Letters: Compound blues
Recently being obliged to take aspirin to combat the pain of lumbago,
I dissolved soluble aspirin in red wine to disguise its taste. This is very
successful. However, the pink sediment left in the glass turns blue when
it dries.
Indeed, I have produced successful indicator strips on newspaper since
the colour change is stable and repeatable – if crude – and indicates dampness
in much the same way as litmus indicates the pH value. But what is this
compound?
Bernard Howlett Loughton, Essex
Letters: Tea scum
The occurrence of brown tea scum may be drinker dependent (Feedback,
15 January, and Letters, 5 February).
Every day my wife and I drink two cups of tea, each made from the same
pot and in identical cups. All the water passes through a jug filter of
activated charcoal.
Observation over several years has produced the following record of
scum incidence: Wife – nearly always, self – hardly ever.
Probably there is a supping factor, or there could even be a gender
effect.
R. Sydenham Eltham, London
Letters: Establishment view
The article ‘Holy row over Christian physics and maths’ (This Week,
29 January) confirms something which I have feared for some time: that modern
scientists are persecuting what to them is unorthodox belief just as vigorously
as the Church did in the middle ages. Surely the scientific method depends
on an objective outlook, open to the unexpected? How can good science survive
in such an atmosphere?
What a terrible thing it is to find that one is no longer an outsider,
but has become the establishment.
D. R. Billin Carshalton, Surrey
Letters: Trouble in mind
The sub-heading to John McCrone’s article ‘Inner voices, distant memories’
(29 January) reads: ‘Understanding the human mind is easy once you realise
that consciousness is a trick of memory and self-awareness with an illusion
of language.’ He then goes on to develop this theme with a series of confident
statements, which seem to rely for their firmness on hypotheses which are
by no means proven.
I would draw his attention to the well-known case of Helen Keller (1880-1968).
She became completely blind and deaf at the age of 18 months, and remained
so for the rest of her life. Her visual, auditory and verbal memories were
therefore frozen at the stage of a child aged 18 months, and could not possibly
have been reinforced thereafter.
Her only remaining inputs were through her senses of touch, taste and
smell, and heat and cold. With the devoted care of Anne Sullivan, she learnt
to read Braille, and to associate and memorise the tactile patterns of Braille
with the tactile patterns of objects. Her ‘inner voice’ can therefore have
been nothing more than a flow of tactile patterns – a condition that it
is not easy to imagine.
She eventually learnt to ‘hear’ speech by placing her hand on the speaker’s
larynx, (again forming tactile memories) and later on she learned to speak
although only Sullivan could fully understand what she was saying.
In spite of all this, she went on to graduate with honours, and with
the help of Sullivan, to give lectures, to publish books and to support
movements for the welfare of the blind and disabled.
It is not easy to square this extraordinary history with McCrone’s theories
of the ‘(verbal) inner voice’ and the ‘visual image’ as the main (and only?)
prerequisites for consciousness and self-awareness: or would he argue that
Keller was merely a highly trained zombie.
On a minor point, his statement that ‘there is little evidence that
cats have an internal mechanism for bringing past experiences to mind’ seems
questionable. If he kicks his cat, it will almost certainly avoid him next
time it sees him; but if it cannot ‘bring past experiences to mind’ why
should it avoid him? He seems to believe that the actions of animals are
dictated entirely by their immediate situation, irrespective of their past
experience: in effect, that they can never learn, and never act on what
they have learnt. This would seem to many, (and not only to cat-lovers)
to be a less than persuasive hypothesis.
M. Peters Blandford, Dorset
Letters: Short-sighted
Alison Brooks suggests that optometrists should hold ‘eye exercise classes’
that would prevent or slow the rate at which an individual develops myopia.
I am unaware of any convincing research data that suggest that eye exercises
can affect the rate at which myopia increases.
If Brooks has this information, I will be pleased to publish it to the
optometric profession. If she does not, she should refrain from denigrating
optometrists by suggesting that they do not recommend eye exercises for
financial reasons.
Michael Fox British Journal of Optometry and Dispensing London
Letters: Speak low
Your article ‘Computer breathes new life into Jazz Age’ (Technology,
5 February) about transferring Gershwin’s piano rolls to MIDI files says
that Yamaha claims it as the first use of the Disklavier for recording.
In fact, I programmed a prototype version of the Disklavier to perform
several pieces by George Antheil for a BBC Radio 3 documentary on the composer
in 1988. The results were wholly convincing.
There was a neat irony in this because Antheil’s most celebrated work,
Le Ballet Mecanique (1926) was conceived for 16 player pianos in unison.
Unfortunately they could not be synchronised and it ended up being played
by four live pianists in the Paris premiere.
When I used the Disklavier in 1988 the mechanism driving the hammers
was not sufficiently reliable to allow the use of the lowest 25 of its 128
levels of volume. Doubtless the instrument has been improved but I doubt
that the inflexible nature of a mechanically controlled hammer could ever
achieve the subtlety of a pianist playing very soft or very loud without
at least 512 levels of volume – a scale that lies outside the parameters
of the MIDI format.
Mike Steer London SE15
Letters: Creative budgeting
In ‘A Major commitment to science?’ (This Week, 12 February) Jeremy
Webb reported there would be ‘new money’ of about 拢7.5 million for
the research councils next year.
Good news? Well, yes, but we should be careful to distinguish ‘spin’
from fact in government presentations. The spending plans announced in November
1992 foresaw a budget for science staying roughly constant in real terms
through 1994-95 and then falling the following year. In November 1993, Save
British Science welcomed the budget statement demonstrating that William
Waldegrave’s promise to maintain the value of the science budget had been
kept and extended to 1995-96.
But there is no new money. After the November 1993 statement, a provisional,
but unannounced, carve-up between the councils was made, in which 拢9
million was left unallocated. Of this sum, 拢7.5 million has been added
to John Cadogan’s efficiency savings – so far unidentified – of 拢7.9
million, to make up the 拢15.4 million special fund for new projects
which Webb refers to.
John Major in his ‘back to basics’ speech on science has promised a
real increase for science next year. Had we seen the small real increase
promised in 1991, science would already be about 拢40 million a year
better off.
John Mulvey, Save British Science, Oxford
Letters: Missing islands
Your articles ‘Burdens of Empire?’ and ‘Some of our islands are missing
. . .’ (Comment and This Week, 5 February) imply that the British Indian
Ocean Territory (BIOT) is being deliberately overlooked in matters of conservation.
Biological and conservation work is in fact proceeding well in the archipelago.
It may not be surprising that the base does not allow free access to scientists
(I don’t imagine bases on the British mainland do either) but the base only
occupies one or two per cent of the 250 by 150 kilometre maze of atolls,
reefs and shallow banks which comprise the BIOT and the Chagos Archipelago.
It is this very rich reef complex which is of interest to scientists and
work on the conservation of this 98 per cent is being strongly supported
by sections of the government.
The Foreign Office has recently appointed a Conservation Officer to
develop a comprehensive conservation programme for the BIOT, which will
culminate in two years in a follow-up research expedition and the subsequent
production of a Conservation Management Plan.
The officer has sought the help of several of us who in the past have
spent substantial time gathering ecological data in the area, and we in
turn are preparing for a two-year research programme and another round of
research visits to all the area, except the military base.
Charles Sheppard University of Warwick Coventry
Letters: Slick story
In Kate Douglas’s dramatic account of the Braer oil spill in Shetland
(‘Diary of a disaster’, 8 January), she has rather glossed over the effects
on the marine wildlife. She comments that the effects on the marine wildlife
seem to be minimal, concentrating on seals, otters and seabirds, but ignoring
the effects on fish, invertebrates, seaweeds or wider processes in the marine
ecosystem. Marine mammals and seabirds, though being the most newsworthy
of marine species, are not the whole story.
As a result of the oil spill, the Secretary of State for Scotland appointed
an Ecological Steering Group on the oil spill in Shetland to assess the
impact of the incident on the ecology of the Shetland Isles. In its interim
report the steering group states that ‘at two sites around Garths Ness no
gastropod molluscs survived . . .’ and further that ‘The sandy shore in
Quendale Bay lacked the crustaceans which would normally have been expected.’
The group acknowledges that ‘while the extent of the short-term impact from
the oil spill was limited in comparison to other spills, sub-lethal effects
may only become apparent in the longer term’.
A monitoring programme, which is being coordinated by the steering group,
is under way and includes surveys of coastal areas. It will only be after
the final analysis of these data that statements such as that in Douglas’s
article could be justified.
Michael Usher and John Baxter Scottish Natural Heritage Edinburgh
Letters: Winston – the tooth
Feedback will be interested to learn that Norman Shelley gave a full
account of his unique contribution to the wartime effort on BBC1‘s
Nationwide programme in the 1970s.
Having delivered his ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ speech, Winston
Churchill could not find the time to commit it to shellac for posterity,
and decreed that ‘some actor chappy’ would have to do the honours. This
honour, great indeed, fell to Shelley, who was to achieve professional success
after the war playing Doctor Watson to Carlton Hobbs’s Sherlock Holmes on
the radio. The better to emulate the Prime Minister’s lisp, he removed his
false teeth.
Nearly fifty years after the event, this oration still has the power
to move; however hard our daily lot, we should reflect upon what could have
been, and nearly was. To know that we are hearing Doctor Watson with his
teeth out detracts nothing from this – after all, this could happen in no
other country.
Joseph Fox Redhill, Surrey
Letters: Ethical dilemma
It is true that philosophers often cannot agree on ethical principles
(Comment, 12th February). This disagreement, however, does not reflect any
peculiarity of philosophers, so much as the insolubility of many ethical
problems. Ethical propositions cannot be wholly converted to logical ones.
For example, try reducing ‘Thou shalt not kill’ to totally value-free statements.
We might argue that we would become extinct if homicide became the norm,
but the response ‘why would that matter?’ would not be illogical.
As ethical problems tend to be insoluble, the only real answer is to
avoid generating ethical concerns in the first place. Consider infertility:
prevention of infertility would be unlikely to upset anyone; IVF and artificial
insemination bother quite a few people, especially when donors are used;
the proposal to use eggs from aborted foetuses in IVF has caused an uproar.
Research funding, however, has been channelled into the development of highly-interventionist
techniques while the causes and prevention of infertility have been relatively
neglected. This situation arises perhaps because scientists’ careers benefit
most from working in high-profile areas of research. The more interventionist
the techniques, the greater the publicity and the greater the profile of
the research area in question.
Ethics committees are an essentially reactive response to problems thrown
up by scientific developments. A better approach would be to incorporate
an ethics-based ranking system in the research funding process. Individual
projects would be ranked so that prevention would be favoured over cure,
and low-intervention techniques would be favoured over high-intervention
ones. 杏吧原创s would then find that their career prospects are enhanced
most by carrying out research that upsets the fewest.
C. Mather Meersbrook, Sheffield
Letters: Labour pains
As a psychologist researching the effect of stress on childbirth I have
become fascinated by the role of endorphins in pregnancy and labour. There
seems to be a vast literature on some effects but nothing on their effect
on the smooth muscle of the uterus.
Endorphins were originally identified by their contraction-inhibiting
effect on male reproductive smooth muscle and beta-endorphin has since been
found to quash immune reactions. Both these activities would seem important
in maintaining pregnancy. The former would have implications for the management
of labour.
Endorphins are secreted by the placenta and the ovaries as well as
emanating from the hypothalamus – the uterus is swimming in the stuff in
pregnancy. Surely I am not the only one to have noticed the physiological
implications. Please will someone tell me the flaw in my argument before
I die of frustration.
Margaret Jowitt Craven Arms, Shropshire
Letters: Positive currents
Mr Agnew of the Scottish Green Party (Letters, 5 February) argues that
electricity companies should not actively market their electricity.
However, pollution control equipment is almost exclusively electrical.
The list of equipment which relies on electricity to power pumps, fans and
control panels is almost endless. I hope that Mr Agnew would agree that
the electricity industry should be promoting the sales of pollution control
equipment, one growth area of an economy in recession.
Indeed, the environmental benefits of electrical pollution control could
be argued to outweigh the negative effects of electricity generation. For
example, without an electricity supply, how would we remove cadmium and
other toxic metals so effectively from liquid effluent, remove volatile
organic compounds efficiently from gaseous emissions, or destroy pesticides
in our drinking water?
This is the positive side of electricity in the environment, an argument
which is rarely heard.
Simon Morgan Mold, Clwyd
Letters: Short-sighted
Alison Brooks (Forum, 5 February) makes the somewhat surprising assertion
that a primarily genetic cause underpins the orthodox view of myopia.
In fact, myopia can be induced in experimental animals by altering refraction
during development. It is now generally accepted by physiologists that this
process also appears in humans. Thus, in children and young adults activities
such as extensive reading hasten the onset of myopia.
Brooks’s article quite rightly indicates that research is urgently needed
in order to unravel the precise types of ocular activities likely to lead
to the premature onset of this now almost ubiquitous condition.
Kevin Smith Dundee Institute of Technology
Letters: Short-sighted
Alison Brooks may be a palaeontologist, but her scientific method is
sadly lacking. It is not surprising that ‘. . . in the 19th century, fewer
people wore glasses, as we can see from photographs’. Spectacles in those
days were relatively expensive, and screening for vision defects often unsophisticated.
Many sight defects would have gone undetected, or not been considered to
be worth correcting. To suggest that on this evidence ‘the population is
getting more and more short-sighted’ is not a logical argument. Expectations
of vision are much greater, both in leisure and employment. Vision is screened
in schools, as well as in driving tests and by some employers.
And why concentrate purely on myopia? Many children wear spectacles
for hypermetropia (long-sightedness) which seems not to bother Brooks at
all. But she is correct about one thing – it is quite normal for myopia
to reduce with age in adulthood.
Colin Fowler Aston University, Birmingham