Letters From Our Readers
Brain Trauma in Iraq
Emily Singer’s
article on brain trauma suffered by U.S. military personnel in Iraq underscores
the fact that even with recent advances in functional neuroimaging techniques,
brain injuries are difficult to diagnose, owing to the complexity of the brain
and of the cognitive functions it enables the healthy adult to perform (“Brain
Trauma in Iraq,” May/June 2008). The affected veterans deserve help, all the
more so because they are returning to a workforce in which cognitive ability is
increasingly valued. Neurology appeals to medical students and other health
professionals in search of a monumental challenge, since it demands
multidisciplinary expertise while seldom yielding simple solutions. Singer’s
article suggests that we need to encourage more health professionals to choose
this specialty in the hopes that they will help develop better diagnostics and
therapies.
William E. Cooper
Midlothian,
VA
On April 17, the
California State Senate unanimously passed a bill that will ensure screening of
veterans for traumatic brain injury; it is to be hoped that the bill will serve
as a model for other states. For too long, the U.S. Department of Veterans
Affairs has taken a reactive stance to the problem of TBI. Imaginative research
such as that described in Singer’s piece, coupled with proactive screening such
as that now legislated by California,
will be crucial in mitigating the awful effects of TBI.
Jerome V. Blum
Los Altos Hills, CA
The Wonder of Physics
When I was a boy, I read almost everything I could
find about the prospects of atomic energy. Not long after I entered MIT in
1936, Hiroshima
became an enduring emotional moment of my life.
Throughout that life, and especially after retirement,
I have been reading about the advances in knowledge of subatomic physics. Now,
at almost 89 years old, I simply must live long
enough to learn what the Large Hadron Collider, which was depicted in the photo
essay of your May/June 2008 issue, first reveals.
Martin Antman
Jacksonville,
FL
Extraterrestrial Life?
Though entertainingly written, Nick Bostrom’s
essay on the search for extraterrestrial life (“Where Are They?” May/June
2008) suffered from lax logic. From the fact that “humans have,
to date, seen no sign of any extraterrestrial civilization,” Bostrom concludes
that we must be alone in the galaxy. But the absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence. There are many potential explanations for our failure to
detect extraterrestrials, the leading candidate being that we have only been
listening for about 50 years. This means Earth’s “light cone”–the volume of
space from which any signal could have reached us–is only 100 light-years
across, or a mere 0.1 percent of the diameter of our galaxy.
Wade Roush
Boston,
MA
As director of the Future of Humanity Institute,
Bostrom does well to whistle in a cosmic graveyard and place all his hopes in
one Great Filter–one “probability barrier,” as he puts it, that determines
whether a civilization will become advanced enough to colonize space. If that
Great Filter is safely behind us, he argues, then the future looks bright. But
the filter that does a civilization in may not have to be great. If there can
be, instead, many potholes and a few landslides along the road from the
collapse of a protostar to the rise of a galactic empire, then chances are that
at least a few of them lie ahead of us. Peak oil and global warming come to
mind.
Michael J. Sloboda
Hong Kong
Bostrom points to the “vast expense” of the
International Space Station as evidence that advanced civilizations are keen to
explore space. But if the ISS is expensive, consider the cost of building
something able to escape from our star with an excess velocity of (even) 1
percent of the speed of light. And to build it so that it can operate without
resupply for a long time. Perhaps the resources of a planet small enough to
have inhabitable gravity are insufficient for such a project, neglecting the
number of times it would have to be replicated for colonization of a nearby
system. Perhaps the propulsion science to reduce this cost does not exist
outside of science fiction.
David Korenstein
Wayne,
PA
Dubious Recommendations
I enjoyed
Michael Schrage’s review of the recommendation engines in use on sites such as
Amazon (“Recommendation Nation,” May/June 2008). You may be interested to know
that financial trading sites such as OptionsXpress employ similar engines. When
I buy puts on Caterpillar and calls on Pepsi, up pops the “Customers Who Bought This
Item Also Bought …”
window. Other traders can follow my lead and make the same mistakes I do. The
thing is, the recommendations don’t distinguish the plays of sly traders from
those of dolts.
Since the financial world began imploding last summer
and the market has gone completely haywire, these recommendations have only
gotten wilder. Together we do not generate the wisdom of crowds. More like
major-league bozosity.
James Wish
Medway, MA
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