Return to Sender
Holiday 8-Track by Matthew Perks Re: Gas and Gurus
We get a lot of mail from fans. (Thanks, guys!) But it's the notes from fanatics — people who walk the fine line between zealot and kook — that are the most fun to read. Take the sectarian violence that erupted among the various alt-fuel contingents in response to October's story on cellulosic ethanol: Ethanol will save us all! Ethanol is a silly distraction! Solar! Cyanobacteria! Public transportation! The David Allen groupies, on the other hand, are united in their admiration of Mr. Getting Things Done: Most of them loved our profile, praising us for treating Allen as a real person instead of an ascended master. But a few had clearly been to the Kool-Aid punch bowl, suggesting our mention of his checkered past amounted to a "slam job." Dude, when you see the truth as a takedown, you know you've crossed that line into the kook zone.
Keep Off the Grass
The articles on the environment in your October issue ("The Plant That Will Save America" and "Burning Down the House," issue 15.10) include interesting information on high tech approaches to solving problems of global warming and dependency on foreign oil. However, the simplest solutions are often overlooked when compared with whiz-bang approaches like cellulosic ethanol. For example, building effective public transportation networks tied to appropriate land-use planning would accomplish far more than producing more ethanol, which does generate some amount of carbon dioxide. We need fewer cars, not better ways of keeping them on the road. To Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger, who advocate a ManhattansProject approach: Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on research is as obvious as it is simplistic. It can't hurt, and it might help, but we need to spend even more money doing things that we already know will work.
Barnes Bierck
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Biofuel Sell
Thanks for rising above the politics and rhetoric to take an objective look at the future of biofuels ("The Plant That Will Save America"). The people attacking ethanol are flat-earthers who'd have us stuck on the status quo forever. We need to see this through and not abandon ethanol — again. We're on the verge of breakthroughs that can actually benefit our home economy and break the cycle of dependence on oil.
Excerpted from comment posted on wired.com by BBS.
Bad Medicine
Facebook pages serving as universal health records ("Saving Facebook," issue 15.10)? You're kidding, right? Putting health care or other personal information on a site run by the same twentysomething who, unannounced and out of the blue, turns on News Feed? When ad clickthrough becomes more anemic than it already is, when registrations slow to a crawl, and when the killer-app gold mine fails to appear (because "nobody actually does pay for Facebook applications"), who knows what sort of new "business plan" (i.e., data sell-off) will materialize?
Mike Wallace
Dallas, Texas
Thou Shalt Not Stereotype
I realize that Bible-bashing is in vogue (and with the religious right as it is, how couldn't it be?), but the mashup equation "Wikipedia + Bible = Conservapedia" in the Geekipedia supplement (issue 15.10) is borderline offensive. Not all those who read the Bible are radical conservatives.
Scott Admiraal
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Inside Information
Every time Bob Dinetz designs an infographic, Ed Tufte kills a kitten. The "Silicon Valley Cleans Up" flowchart (issue 15.10) neither flows nor charts very clearly the data it purports to present to the reader. Seriously — the "info" in infographic is short for "information," not "tangled mess of clusterfuckery."
Ben McCorkle
Columbus, Ohio
The Recovering
You reveal a deep personal sadness in the story of how scientist French Anderson went to jail for molesting the young daughter of a colleague and how it has affected those directly involved ("The Unraveling," issue 15.10). After dedicating 95 percent of your tale to an objective yet sympathetic description of facts and circumstances, you leave readers convinced that Lin suffered what she says she has suffered.
It is my hope that Lin will find the help and the strength to overcome the burdens of these lasting memories.
Pieter Oosterhoff
Sydney, Australia
Negative Campaigning
In "Mind the Gaps" (Start, issue 15.10), you describe the importance of publishing "dark data" — scientific research that failed to yield a dramatic outcome. Some of the challenges associated with publishing negative results are as follows: 1) You must be very sure that the negative outcome was real. Otherwise, you would be contaminating the literature with false data. But in most cases, it would be very difficult for a peer reviewer to determine whether the negative results are caused by faulty experimental conditions. 2)Journals have a finite number of pages: It is difficult enough to get positive results published; it is nearly impossible to get negative results published. 3) The number of journals dedicated to publishing negative results is pitifully small. 4) The sheer volume of negative results is so huge that, if published, it would overwhelm all our current publishing avenues.
I thought I had published negative results on at least one occasion, but when I look at the article now, I remember that not only did the substance under investigation not provide the expected protective effects against a chemotherapeutic agent (negative results), it actually caused more harm than the chemotherapeutic agent alone.
Jessie Goodpasture
Belmont, California
Run E=MC2
My friend and I were doing a freestyle battle rap this morning and came up with something you might like:
Analog circuits come easy to me, it's easy to see that electrons are easy to free, using high eV UV, electron clouds will form almost instantly. If you apply HV to the hot cathode, and speed of light C is the upper bound, then V of electron E approaches infinity much higher than speed of sound when it hits the common ground, given that there is low pressure and humidity, but I'll be humble to preserve humility. Cause we don't want heat losses in current flows and social blows due to turbidity.
Slava Persion
Nanuet, New York
Nooooooooooooooo!!!
The Wilhelm Scream (Start, "Cue the Scream," issue 15.10) makes me want to scream. It has become a blatant audio cue that screams, "This is all fake!" Every time I hear it, it's like having an alligator chomp on my suspension of disbelief. I feel sorry for the CGI artists who work endless hours to make ultrarealistic visual f/x, only to have the sound designer stick that overused shriek over their hard work and completely ruin the effect.
Rob Huston
Eunice, Louisiana
How Babies Aren't Made
For a group of very knowledgeable and very smart guys, you still don't seem to be able to get past overprotection of male egos. In Mr. Know-It-All (Start, issue 15.09), Brendan I. Koerner answers a question about fertility drugs, quoting an editor at Twins magazine as saying parents should explain that "Mommy needed help in order to have her babies." Whoa! Have you read the statistics on how often Daddy's sperm was either not active enough or had some other defect?
It's so much easier to make the woman the weaker and defective partner. No wonder we techie women are not reading Wired in greater numbers.
Judy Wollowitz
Santa Cruz, California
Zspace Zscientist
How on Earth (or Venus) could you have missed Zsa ZsaGabor as the rebelliousscientist in Queen of Outer Space (Start, "The Best," issue 15.10)? She makes Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage look like Marie Curie. (My favorite line: "I hate zat qveen!")
Jim Phillips
San Francisco, California