Letters archive

Bob Holmes states that people in the highlands of Borneo began to grow domesticated rice only after the second world war ( 31 October, p 31 ). I led the anthropological part of a recent research project in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo. Earth cores show that domesticated rice has been grown …

Timothy Revell reports on efforts to develop software that can tolerate bugs ( 5 December, p 40 ). A major cause of buggy software is the attitude of some programmers and, rather more significantly, their managers. In the 1980s, I was a utility programmer, producing software to automate much of our team's work. Before allowing …

It sounds great at first to be able to stop a computer from crashing by offering up a random number to a program when the required value is undefined or won't fit in the computer's memory. It may work some of the time, but many glitches are caused by an incorrect value, not an actual …

This is the most punk thing I have ever seen Harrison Ritchie-Yates appreciates Soviet-era roentgenizdat , gramophone records made from X-ray plates ( 12 December, p 24 ) .

I agree with much of what Lee Tien and Jeremy Gillula said about how companies should win back our trust in the software that runs so many aspects of our lives ( 12 December, p 26 ). But one of their suggestions has the potential to cause much harm. The idea that the source code …

You report that partners of domestic violence suspects who were arrested were 64 per cent more likely to have died within 23 years of the event than partners of those who were merely warned ( 7 November, p 10 ). Some have interpreted this to mean that arresting the suspects resulted in harm, possibly due …

• The researchers randomly assigned suspects to be warned or to be arrested: two-thirds were arrested overall. So something is going on, though only three of the 91 deaths were murders. Full details of the study are at doi.org/93b .

You interviewed Tim Jarvis about him climbing the world's vanishing equatorial glaciers to highlight what climate change is doing to them ( 5 December, p 27 ). He has already reached peaks in Ecuador, Uganda and Indonesia. However, to complete all intended climbs, he will need to do a bit more intercontinental air travel. This …

Stephen Battersby reports a new definition of planets that would include our moon ( 21 November, p 9 ). I have long thought that Terralune is not a planet-plus-satellite, but a binary planet system. The sun's pull on the moon exceeds that of Earth on the moon at every point in the latter's orbit. So …

I found Anil Ananthaswamy's article about possible links between quantum entanglement and distortions in the fabric of the space-time continuum provocative and informative ( 7 November, p 30 ). If quantum entangled entities are indeed bridged by wormholes, then Einstein could well have been very satisfied. Quantum entanglement would no longer be "spooky action at …

Masayo Soma says it's a mystery why blue-capped cordon-bleu finches need to communicate using super-fast tap-dancing ( 28 November, p 20 ). May I suggest that the pitch of the buzzing sound produced may give the female an indication of the male's weight? Thus the speed of the tapping may, together with the length of …

Debora MacKenzie says it is unlikely that there will be chemical and biological attacks by terrorists ( 28 November, p 30 ). But there have been incidents apart from the Aum Shinrikyo cult's attacks with home-made sarin in Japan ( 11 May 1996, p 3 ), which she mentions. For example, there was also a …

You report the use of 3D printing to make extra bits for old objects ( 14 November, p 21 ). I await with bated breath the first occasion when a repair or improvement made with a 3D printed component results in a failure or accident because the newly empowered "engineer" did not appreciate the design …

It was wonderful to see the informed words of Jon Richfield back in print in The Last Word ( 5 December ) after a significant absence. It would appear that the report of his death was, like Mark Twain's, an exaggeration. Park Orchards, Victoria, Australia

• The cave-dwelling olm is known in Slovenian as človeška ribica – "human fish" ( 5 December, p 38 ). • The "birthday paradox" is in fact that in a group as small as 23 people one shared birthday is more likely than none ( 12 December, p 30 ).