31 August 2019 | New Scientist | 27Not everyone depends
on thinking in language
Letters, 20 July
From Martin Greenwood,
Stirling, Western Australia
David Werdegar asserts we have
an “absolute dependency on the
signs and symbols of language”.
That is questionable: not
everybody thinks in the same way.
Composers clearly think in
musical terms that are sometimes
difficult if not impossible to
verbalise. Roger Penrose, in his
1989 book The Emperor’s New
Mind, uses his own experience,
and that of other distinguished
scientists, to argue that much
scientific and mathematical
thought is non-verbal.
More on mapping time
and language to space
Letters, 27 July
From Derek Bolton, Birchgrove,
New South Wales, Australia
Phil Ball suggests that Mandarin
speakers think of the future as
down because it matches their
direction of writing. Even if such
a correlation is found across all
writing systems, it could equally
be that the mapping of time to
space came first.
Spatial mappings can arise
where there is no writing. The
Yupno of Papua New Guinea
conceive the future as uphill, while
for the Aymara of the Andes it is
behind one, with the past in front,
perhaps on the basis that the past
is known, the future unknown
(2 June 2012, p 14).
The far right recycles
its ideas efficiently
17 August, p 24
From Anthony Wilkins,
Ripponden, West Yorkshire, UK
I enjoyed Graham Lawton’s
article on the exploitation of
environmental language by the far
right. I take exception, though, to
the idea that this has only recently
emerged. Far-right politicians
have often linked notions of
nationhood and the environment.
This was particularly evident
in the 1930s, when some Nazis in
Germany used the idea of a Vol k
embedded within an environment
supposedly peculiar to a particular
race. So this is another example of
the ability of the far right to do its
own dispiriting sort of recycling.I see downsides of drawing
water from the desert air
3 August, p 38
From Sam Edge,
Ringwood, Hampshire, UK
Attempts to draw water from the
air, and especially the use of metal
organic frameworks with their
non-intuitive properties, are
interesting. But what is going to
happen to flora, fauna and down-
wind weather patterns if large
amounts of moisture are pulled
from the atmosphere in already
arid environments?Please get in touch if you
were on the Maths Bus
3 September 1994, p 6
From Lawrence Sithole,
Soweto, South Africa
Sue Armstrong reported nearly
a quarter of a century ago on
the Maths Bus that toured South
Africa. Some of your readers
were attracted to this educational
project and volunteered on and
supported the bus. I ask them to
get in touch through New Scientist.Some obstacles to building
better hearing aids
Letters, 27 July
From John Woodgate,
Rayleigh, Essex, UK
Alan Gordon suggests hearing aids
should replicate the directionality
given by the shape of the ear. Most
manufacturers use test equipment
called a Head and Torso Simulator.
This can be fitted with external
ears to test the idea. It ought toWant to get in touch?
Send letters to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London
WC2E 9ES or [email protected]; see terms at
newscientist.com/letterswork. I haven’t yet tried it myself,
but I might be able to in the
near future.
My guess is that it doesn’t
work very well. If it does work, it
isn’t easy to see how to make its
appearance acceptable, especially
as hearing-aid manufacturers
try to convince people that the
aids should be as near to invisible
as possible. This is despite it
increasing costs and
compromising performance.
By the way, I’m nearly 82 and
am still able to work on things
to help people hear.We are halfway to a carbon
sequestration solution
Letters, 3 August
From Barry Cash,
Bristol, UK
Butch Dalrymple Smith says
we should plant trees and make
things out of wood to sequester
carbon. We are already doing half
the job by farming trees to make
paper and chipboard. When we
have finished with them we
recycle or destroy them.
Why not preserve the paper
and chipboard as a way of storing
carbon? We would need to package
it to prevent decomposition. How
about baling the paper and then
coating it in plastic? We have lots
of waste plastic to recycle for that.Slime, slime, glorious
healing slug slime
15 June, p 19
From Theo Rances,
London, UK
Leah Crane reports work on using
salamander mucus to help heal
wounds. This reminded me of the
time my father gashed himself
while working on a motorbike
engine. As someone whose
pharmacy training was
interrupted by a spell as ground
crew in the air force, he knew aremedy used in the 1920s, and
dispatched me to find a large slug.
This he squeezed to make it exude
the slime that he found to be
healing for the wound.
I have never found the need to
repeat this treatment on myself.
I am surprised that Harvard
Medical School has discovered
the same phenomenon in
Chinese salamanders.A surprising part of Gaia’s
self-correcting strategy
10 August, p 13
From John Entwisle,
Leatherhead, Surrey, UK
After reading your recent
article on the Gaia hypothesis,
I wondered whether anyone
had considered that the human
species may be a solution to one
of the biggest threats facing Gaia.
It seems that humans have just
the right amounts of aggression
and intelligence to create things
that could alter the trajectory of an
incoming asteroid that is capable
of causing a mass extinction.
The last one of these was quite
bad and the next could be worse. It
would be a risky strategy on Gaia’s
part, but if the species also enables
life to be established on a second
planet that would improve the
long-term odds of life’s survival.Such a cool word
deserves to be used
13 July, p 15
From Rick McRae,
Canberra, Australia
Chelsea Whyte writes of moons
ejected from their orbits around
exoplanets, called “ploonets”.
She mentions the slow drift
in our moon’s orbit and the
possibility that this might be
its fate. Would this make it a
“protoploonet”? That is such
a cool word that it deserves
to be used.For the record
❚ The common name of Protonibea
diacanthus is the blackspotted
croaker (1 October 2016, p 16).