, but by doing so she would be cutting them off so completely as to be nearly irreparable — something which flies in the face of her claim to love and support them.
So the couple is non-negotiable.
On the other hand it is the privilege of those whose wedding it is (and those who are footing the bill) to exclude children if they want. It's very easy to do this: Baffled may simply need to tell the girlfriend-in-law-to-be (or whatever she's called) that as much as they wish they could she and her husband aren't able to invite children as well as adults, and they hope so much that that won't prevent anyone from being able to come. If the girlfriend doesn't get the hint, maybe Baffled will need to be more firm.
Either way, if Baffled suspects that the girlfriend will bring the baby no matter what, how expensive is it to discreetly arrange for a babysitter to be around as a fallback? The goal is peace and tranquility and happiness, right?
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Classic Dyson
[Read the article: Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Optimistic, heterodox, bold to a fault, and unafraid of big ideas and the inevitable weirdness of the future.
Above all, though, even more than he is a futurist — maybe even the futurist — Dyson is a scientist. He treats his ideas not as doctrine or prediction but as hypothesis, and here is where Roychoudhuri missed the boat.
When Dyson says that it's better to be wrong than to be vague, that's because we don't learn anything from vague hypotheses. In science falsification is where it's at, and specific, explicit ideas that turn out to be wrong are the engine of illumination. Unfortunately Roychoudhuri's line of questioning never really picked up that thread.
Let's pick global warming. Dyson's opinion about the severity of world climate change is frankly less interesting per se than the process by which he arrived at it. That's what's always made Dyson interesting to hear from, right or wrong. And Roychoudhuri walked right up to the question I really wanted to see answered — "If you're wrong, how and when will you know, and what do we do about it then?" — but never opened the door.
That's not the sort of question you can ask your average climate-change-denier or gen-mod PR shill — they aren't people who really know why they believe something nor are they prepared to look at the possibility that they could be wrong.
But Dyson is not among them, and I couldn't help but feel a sense of loss at the opportunity to hear more from him.
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Majority? If only....
[Read the article: How the Democrats blew it]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I would love to see what an actual Democratic majority would do in the Senate. Too bad there isn't one.
I'd also love to see what a well-funded Israel-oriented public policy lobby other than AIPAC would do to influence American statecraft. Too bad there isn't one. (And no, Soros' organization doesn't count, at least not until it actually accomplishes something.)
But more than anything, I'd love to see a progressive intellectual movement with a plan of greater depth and vision than just, "we don't like these candidates, so we're taking our marbles and going home."
Well? Is there going to be one of those, or not?