Letters to the Editor
mitch
Published Letters: 42 Editor's Choice: 26
-
beat evolution at what?
[Read the article: Cautionary tales of microbe evolution]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm not so confident our tinkering will be without consequence; we've beat evolution in so many other ways. We've built machines much faster than any living organism.
We've beat evolution at what? It's true that we've created tools that do things no living thing can do. However, if the game is survival in the natural world, nothing we've created even comes close to the species that evolution has put together.
This is especially true with microorganisms, which (as this post relates) can bring enormous evolutionary firepower to bear on the problem of survival. In general, living things are the way they are for a reason (fitness); the modifications we introduce are almost certainly going to make them less effective in the rough-and-tumble real world. And that lack of effectiveness means that they're not a threat to anything.
-
Extras!
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The second season was even better than the first in my opinion, and that's saying something. Those of us in America finally find out who Ronnie Corbett is! The first season DVDs just came out and I bought three copies to give away.
I could never get into The Office or Curb Your Enthusiasm (I found the cringe-humor too draining and painful) but I love Extras.
-
I thought Arrested Development was great, too
[Read the article: Bright lights, big pity]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But then again, I saw it on DVD, so the in-jokes were probably easier to get.
I was just talking about FNL with my friend the other night. I had talked about it glowingly before, and he watched a few episodes but didn't like it. In our last conversation, he said that he was a fan of the novel and the movie and that he expected the show to have more football. But he seemed open to trying it out again.
I didn't really have a good pithy explanation for why I like this show so much, but one of the other letter writers here got it right. It's one of the most authentic-feeling shows I've ever seen.
I was sure that FNL was the kind of thing Heather likes, so I've been waiting for the column that raved about it. Especially since around mid-season when it went from good to great. I do kinda wish she had written about it earlier, though, because the show definitely has that "to good to get renewed" vibe.
-
treadmill?
[Read the article: Why Monsanto loves ethanol]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No doubt Monsanto plans to come up with new, "improved" corn seed products that will target new, improved pests, and will be able to resist new, improved herbicides. That is the treadmill that the human race has put itself on, and whether we'll ever be able to get off of it seems a highly doubtful proposition, unless food prices rise so high that biofuels become politically impossible.
We've been on this treadmill since the beginning of life. It's called evolution.
-
novel?
[Read the article: Is genetically modified corn a honeybee killer?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The nucleotides in a species' genes are like a complex novel, written over millions of years in an economic, yet subtle style our best comparison to which, perhaps, is Hemingway.
...
This process is the very opposite of proverbial monkeys pounding on typewriters until Shakespearean prose is spit out: it's letting monkeys take Hemingwayean manuscripts and write over passages with their typewriters, until nothing of the sublime whole is left
This is a terrible analogy. Writing a novel is intelligent design, not evolution.
All genomes were originally authored monkey-style. There was never any Hemingway involved. The genetic engineering we have now is like having monkeys at those typewriters that understand the plot. Those genetic engineers are no Hemingway, it's true, but they're certainly no worse than anything that's come before.
-
definitive proof of safety?
[Read the article: Hypocrite environmentalists?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When it comes to proving safety, I think one of the things that worries some scientists is that they're being asked to prove a negative.
Any study that shows no bad effects can be criticized on the grounds that it doesn't consider every possible bad effect. You can say the study is not long-term enough, it only considers current GMOs (as if any current study could test future organisms), whatever. There's no way to prove that no GMO will ever hurt anything.
Should parents be asked to prove that their children will never hurt anyone? You can't do it.
If those that are afraid of GMOs would propose a testing hurdle more reasonable than "you have to prove that it's impossible for this GMO to hurt anything anywhere ever" then I think a lot of the resistance to testing requirements would go away.
-
carbon comes from the air
[Read the article: Lords of the dirt]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's all about how much organic carbon -- or "soil C," as these scientists abbreviate it -- remains after the harvest. After all the fossil fuels are burned away, soil C is all we're going to have left.
I don't quite follow this. Plants get carbon from carbon dioxide in the air, of which we have plenty. "After all the fossil fuels are burned away" there will be even more carbon in the air.
I certainly buy the idea that you have to take good care of your soil, but I don't see why carbon in particular is so precious.
-
Bond yields
[Read the article: Will China drop the bomb on the U.S. dollar?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]re: "...if the value of the dollar dropped, so would the value of China's remaining dollar-denominated assets."
Not so.
As the article points out: "It would also cause a spike in US bond yields...It is estimated that China holds over $900bn in a mix of US bonds.
You're mistaken. The spike in bond yields doesn't do anything at all to help China's current bond assets.
If China started selling US T-bills en masse, the value of those bonds would drop dramatically. If you were to buy one of those from them on the cheap, you would get a very high yield, because you bought for such a low price. But the high yield that you get doesn't help China at all.