This is a suggestion for the valley farmers’ vole problem. A cure for moles and gophers is to put a piece of chewed Juicy Fruit gum on a big smooth rock and turn it over and lay it on an entrance to their tunnels. They seem to be gone.

Betty Brown

Albany

The statistics of warming

Gordon Shadle (Jan. 14, “Never doubt the pig committee”) makes a valid statistical point: Small errors add up. But does he think he’s the first to realize that?

News flash: The guys at the IPCC are better at this than he is. Whole careers have been devoted to the mathematics of uncertainty in physical modeling.

But that’s just taking the pigs committee’s word for it, I guess, so look at it this way.

Suppose, instead of one furnace, you had 300 tiny little heaters in your house. If you turned them all up from 60 to 70 degrees, knowing that the dials are only 99 percent accurate, would you expect only a 5 percent chance that the house would warm up?

Gordon ignores at least two important points. First, most parts of climate models are far more than 99 percent reliable. They are like the little heaters. Crank the dial, and they will get hotter. Add CO2 to air and it will become more insulative. I’ll give Gordon 99 to 1 odds on that one any day.

The basic physics of the problem are far more important to the outcome than absolute accuracy of things like CO2 measurements. It’s the sign, and size of the change relative to the error that count.

Second, errors cut both ways. Gordon’s math computes the odds that the models are exactly correct. Like our room hitting exactly 70 degrees, exact prediction is unlikely, but also largely irrelevant.

The room is going to warm up, Gordon, and no amount of pseudo-statistical hogwash can change that.

Jim Roy

Albany

It’s not where you live

This letter is in response to the column the young lady wrote in Young Voices noting the fact that anyone in the western hemisphere can be called an American. It was a well written article and I can see her point, but there’s another side to the story. Being an American isn’t about where you are born or where you live.

People started calling themselves Americans here before the United States came into existence in order to distinguish themselves from the royalty-loving louts who supported tyrannical kings and queens who were raping their own countries to fund their petty wars and lavish lifestyles. An American is anyone who loves freedom and fights tyranny, and the title demolishes class distinctions.

Our neighbors to the south were established as very class-stratified societies stretching back to the Spanish, Mayan and Incan aristocracies. To call themselves Americans would diminish their standing in the societal structure.

And our neighbors to the north, most of whom live within 50 miles of the border, call themselves Canadians mostly out of self-preservation to ward off the long arm of the U.S. pop culture.

It isn’t a matter of whether we recognize other people as American, it is whether those people recognize themselves as Americans. Live free or die.

John Collet

Albany

Small group, big effort

As I consider the incredible news about a medical school coming to Lebanon, I’m reminded of Margaret Mead who said, “Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

To the small group of people: Thank you for caring so much.

Barbara Newton

Lebanon

MAILBAG GUIDELINES: Letters must bear the writer’s full name and address, but we’ll omit the street address in the paper. Please include a daytime telephone number. Letters should be as brief as possible and are subject to editing and abridgement. Letters from the same person generally are limited to one a month. We usually do not print verse. Thank-you notes for donations may appear Saturdays in “In Appreciation.”Because of the volume of mail, it is not possible to acknowledge all individual letters.