Letter: Nuclear pyramids
The suggestion to have burial mounds for old nuclear power stations
seemed to be most appropriate (This Week, 7 July). The possibilities of
cockups in decommissioning makes the thought of covering them a sensible
option.
However, I disagree strongly about the final finish. Rather than the
mounds being tastefully blended in with surroundings they should deliberately
be tremendous pyramids or ziggurats, dominating the landscape. The new pyramids
to the gods of nuclear power, to last a 1000 years, would surely be a powerful
symbol to mark the end of the 20th century.
K. K. Thapen London
Letter: Labelling experts
I was amused to read Fred Pearce’s article on pundits (‘As seen on television’,
Forum, 16 June). Poor Pearce! Was his attack on my present and former employers
a fit of pique, or did it betray angst at the loss of his familiar New 杏吧原创
womb? Was this musing and irritation with pundits, including himself, due
to guilt at taking the media’s shilling?
More seriously, Pearce took issue with my saying that labelling on food
was legalised fraud. This was a misapprehension. Some food labelling is
fine, so far as it goes. Both consumer and health pressure groups are still
waiting for a proper national scheme for nutrition labelling. I was not
talking about that.
In the context of BSE, Channel 4’s Check Out asked me if a food label
could give a consumer enough information to enable her or him to make an
informed purchase. On a scale from ‘British beef is safe’ to ‘all beef is
dangerous’, adherents of the extremes have no difficulty when out shopping.
Parents for Safe Food’s concern was equally for consumers who fall in between.
Here is where the food label was inadequate.
If the consumer wanted only to buy a meat product with no beef, how
could this be done with a sausage whose ingredient list said the meat was
‘meat’? Whoever heard of an animal called ‘meat’? Moreover, consumer organisations
have long campaigned for controls or a ban on mechanically recovered meat
(MRM), a gunge made from left-overs of butchery. Nothing wrong with that,
you might say, but the Food Standards Committee back in 1980 said MRM was
‘chemically less stable than carcase meat and presents a greater microbiological
risk’. And the law says MRM can be put in meat products at up to 10 per
cent of the whole without it being declared. So it is a rare manufacturer
who does so. We think that is legalised fraud. Consumers think of meat as
muscle meat, not as sludge.
Tim Lang, Director Parents for Safe Food London
Letter: Crop rotation
It seems clear that Nicholas Albery’s study of the crop circle phenomenon
has been perfunctory (Letters, 7 July). Well over 1000 of these events have
now been recorded since 1980, and a great range of different patterns is
known. Although the strong appearance is of a clustering in three, widely
separated, areas in Hampshire and Wiltshire, we have had reports in 1989
and 1990 from well over a dozen other counties in England and Scotland,
as well as from Australia, Canada and the US.
A few hoaxes have been detected: they are readily distinguished from
the genuine occurrences. The latter are rarely circular but depart, sometimes
markedly, towards the oval or elliptical; the heads of flattened grain are
left undamaged and continue to ripen; the disturbance in the crops is often
very complex in the ‘swirl’ patterns it exhibits; and, from time to time,
two different layers of disturbance are seen, one lying above the other.
None of these features is easy to copy. Who, in any case, are these skilled
and dedicated technicians who have been rushing about Wessex for nearly
11 years (and latterly far more widely afield) without ever being detected,
even in the most publicly exposed places? And what is their motive?
The Centre for Crop Circle Studies shares Terence Meaden’s view that
hoax is the least credible of the many strange explanations which have been
on offer. We depart somewhat from him in doubting that atmospheric physics
is near to providing a decisive model for the occurrence of these events.
But we are alongside him in wishing to see much further research.
Ralph Noyes Centre for Crop Circle Studies Guildford Surrey
Letter: Chain reaction
Your article on bicycles was a real disappointment because it concentrated
on sporting and racing machines (‘The bike built to win’, 30 June). As a
cycling commuter, with over 50 000 miles behind me, I am appalled at the
unreliability of modern bikes.
Starting off with basics, the accumulation of dirt on chains and gearing
makes nonsense of the claim that only 1 per cent of power is wasted. More
irritating are components going out of adjustment, brakes binding, constant
punctures, and fatigue failures of axles, gearteeth and bearing races. When
are cycle designers and constructors going to realise that virtually all
modern consumer durables are highly reliable and maintenance free? If they
want to get people out of their cars and onto their bikes, they had better
realise that not everyone wants to spend Sunday morning with an oil can,
a rag soaked with paraffin and a spanner to tighten everything back up.
Fred Starr London
Letter: Sensible dress
I enjoyed very much Ralph Estling’s article ‘Piety in the sky’ (Forum,
23 June). Of the beautiful Seven Sisters, Estling parenthetically says ‘don’t
ask me why they didn’t scatter in various directions’ – safety in numbers,
surely? They might have received less sexual harassment from the pantheon
had they dressed in something a little less risque than ‘diaphanous mists
of star gauze’. I am sure hairy-chested Jove, Mars and Neptune were, after
all, only flesh and blood.
Paul Ray Bicester Oxon
Letter: Plastic bagged
John Emsley’s article on saving the Earth was timely (‘On being a bit
green’, Forum, 30 June). But he does environmentalists a disservice when
he says we have not thought enough about biodegradable plastics. Friends
of the Earth in Britain supports reuse and recycling of plastics, and does
not support the widespread use of degradable plastics, for the reasons Emsley
gives, and others. We have been a factor in the decision of organisations
like the Body Shop to discontinue the use of biodegradable plastic carrier
bags. And Friends of the Earth in the US has joined a consortium of environmental
groups in calling for a consumer boycott of biodegradable plastics.
Peni Walker Friends of the Earth London
Letter: Pretty graphics
If engineers really thought that their ships, aeroplanes, buildings,
machines and fluid flows all behaved in purely linear or static fashions,
then the revelations in your article about chaos theory would indeed be
a breakthrough (‘Chaos, catastrophes and engineering’, 9 June).
However, the examples about dynamic oscillations (including complex
ones with harmonics of fundamental frequencies), resonance and non-linear
behaviour all seemed very familiar, except that they had been renamed ‘fractals’,
‘attractors’, ‘blue-sky catastrophes’, and so on.
With the extravagant claims being made about the benefits which will
flow from this ‘new science’, I have been following it fairly closely, but
all I have actually found is new jargon and a lot of pretty computer graphics.
I appreciate that it is all very exciting for the mathematicians and computer
operators but it still seems to be pretty thin on useful, interesting results.
Have I missed something?
Alasdair Beal Leeds
Letter: Overseas choice
I sympathise with Judith Kerr and her problems with choice of A-level
subjects (Letters, 23 June). It is to be regretted that sixth-form students
in England and Wales are denied the opportunity to study as wide a range
of subjects as their peers in international schools around the world, who
can follow a course of six subjects that must include two languages, a study
of man, mathematics and an experimental science.
A review of further education is long overdue, and I think that the
International Baccalaureate presents a curriculum model that is worthy of
consideration.
James Cambridge Machabeng High School Kingdom of Lesotho
Letter: Dream world
I very much enjoyed the Inside Science article ‘All in a night’s sleep’
(7 July). I was struck by some pieces of information which, when juxtaposed,
throw an alarming spotlight on the political future of Britain: ‘Our brains
require a minimum ration of fantasy dreams each day’ which ‘serves a function
in keeping us sane.’ We get the ration either in rapid eye-movement (REM)
sleep or in daytime fantasising.
‘REM sleep is only a quarter of the total sleep in adults.’
‘An average adult has eight hours sleep.’
‘Mrs Thatcher seems to need little more than four hours.’
One might suppose that Mrs Thatcher, who has half as much REM sleep
as a normal adult, either makes up the minimum ration by daytime fantasising,
or does not make it up at all. So she spends her working life in a state
of fantasy or insanity.
Marie-Anne Cody London
Letter: People of Sarawak
In the discussion of the results of the International Tropical Timber
Organisation mission to Sarawak the central issue in the controversy has
been lost sight of (This Week, 2 June and Letters, 30 June). The main reason
that Sarawak became the focus of international concern, and thereby the
subject of the ITTO investigation, was the conflict between loggers and
native people defending their rights.
Nothing that the government of Sarawak has done since the blockades
started in 1987 has diminished this social crisis. As regularly as the police
move in to arrest native people – so far there have been over 300 individual
arrests – the blockades go up again, often in a different place by different
people.
The intergovernmental response to this situation, as represented by
the ITTO, has been to exclude any mention of the problems of the native
people from the terms of reference of its investigative mission, and to
send in a team deprived of the social science and legal expertise necessary
to give the native people a fair hearing. Yet, even within these constraints,
the ITTO mission could have done a much fairer job. However, it chose to
interpret the notion of sustainability in a way that marginalised what the
report revealingly refers to as the ‘awkward difficulty’ of the ‘native
peoples’ question’. Sustaining the livelihoods of the 220 000 forest dwelling
people of Sarawak should have been the primary task of a mission charged
to investigate the ‘sustainable utilisation and conservation of tropical
forests’. This is especially the case considering that Sarawak’s own forest
policy explicitly sets the preservation of forests above their management
for the production of timber, to secure their ecological functions and to
provide, in perpetuity, produce of the forest to the country. It is Sarawak’s
policy that the export trade in forest produce is to be fostered only ‘as
far as may be compatible with the prior claims of local demands’.
That the mission chose instead to focus on timber production and made
no clear recommendations to secure native livelihoods, reveals all too clearly
how the ITTO subordinates human considerations to the interests of the timber
industry.
Marcus Colchester, and others World Rainforest Movement Chadlington
Oxon