Letters: Pub trawl
I would suggest the following for potential new ‘scientific’ alehouses.
(Th)e = mc 2 The Newt ‘n’ Apple The Pavlov’s Dog & Duck
The Hammer & Anvil The Archimedes Bath.
Ian Hobbs London
Letters: Pub trawl
We have culled the following from a very much longer list which successfully
occupied half an afternoon.
Maxwell’s Demon The Specific Gravity The Cosine & Tangent The String
& Singularity The Cartesian Coordinate The Wave & Particle The Darwin
& Beagle The Doppler & Whistle The Euclidean Point The Chaos &
Entropy The Rat & Maze The Dopamine Receptor The Bell & Aspect The
Missing Mass The Quantum Leap The Paradigm Shift
Cindy Norton and David Piggins Wales
Letters: Bad design award
In reply to J. C. Stopes-Roe’s letter regarding the incompetence of
the telephone plug designer (Letters, 12 October), surely the ultimate award
for design incompetence should go to the developers of the push-button phone.
Why they had to ignore convention and reverse the order of button placement,
I and millions of others will never know. To turn from a calculator to a
telephone is a daily excercise in frustration.
Readers may like to propose further nominations for this award – Ed.
John Dow Canberra, Australia
Letters: Potent puddle
With reference to ‘Putting a stop to rhino poaching’ (5 October), there
is another possible solution.
Some years ago in Nepal I was riding on an elephant when we located
a rhino mother and calf. Alarmed by our approach the mother urinated, forming
a large puddle in the clay soil, then moved off. My guide climbed down and
mopped up the urine with a sponge and squeezed it into a bottle. It was
obvious he had done this many times before and he said the urine fetched
good prices as a medicine.
Later, when reading Boarding Party by James Leasor, I found a story
of how a local merchant, Harry Squire, raised money for the Calcutta zoo.
Leasor wrote: ‘Many Bengali men in middle age believed that rhino urine
possessed unique aphrodisiac qualities. A considerable trade was done in
this commodity between East Africa and Calcutta before the war and the retail
rate was one rupee for a small bottle. But some potential Bengali customers
questioned the purity of the African product, so Squire persuaded the zoo
keepers to train their rhinos, through judicious use of carrots and bits
of sugar cane, to urinate at the stroke of a gong, and in a bucket rather
than haphazardly in their pool. He then provided a metal rail near the rhino
enclosure, where the clients could lean while they satisfied themselves
that no adulteration took place between production and its bottling. So
popular was this aphrodisiac in Calcutta that it was soon producing an annual
income of thousands of rupees, which helped to rescue the zoo from its debt.’
Perhaps this might be another solution to providing rhino products with
no harm to the animals in the wild, since there must be hundreds of the
animals in zoos around the world.
Vincent Serventy Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia Sydney,
Australia
Letters: Not a killer
We are very concerned about the statement by Peter Cardy, the Director
of the Motor Neurone Disease Association, that ‘motor neurone disease is
the second biggest neurological killer after Parkinson’s disease’ (Letters,
14 September), Parkinson’s disease is not a fatal disease. With optimum
drug treatement, the life expectancy for people with Parkinson’s disease
is normal. The causes of death in patients with the disease are found in
any chronically disabled person, and include chest infections and general
weakness. Parkinson’s disease may be a contributing factor to this but is
not of itself a killer.
The Parkinson’s Disease Society exists to help people with Parkinson’s
disease and their families, through fund raising, medical research, welfare,
publicity and information. We would very much hope that anyone who has been
distressed by this statement would get in touch with us.
Bridget McCall Parkinson’s Disease Society London
Letters: Breeding sea birds
It should be realised that the suspension of fishing for sand eels is
not the only possible explanation for the widely reported improvement of
sea bird breeding success in Shetland this year (In Brief, 28 September),
which could be due to a combination of many factors. I pointed out in your
columns two years ago that the recent run of poor sea bird breeding seasons
appeared to be associated with fine weather.
Sea birds are now known to have a life expectancy running into decades,
during which time they only need to breed successfully once in order to
replace themselves. It has been known for the best part of a century that
they are periodically prone to fail to breed for long periods, despite which
most of them have continued to increase steadily throughout this period.
The increase in sea birds seems to have become particularly marked when
overfishing of the larger fish led to an increase of the smaller fish on
which some of the birds also feed in the 1970s, and the birds appear to
have started to decline again when the larger fish began to increase once
more during a period of fine weather during the 1980s. Their current recovery
appears to be related to the occurrence of an unusually cold, late spring
this year, when it would appear that they must have been more successful
in fishing again.
W. R. P. Bourne Aberdeen, Scotland
Letters: Pub trawl
In answer to Kimberly Martin’s plea (Letters, 19 October) for existing
and potential scientific pub names, I nominate the establishment in Fratton
Road, Portsmouth, in whose lounge bar the South Hants Science Fiction Group
meets every second and fourth Tuesday evening of the month. It is called
The Electric Arms.
Paul Terry Hunt Eastleigh, Hampshire
Letters: Undemocratic
I was very disappointed to read Sir David Phillips’s apologia. It always
surprises me how sensible academics allow themselves to be used as frontline
troops by politicians. The technique is quite simple. Find a group of able,
well-meaning individuals and persuade them that they will be able to make
decisions. Ensure that their advice is private and give them too little
money to do the job.
The attraction to the academics is that their decisions appear to be
nonpolitical. However, since the funding crisis is politically created its
consequences are also political. All that the distinguished academics are
achieving is a smoke screen to protect politicians.
The solution could be quite simple. Accept that the major policy decisions
are political and make them clearly part of the political system. Then decisions
by ministers could be questioned both by the public and in Parliament.
Alan R. Camina Norwich
Letters: Faraday was wrong
Before we get carried away with unbridled adulation for Michael Faraday
– the consumate experimentalist and, it would now seem, theoretician (‘The
myth of Michael Faraday’, 21 September) – it is perhaps wise to remind ourselves
of one of his blunders.
Faraday, not knowing about electrons, guessed that current flowed from
positive to negative. As a result, generations of students have been lumbered
with Fleming’s rules, in which the middle finger represents ‘conventional
current’.
Why can’t we just admit that Faraday was wrong, do away with ‘conventional
current’, and swap Fleming’s rules around?
Taher Yousaf Newcastle upon Tyne
Letters: Those bubbles
In reply to Ian Anderson (Letters, 5 October and 19 October), I too
have been fascinated for some time by these ‘bubbles’, or globules, forming
on water surfaces.
The globules occur when water (or a suitable liquid, such as coffee)
is allowed to drip onto a liquid surface. Casual observation and simple
experimentation have revealed that these globules form most readily and
to greatest size when surface active molecules (surfactants) are present.
This can be seen to greatest effect with dishwater, black coffee and Indian
tonic water. This is a puzzle as one would normally expect surfactants to
lower the surface tension of the liquid and, hence, reduce its ability to
support such globules.
The answer to this conundrum is to be found in C. L. Strong’s article
‘Water Droplets that Float on Water’ (Scientific American, 1976). Water
is a polar solvent and, consequently, its surface is polarised – in effect,
electrically charged. This means that when two water surfaces are brought
near to each other, such as Ian Anderson’s coffee globules skating on his
morning coffee, there is an electrostatic repulsion between the two. Surfactant
molecules are also polarised and, although they reduce the surface tension
of the liquid, they increase the surface polarisation. This increases the
electrostatic repulsion and prevents the globules merging with the main
body of the liquid. With careful manipulation the globules can be made to
survive for several minutes.
Mike Petty University of Durham
Letters: Trickle of mail
I wish to draw your attention to errors regarding the work of the World
Health Organization’s Office of Information made in Donald Gould’s article
(Forum, 21 September).
Gould insists that he is being flooded by WHO press releases ‘at the
rate of six or more a week’. According to our own statistics, there were,
on average, two print materials per week issued in 1990. The same figure
is true for this year as well.
I also challenge Gould’s assertion that WHO ‘hand-outs are valueless’.
I trust you will concede that the easiest litmus test for the value of our
press releases is their impact on the international media. As examples,
three of our latest press releases on contraceptives and cancer, universal
child immunisation, and the world AIDS cases quarterly update, were carried
by the world’s biggest media organisations, including AFP, AP, BBC, Reuters
and daily newspapers with worldwide circulation, such as The Washington
Post and Le Monde. It appears that Gould’s fellow journalists around the
world do not share his poor assessment of ‘WHO’s hand-outs’.
Therese Gastaut World Health Organization Geneva, Switzerland
Letters: Spooky spike
I have in my garden a round red plastic container which holds water
for the birds. In last winter’s first hard frost, I found an odd ice formation
in the bowl. Although the weather the previous day had been clement and
the water was fluid, we had that night a sharp frost down to about -4 掳C.
The following morning I noticed what appeared to be something sticking up
out of the frozen water in the dish. On closer examination, it proved to
be a solid ‘spike’ of ice, ending in an arrowhead. The ice was solid and
came out of the side of the frozen water at an angle of about 45 degrees.
It was about 9 inches long and solid throughout.
The dish was situated in the centre of the lawn with nothing near it
and no overhanging trees. I was able to watch the spike slowly melt over
the following few days, and there was nothing inside it.
The best brains of the Science Department of Alcester Grammar School,
where I work and my son, who is a sixth form science student, could throw
no light on the matter, or explain this phenomenon.
Judy Turner Warwickshire
Letters: Undemocratic
In his recent article (Talking Point, 12 October) Sir David Phillips
has spelt out what he believes to be the responsibilities of the research
councils and the Advisory Board for the Research Councils (ABRC). I am pleased
that Sir David has taken the trouble to make this information available
to the scientific community. However, I very much doubt that he can clear
up the ‘misconceptions’ he feels I may have. I have learnt too much over
the past year about the undemocratic way in which the SERC and ABRC operate
to place much trust in such statements.
I was particularly interested in Sir David’s remark that ‘it is the
ABRC’s responsibility to monitor the effectiveness with which the research
councils are making these hard choices’ (the decisions on priority among
research programmes). Perhaps I might ask how effective the ABRC feels the
SERC has been in this regard. To take but one example, the decision to close
the Nuclear Structure Facility first, and then set up a review later (the
‘shoot first and ask questions later policy’, Physics World, June 1991),
seems a particularly inappropriate way to go about the business of setting
scientific priorities.
I was disappointed to see that, in the whole of his article on the responsibilities
of the ABRC, Sir David makes no mention of a role in arguing for an increase
in the funding of science. I would imagine many other scientists would share
with me a feeling of sadness that the main bodies responsible for supporting
research in Britain appear to be so preoccupied with other matters that
they seem to have forgotten this vital role. If the ABRC does not afford
this matter priority, then who else will?
B. R. Fulton University of Birmingham