Letters archive

Three months ago, you reported on the French National Academy of Science's forthcoming report on the health effects of low doses of ionising radiation (This Week, 2 September). A radiation biologist from London called the report "stupid". Is that so? The International Commission on Radiation Protection based its assessment of risk from high doses of …

Stuart Sutherland reviewed my Artificial Minds (Review, 7 October) as a chronicle of the artificial intelligence (AI) debates, though it was intended to promote a new paradigm of mind. Too bad. I completely agree with much of what Sutherland says. AI people, including me, are certainly optimistic about the future of machine intelligence. Too many …

I have belatedly been reading your special issue on Africa. I agree and sympathise with a great deal of what you have written. Africa is not the basket case it is so frequently assumed to be. But it has been through a terrible time. Thinking of the economic chaos caused here when GDP simply failed …

With regard to the Orwellian points alluded to in your editorial, it hardly needs pointing out that in Orwell's vision the activities that today's city centre surveillance systems are set up to catch would actually have been ignored (Comment, 4 November). Muggers would have been left to mug, rapists to rape, and vandals to vandalise …

The National Radiological Protection Board chooses to ignore a considerable body of independent evidence regarding the effects of electromagnetic radiation on natural organisms (Letters, 11 November). The importance of low level background electromagnetic fields (EMFs) to life is emphasised by NASA putting Schumann wave generators on spacecraft, where lack of natural terrestrial EMFs causes immune …

I read Tim Hunkin's comments on The Microprocessor: A Biography with interest (Review, 4 November). I can certainly sympathise with his experiences of early "development kits" and the difficulty of actually doing anything useful with microprocessors. As producer and presenter of a BBC/Open University radio series on the history of electronics, I interviewed Gordon Moore …

Your "Complete scientific history of the Universe" (28 October) has Leonardo Fibonacci introducing Arabic numerals to Europe in 1202. Had you specified "successfully", your history would be less incomplete. Although it did not catch on, an earlier introduction was actually made by peripatetic polymath Abraham ibn-Ezra (1093-1167) of Spain (the same Rabbi Ben Ezra of …

I think your correspondent will find that if Second World War fighter pilots did have a tendency to turn left under stress, it was almost certainly because of the bias of the aircraft and not any inherent bias in the pilot (Letters, 4 November). Any pilot of a single-engine propeller-driven aircraft will tell you that …

Reading Stephen Day's cover story "Invasion of the shapechangers" (28 October), I was very much reminded of Stephano the drunken butler in Shakespeare's The Tempest, when he stumbled across the monster that spoke from both its ends. What indeed can be made of a mouse that has the spine of a primordial jawless fish? Perhaps …

In our early teens in the mid-1950s, a friend and I used to cadge junked mains radio receivers from repair shops, refurbish them in the cellar at home, and barter them for ex-army two-way radios. While doing the repairs we worked on the exposed circuitry with the sets plugged into a two-pin non-earthed 240-volt mains …

Susan Blackmore is correct in saying that there are numerous studies on anomalous physical phenomena associated with random number generators which have been interpreted in terms of psychokinesis (Review, 11 November). However, many of these studies ascribe similar properties to randomly seeded pseudo random number generators. This should be sufficient to allow anyone to smell …

If the extraterrestrials allegedly visiting us are so smart (This Week, 4 November) why do photographs usually show them driving 1950s lampshades or pie dishes supported by strings? My hypothesis is that, rather than render themselves invisible, they deliberately disguise themselves as domestic kitchenware etc, in order to heap ridicule on anyone who reports the …

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