Letters: Wapping mistake
I am writing in response to ‘Who’s a pretty poly then?’ (Forum, 22 May). I
work for the University of Greenwich (formerly Thames Polytechnic) in the
ever-expanding school of Biological and Chemical Sciences, which has been
sited under many guises for about one hundred years in Woolwich, which is
firmly in the borough of Greenwich. The site of City Polytechnic at Wapping
was amalgamated with Thames back in 1989 and this is the reason they are the
University of Greenwich. The main site of the university is at Avery Hill,
in the leafy glade known as Eltham, which is in Greenwich.
I hope no further concerns as to why Wapping is classed as Greenwich will be
expressed.
Steven Williams
London
Letters: A bit of stick
I note that 拢6.7 million has been assigned to the study of
adhesives (In Brief, 22 May).
It has been known for many years that properly prepared aluminium can be
very effectively bonded using epoxy resins. My own procedure involves
roughening with fine grade, wet-or-dry sandpaper, followed by swabbing with
acetone. Such a bond generally results in metal rather than adhesive
failure.
Might I be put in line for a small consultancy fee – say 10 per cent?
N. P. E. Wheeler
Sutton, Surrey
Letters: Green greens
Richard Thwaites has raised a very interesting point concerning the lack of
black plants (Letters, 15 May). This can be answered partially by the fact
that purple photosynthetic bacteria arose first. However, if growth is
limited by light availability, I wonder if this is related to the sun
setting in the evening? One solution to this problem would be to produce
luminescent plants that glow in the dark. The result would be increased CO2
absorption and decreased electricity generation for artificial street
lighting; hence ‘environmentally friendly’ greens.
Steve Forsythe
The Nottingham Trent University
Letters: Green greens
Thwaites is correct when he states that light is often the limiting factor
in plant growth. However, in answer to his question:
If plants were black, they would indeed absorb all solar radiation. But
they would reflect none at all and consequently would act as perfect
‘black-bodies’. Due to this they would overheat and die, due to a
combination of essential enzyme denaturation and unchecked water loss via
evapotranspiration.
Also (not intended as a science versus religion argument); if God had made
all plants black, what a boring world this would be to live in.
Harry Philcox
Halebank, Cheshire
Letters: Green greens
I am happy to inform Thwaites that at least one plant has evolved in the
way he enquired about. Ophiopogon Planiscapus has all-black leaves and black
berries. Admittedly its flowers are pink; but it is certainly well on the
way to total blackness. Just in case the Latin name is too much of a
mouthful, its English name is Snake’s Beard.
Colin Flood Page
Hereford
Letters: Big pig
Re your picture of a woman researcher kneeling beside a ‘tin pig’ (In Brief,
15 May). A pig five metres in diameter gives food for thought, but how tall
does this make the researcher?
Perhaps the imperial measuring system was better after all.
D. W. Oxlade
Isleworth, Middlesex
Letters: Successor sought
A search committee has been formed to find a successor to Professor Abdus
Salam, the incumbent Director of the International Centre for Theoretical
Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy. I have been connected with the ICTP since
1971. This is a unique institute for fundamental research, especially
addressed to the needs of citizens of developing countries. It has been a
success.
I am worried about the future of the centre after the retirement of
Professor Salam. I wish to pass on a profile of the new director of the
ICTP. This has been compiled after thorough discussion with a number of
scientists from both developing and developed countries.
The new director must fulfil the following criteria: (S)he
1. must be a citizen of a developing country who studied in her/his country
and spent a total of at least ten years outside her/his own country.
2. must be a theoretical physicist (not a mathematician) with experience in
other branches of knowledge such as economics, environmental and life
sciences, because ICTP deals with these issues.
3. must be well-informed about the socio-economic and cultural situation of
her/his country and region, and about the problems of the scientific
community of developing countries.
4. must speak and write English fluently and be willing to learn Italian.
5. must be less than 50 years old.
6. must be able to deal intellectually with her/his peers. (S)he must be
well-read in a wide variety of subjects and well-informed about current
affairs. (S)he must be well-informed about science policy, higher education
and research in the USA, EC and other countries producing knowledge on a
large scale.
7. must be willing to review existing programmes (schools, research,
conferences, workshops, associateships) of ICTP and cancel some of them.
8. must have management and diplomatic skills.
ICTP is not just a scientific institute or an international research centre.
It is also an exchange for scientific, cultural, philosophical and
educational information. The leadership qualities of the new director are as
important as the other qualities mentioned above.
Saiful Islam
Munich, Germany
Letters: Perfect primes
Philip Mottram asks whether anyone has used the reciprocals of what he calls
‘perfect primes’ to generate random number sequences (Letters, 22 May). The
answer is yes. The sequence of digits generated by the decimal expansion of
1/q where q is a suitable prime has been shown to be sufficiently random for
a number of applications. These include the design of radar for use in very
noisy environments and linear shift registers in cryptography.
One problem, however, has been of identifying suitable primes. They must be
large, as their decimal expansions repeat with a period of q-1, yet
frustratingly they appear to become less common as q increases.
In a recent paper (Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematics and its
Applications, vol 28, p 147) I show that suitable q are primes of the form
40k+7 or 40k+19 or 40k-17 (k=0,1,2,3 . . .) for which (q-1)/2 is also prime.
The largest such prime my PC could find is 1 999 998 383, whose reciprocal
thus gives a sequence of random numbers almost two billion digits long
before cycling.
Amusingly, this algorithm provides a link with so-called Germain primes, and
thus with Fermat’s Last Theorem. Who would think that random number
generation would link up with this notorious unsolved problem?
Robert Matthews
Sunday Telegraph
Cumnor, Oxford
Letters: Poor old Gilles
Re David Cohen’s review of Extremes by A. J. Dunning (15 May). Gilles de
Rais was not burnt at the stake in the same year as Joan of Arc. He was
hanged in 1440 after a rigged trial and a confession extracted after a
private view of the torture chamber. He was said to have abducted boys,
sodomised and then killed them in droves, but all the evidence at the trial
was hearsay, and his property was already being partitioned by the
prosecution and its associates before the trial had started.
The King, Charles VII, sent a message to Gilles’ daughter that her father
had been unjustly accused, tried and executed. But as the whole thing had
been done under the auspices of the Duke of Brittany, then in alliance with
the English, he wasn’t in a position to do much about it.
It may be of interest to note that last summer a report appeared in the
English newspapers to the effect that, after 550 years, the Supreme Court of
France had issued a pardon to Gilles de Rais.
Whether this pulls the underpinning from the book’s comparison of Gilles’s
‘wickedness’ with the ‘virtue’ of Joan of Arc (who in another learned book
is convincingly argued to have been a witch) I do not know. But perhaps in
books like this ideas are more important than history.
Nicholas Salaman
London
Letters: True truth
In your Comment (8 May) on ‘Big bangs and exploding cakes’, there is the
sentence: ‘The important thing to remember is that any scientific metaphor
provides only a glimpse of the underlying mathematical truth’. I think that
the word ‘mathematical’ should be left out.
High-level mathematical descriptions of reality are just as metaphorical as
the simpler thumbnail sketches, even though their accuracy is often much
better. ‘Underlying truth’ is far more than ‘mathematical’. A map, however
carefully done, is never the same as the countryside it represents. It’s all
there, but it’s not the whole story.
John Martin
King’s College London
Letters: Sounds right
Nick Flowers protests just a bit too much (Forum, 8 May).
News may be cutting out sound recordists, but in the rest of TV, sound is
properly recorded with proper microphones, and is properly monitored.
The nasties he can hear on his NICAM stereo at home are generally the result
of imperfect conditions on the shoot (inevitable) or imperfect dubbing,
which takes longer and is much fiddlier in stereo.
Amateur camcorders are another issue. Outside of News they are only used to
get stories that couldn’t be got in any other way. Horizon last year
showed the work of a lab shot over a period of six months by the
scientists themselves, on VHS. It would never have been the same with the
regular intrusion of a crew and producer, and neither would all the ‘Video
Diaries’ that have been shown. Here, the quality of the sound and picture
have been sacrificed for another quality, of the story itself. That is a
choice consciously made by producers, made possible by the improvement in
camcorder technology.
I think Nick is right about News, but that’s only a small part of TV output.
The rest of television isn’t in the same state – yet.
Peter Ceresole
London
Letters: White holes
So gamma ray bursts are putting huge amounts of energy back into the
Universe (New 杏吧原创, Science, 8 May). Are these the long sought after
‘white holes’? Is Fred Hoyle looking pleased with himself? It makes you
think.
A. R. N. Austen
Blandford Forum, Dorset
Letters: Preview
I believe the ganzfeld room experiments described ‘Roll up for the telepathy
test’ (15 May) confound two separate potential psychic effects. I assume
that after the judging process, the receiver is told if he/she was correct,
and if not, which video clip was the correct one. If we assume that such a
thing as clairvoyance exists, this effect would explain the result just as
much as would the telepathy effect.
To separate the telepathy effect from clairvoyance, you would have to do the
experiment simultaneously with a large number of senders and receivers. They
would have to be paired randomly, and placed in separate rooms, close to
each other. Care must be taken so that each person does not know, and cannot
find out in the future, which room he/she was in, or who was his/her
partner. After the test, the receiver must not be told the correct answer,
nor must he/she ever be able to find it out. Such an experiment would be
very difficult to conduct, but if it yielded a result it would be due to
telepathy in the absence of clairvoyance.
Trevor Magnusson
Weston Creek, ACT
Australia
Letters: Sturgeon caveat
May I respectfully suggest an amendment to Sturgeon’s Law, as quoted by
Frederick Pohl (Forum, 22 May). Sturgeon asserts that ’90 per cent of
everything is crud’. Consider the cases of tabloid newspapers, monetarist
economic policies, and the present Government. In no case can the law as
formulated be said to be a good fit.
The difficulty can be resolved if the term ‘at least’ is prefixed to the
existing formulation.
John Anderson
Fleet, Hampshire
Letters: Bring on the physio
I am writing with regard to the article ‘Balanced muscles kick injury into
touch’ (This Week, 24 April).
Physiotherapists, especially those working in the field of sports medicine,
have been using isokinetic dyna-mometry for a number of years, utilising
machines such as the KIN COM and CYBEX. Isokinetics have been used
extensively in the prevention and treatment of sports related injuries. To
suggest that this is a new method to spot and treat muscles that are weak or
that it is one offered exclusively by ergonomists is incorrect.
Anyone working with athletes must realise that imbalances in muscle strength
are only one of the many factors that predispose an athlete to injury.
Factors such as imbalances in muscle length, soft tissue adhesions, residual
pain and joint instability also need to be considered in any pre-season
screening. The recognition and remediation of these additional factors would
appear to be outside the scope of an ergonomist’s area of expertise.
In conclusion, I feel that the opening remark that ‘footballers who are
prone to injury could benefit more from a session with an ergonomist than a
physiotherapist’ not only shows ignorance as to the role of
physiotherapists in sport but is also quite misleading.
Angela Schwalbe
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia