Letters archive

William Lee Adams described the confidence-building possibilities of the so-called Superman stance (20 June, p 40) . During a recent visit to Hampton Court Palace in Greater London, I realised that portraits of King Henry VIII and some of his contemporaries show a very similar powerful stance. I wondered whether this stance could be found …

We have come a long way in our understanding of the Ebola virus since it was first identified in 1976. But the most profound aspect of the recent outbreak in West Africa isn't the resulting improvement in medical procedures or even the discoveries made about where the virus can persist in the body. Instead, it …

Richard Weller examines the relationships between sunlight and health benefits (13 June, p 26) . I couldn't help wondering whether sunlight exposure is merely a side effect of being active outdoors? Are we missing the obvious here? Taroona, Tasmania, Australia

Thank you Richard Weller for trying, at last, to put the record straight: it isn't just the popular press that tends to treat skin cancer as one disease. It is more than 30 years since it was recognised that there is a relatively low incidence of malignant melanoma in agricultural workers compared with office workers …

Michael Le Page gives figures for the sea level rises that will follow the melting of the vulnerable Antarctic ice sheets and the Greenland ice sheet (13 June, p 8) . These assume that rises will be the same everywhere. It has been reported, however, that when an ice sheet melts, the sea level rise …

The continuing discussion of whether or not the universe is fine-tuned for life (most recently in your letters column of 30 May) inspires another thought. You could just as well say that the universe is fine-tuned to allow for the existence of a randomly chosen asteroid with its own size, shape and composition. Because we …

Simon Jones makes some outrageous and fallacious comments regarding the politics of conservatism and socialism (letter, 13 June) . For example, he claims that "conservatives regard the general public as... stupid", whereas in fact the opposite is true. Conservatives believe in giving people the right to make up their own minds, whereas socialists aim to …

I was fascinated to read Simon Jones's letter referring to socialist belief and wondered whether he was speaking as a believer or as an outside observer. I suspect the latter is the case. Just as there are as many versions of any religious faith as there are practitioners, so there are multiple versions of socialism, …

In his letter saying that robots are all tax avoiders, Martin van Raay touches on one of the biggest failures of a free market (30 May) . The economics of business treats ex-employees as "externalities" – that is, as ceasing to exist. The automation of a task may be profitable for an industry, but once …

Martin van Raay asks "When you replace a tax-paying taxi driver with a driverless car, who is going to pay the unemployment benefit of the former driver?" In a free enterprise economy, competition will make driverless taxis less expensive, and the passenger's savings will be spent on other services that create employment for the former …

Your report on power transmission via Wi-Fi contains the chilling statement that "the team designed software that broadcasts meaningless data across several Wi-Fi channels when no one is using the internet" (6 June, p 18) . This is a terrible idea in so many ways. The frequency space used for Wi-Fi is increasingly saturated already. …

In his review of the book The World Beyond Your Head , Mike Holderness alludes to the philosopher René Descartes saying " Cogito, ergo sum ", "I think, therefore I am" (9 May, p 45) . Philosophers and many scientists are bound to the notion of "being". Are we all real, or is only one …