Letters: Screwed
John Galbraith’s recessed screws are indeed a giant step forward (Technology,
10 August). The shaped, recessed screw head allows much easier manipulation
with hand or machine tools, stronger tightening, and longer life. It is
appalling that the Society of British Aerospace Manufacturers and the Ministry
of Defence have baulked at this improvement.
Er . . . by the way, these screws have been in use in Canada for many
years. They are called Robertson screws. Actually, Galbraith’s suggestion
has been further improved with a square recess, which improves the strength
of the screwdriver. We have tested them thoroughly in all branches of industry,
and are ecstatic. Most of the screws in use here are now Robertson.
A. C. Carr Hamilton Civic Hospitals Ontario, Canada
Letters: Mice know best
Members of Action and Information on Sugars concerned about obesity,
tooth decay and misleading information from the Sugar Bureau (In Brief,
14 September), might repeat an animal experiment with mice and white sugar
which, as an added advantage, could not possibly offend anti-vivisectionists.
Such an experiment took place in our house, and the experiment was arranged
by the mice. We were invaded by the vermin and it took six months to get
rid of them. During that period they had themselves a feast and left their
droppings in every kitchen cupboard, nook and cranny. There was only one
‘food’ which could safely be left uncovered on the table and which would
remain untouched: white sugar.
The animals obviously did not regard white sugar as a food and we ourselves
took our cue from the mice and stopped eating white sugar there and then.
A. Gotzsche, London
Letters: Mystery bubbles
Earlier this year, while standing watching the morning coffee filter
into the pot, a colleague at work remarked on something which none of us
had ever noticed before and yet was clearly observable. As the coffee dripped
onto the surface of the collecting coffee, the splashes were forming liquid
bubbles. They varied in size from pinhead to petits-pois, the larger ones
clearly containing coffee, not air, and existed for up to several seconds,
even the ‘biggies’. They skittered about on the surface, as did mercury
on the bench in my carefree school-days, the smaller ones shooting outwards
from the splash and bounding off the side of the pot.
There was general puzzlement amongst us non-scientists as to why these
bubbles formed at all. Could any of your readers explain them in terms a
layman might be able to understand?
Ian Anderson Cambridge
Letters: Talking genes
I refer to Ian Gordon’s ‘Genetics as it is spoken’ (Forum, 7 September).
May I suggest some alternative factors which may account for the ‘correlation
between genetic make-up and the language of the region’, which do not take
in the factor of geographical separation? First, there is intermarriage,
which has been known to maintain genetic differences between peoples in
a country over many generations. Secondly, the existence of cultures which
pass on norms, values, customs and language from one generation to another.
A combination of the two can adequately explain the association between
genetic make-up and language without having to consider the double helix
itself.
Ian Gordon has, I fear, fallen into the all-too-easy trap of mistaking
statistical correlation (association) for a cause-and-effect relationship.
In his native New Zealand, I am sure that fire engines are correlated with
fires. He would agree with me, however, that fire engines do not cause fires
and that fires do not directly cause fire engines.
Martin Pearce, Northolt, Middlesex
Letters: Sick to extinction
It has always puzzled me, especially in connection with the disappearance
of the dinosaurs, why reference is so seldom made to disease and/or parasites
(‘Extinction: bad genes or bad luck?’, 14 September). Could not, for example,
the creation of a land bridge by lowered sea level have introduced them
to non-resistant species? (It’s happened often among humans.)
I also wonder about the role of birds . . .
John Brunner South Petherton, Somerset
Letters: More about GREP
Mr David Brenner (Letters, 21 September) evidently got his information
off a cereal packet. Here are the real origins: GREP is General Regular
Expression Pattern-matching, a little cryptic but not arbitrary. AWK stands
for Aho, Weinberger and Kernigan, who invented it (and the bird on the manual
is a Great Auk, not a penguin). CAT means catalogue, which makes just as
much sense as TYPE but a little less than LIST. MAN is for Manual, obvious
really, and appropriate since they aren’t very helpful. Finally BIFF comes
from Bell Interchange File Format – it refers to a standard.
UNIX commands are usually short to save keystrokes, which makes them
convenient to type but hard to remember (and hell to read).
T. E. Groves Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey
Letters: Natural wells
In ‘The parching of prehistoric North America’ (7 September) David Meltzer
describes as man-made features wells which his geological colleagues have
persuaded him cannot be natural. Whilst we have not visited Mustang Springs,
the features shown in the excellent photographs accompanying the article
appear morphologically identical to natural solution pits, which in many
areas of the Bahamas are the predominant surface landform.
Common features between the Bahamas and Mustang Springs forms include
similar density, steep or undercut walls, circular form, tendency for coalescence
of adjacent holes, and the crenulated nature of the interhole bedrock surface.
Both areas are characterised by a semiarid climate, carbonate-rich bedrock
and water table relatively close to the surface, implying that similar processes
may be active. Whilst we do not expect that the Bahamas and Mustang Springs
features are absolutely identical, they may well be of the same genre. This
inference, although suggesting that Altithermal man had a less technical
response to impending desiccation, in no way reduces the importance of the
Mustang Springs site as a focus of prehistorical activity.
Peter Smart and Fiona Whitaker University of Bristol
Letters: The cost of caring
From my own experience, I agree wholeheartedly with Helen Mason’s plea
for women scientists struggling to combine a career with family commitments
(Talking Point, 14 September).
Her problems are not confined to women, nor to scientists, nor is caring
required just for children. Last year, 6 million people in Britain were
looking after elderly relatives.
The extensive burden of personal care for dependent relatives was emphasised
in three reports published last year (by the Family Policy Studies Centre,
Crossroads Care, and Opportunities for Women).
They showed that 70 per cent of full-time carers would return to work
if they were not looking after others. Most carers were women, and those
who combined caring with employment did so at considerable personal cost,
since 50 per cent considered that caring adversely affected their working
lives in terms of reduced work effectiveness and limited opportunities for
promotion or a new job. Ninety per cent found their dual role stressful,
mainly because of the difficulty in arranging adequate care support while
they were at work.
Small wonder that few women are top scientists!
Hilary Hawkins University of Kent
Letters: Load of rubbish
It is astonishing that, at a time when Europe, the British government,
industry and environmentalists have agreed on a waste management hierarchy
that prioritises the reduction of waste at source, David Pearce (special
adviser to the Department of the Environment) should be travelling so rapidly
in the opposite direction (This Week, 14 September).
The notion put forward by Pearce that Britain need not bother itself
about reducing packaging because it has lots of landfill space to chuck
it in is not only dangerously complacent but is so isolated that it is not
even shared by the waste disposal industry which profits from landfill.
Pearce is apparently unaware that the government has identified over
1000 landfills generating methane gas (explosive and a contributor to global
warming) and 1300 sites that may pose a risk of water pollution. One wonders
if Pearce has even seen a landfill.
It verges on the bizarre that, at a time when Britain is spending millions
of pounds on cleaning up the environmental damage from old landfills, Pearce
should suggest that we carry on with the mistakes of the past.
Blake Lee-Harwood Friends of the Earth London
Letters: The big bang OK
Whilst conceding that lengthy correspondence in your Letters pages on
why flamingos stand on one leg, why sheep aren’t green, etc. are great fun
for all concerned, I fear you may be underestimating the danger they pose.
Your non-scientific readers may well conclude that, since scientists produce
an endless stream of wildly diverging and mutually exclusive explanations
for such simple phenomena as semi-skimmed milk going sour, why on earth
should they believe a word scientists have to say on such profound issues
as life, the Universe and where all the paperclips disappear to? No wonder
public confidence in science is not all it might be.
As a solution, I propose that the major associations for the advancement
of science get together and set up an Office of Kosher Science, which will
give out its vaunted OK mark (same principle as the kite mark of the British
Standards Institution and the like) to those theories which are deemed to
be sound by the mainstream of scientific opinion. An author could then write
of The Big BangOK, making it instantly clear to readers that here was the
absolute and undiluted truth, or as near as dammit. Where two opposing theories
are equally credible, both may carry the mark until one or other wins out,
for example, Punctuated EquilibriaOK versus Phyletic GradualismOK.
Should an OK theory eventually turn out to be wrong, there is no problem
– simply reverse the mark: PhlogistonKO.
Richard Wilson Lutterworth, Leicestershire
Letters: Hubble and God
The Hubble telescope was to have been the crowning achievement of the
20th century’s most brilliant technicians. It is inconceivable that they
were responsible for the faults that became apparent after its launch. For
those there can be only one explanation: divine sabotage, perfectly concealed
by retrospective adjustments to the memories and records of the manufacturers.
But what was the motive? Again this is clear. Data from a fully performing
Hubble would have revealed the secret of the Universe.
Obviously this could not be allowed.
Ronald Stott Kooyong, Victoria Australia
Letters: Bugs and glasnost
In your article ‘Policing the bugs of war’ (Comment, 7 September), you
misrepresented the position set out in my article in the Chemical Weapons
Convention Bulletin by indicating that we wish to have our biological defence
programme and research facilities shrouded in secrecy.
On the contrary. On 2 September we arranged a press visit during which
journalists were shown round our microbiology laboratories, talked to many
of our hardworking scientists and were briefed by Foreign Office and Ministry
of Defence staff – on the record – on Britain’s proposals for new confidence
building measures for the Biological Weapons Convention Review Conference.
These include one for a detailed declaration of the biological warfare defence
research programmes carried out by Britain and other countries.
When reviewing Britain’s openness on biological warfare defence programmes,
it is also relevant to note that we, unlike two-thirds of the other parties
to the convention, have completed our confidence building measures returns,
giving details of our facilities.
Your article referred to my concerns about the dangers of making too
much information public.
First, I should say that we cannot make all our defence capabilities
known, because that would identify the gaps in our protection. Secondly,
I stated that ‘the use of civil sector laboratories for research connected
with biological warfare defence is preferable in confidence building terms
to creating a wholly in-house government capability, shrouded in secrecy
and seclusion’.
This is my profound belief. However, after a tragic incident in which
one of our members of staff was attacked, I am sure that many will understand
my concern about the risks from terrorism and misguided activists. I can
assure you that our wish for some confidentiality for work conducted in
civil sector laboratories is driven more by concern for the wellbeing of
our scientific colleagues than by any resistance to openness or the building
of international confidence.
Graham Pearson Director-General Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment
Porton Down, Salisbury, Wiltshire
Letters: Bring back Aether
John Gribbin’s report of the zero point energy conundrum (Science, 31
August) reminds one that Descartes is reputed to have said, of Newtonian
gravity: ‘Mass has got nothing to do with it. It’s density that matters.’
Given the obvious relationship between density and mass, this probably
provoked much Anglo-Saxon muttering about the mass and density of the French.
Now however, Newton’s gravity is seen as just an approximation, valid only
as a special case; might Descartes have been right after all?
Current relativity retains ‘mass’, but has it doing quite strange things
to time and space. If the energy of the vacuum is real, it is not unreasonable
to suppose that it might vary with time and place. Einstein’s results would
be the same, if applied to constant coordinate, variable density space/time,
as they are with constant density, variable coordinate space/time. Descartes
would have thanked Einstein for providing the mathematics to go with his
own, pre-Newtonian, theory of what Newton called Aether.
The main reason for abolishing the Aether seems to have been that we
couldn’t find it and, with Einstein’s relativity, didn’t need it. Not everyone
agreed. Sir Arthur Lodge remained to his dying day a firm believer in the
existence of this universal connecting link, the transmitter of every kind
of force. Descartes would have agreed. Given the present conundrums of physics
and cosmology, perhaps they were not entirely wrong.
Consider the Dirac/Puthoff vacuum energy; the missing ‘dark matter’;
the deficit of solar neutrinos; the microwave background; and the quantum/relativity
conflict raised by Wesson and described in Gribbin’s report. It does seem
at least possible that something, which might as well be called the ‘Aether’,
would fit in there somewhere.
It cannot be the continuous, stationary, incompressible substance that
was envisaged by Lodge. Its density would have to be changed by the presence
of condensed matter, which might then involve vortex flow. It might need
Lodge’s 1033 ergs per cubic centimetre to be Hertzified, Kelvinised, divided
by C-squared and stood on its imaginary, negative reciprocal head. But it
would be so nice to have something for the radio waves to roll around in,
to have clocks that tell the right time, and space the same size that it
looks.
Please, please can we have some Aether again?
Kevin Woodcock Winchester, Hampshire