Letters: She does shave
I use an electric razor, so if it is a fact that only males shave,
then whose safety razor is it that I have often seen in the bathroom cupboard?
I always assumed it was my wife’s. It seems I am mistaken and have a rival
hidden somewhere.
David Edwards Cardiff
Letters: Taboo genetics
I was disturbed at the political correctness of your Comment of 21 May:
‘The truth is that if small men really are more aggressive than their taller
fellows, it is not likely to be because of their genes but because of
centuries of heightism.’
The archetypal isms are racism and sexism. Studies of their effects
would not seem to suggest that Jews or women are thereby rendered more
aggressive. Why should ‘heightism’ function in this way? The fact that aggression
is overwhelmingly a male behaviour in humans clearly suggests a genetic
cause.
The thrust of the Comment was to attack ‘the current vogue for finding
genetic explanations for behaviour . . . the creeping trend towards a dangerous
biogenetic determinism’. It is far more important to attack the dangerous
political correctness which rules certain explanations out of court, forever
preventing solutions to those problems should the taboo mechanism be the
correct one.
The reality is that the vogue, exemplified by the well-publicised attitudes
of Stephen Jay Gould, Leon Kamin, Daniel J. Kevles and others, is to decry
all attempts to suggest that psychological characteristics are significantly
influenced by biological factors. C. C. Darlington noted this ‘taboo (against
discussing genetic influences) which dominates the study of human problems’
and gave this as an example: ‘There is indeed no other way in which we can
understand either the difference in intelligence between man and the ape
or the means by which it arose.’ We could say the same about aggression,
in that it is the other particularly human trait: Homo sapiens is also
Homo pugnans.
Once upon a time schizophrenics were burnt as witches. Later they were
incarcerated – eventually, after psychoanalysis. Now there is medication.
I think that is scientific progress. ‘Deterministic’ science provides no-blame
explanations and, in the fullness of time, humane solutions.
Dick Atkinson South Shields, Tyne & Wear
Letters: Missing ingredients
Having spent many years in the all-natural end of the food industry
I was pleased to see your article (‘Real juice, pure fraud’, 21 May) on
the fraud undertaken by dubious companies seeking to raise the image of
their products.
A quite legal and ongoing scandal is that afforded by the opportunity
to avoid listing the components of the ingredients used in the making up
of a product. In other words, a seemingly preservative-free product may
contain large amounts of preservative in the strawberry extract used as
an ingredient. Sugar, colourings, and other additives can be and sometimes
are incorporated into products in this manner without the need for listing
as an ingredient.
Another common practice in these sugar-conscious days is to avoid showing
sugar as the first (greatest) component in the ingredient panel. This is
done by breaking the sugar component of a product down into two or three
types of sugar (glucose syrup, sugar, invert sugar, etc) and so while sugar
may comprise most of the product it will appear on the list after a more
wholesome sounding item like wheat.
On a closing note, I will add that in the twenty years I spent manufacturing
and distributing natural foods we received a total of some 300 letters
from trading standards officers looking into our products on one count or
another. When samples are officially taken for testing a statutory note
is sent to the manufacturer advising of their intentions. During these twenty
years, we never received one notification advising proposed analysis for
the correctness of the ingredients listed.
Perhaps it is time for an independent company to provide a hallmarking
service to the food industry and its customers, backed up by private laboratories.
The public certainly need this and I suspect there are enough decent food
manufacturers who would be pleased to have their assurances to the public
substantiated by independent audit.
Gregory Sams London
Letters: Taboo genetics
Your Comment was undoubtedly written by a short person. Contrary to
the assertions in the article, tall people commonly experience discrimination.
Clothing manufacturers never cater for tall people, for instance, and whereas
it is a simple matter to shorten a trouser leg, try lengthening one when
there is no hem.
Public transport, especially air travel, is excruciatingly uncomfortable.
Unless one can afford business class, there is never enough legroom and
the headrest lies behind the shoulder blades. Shorties can curl up in comfort
and sleep all the way. Feet hang over hotel beds, you have to crouch to
have a shower and, in the tropics, the ceiling fan can be lethal. Like
seats on aeroplanes, cars are uncomfortable and cramped for tall people,
and as for making love in the back – definitely leave that to the runts.
In everyday work and play short people seem to feel the need to hurt,
beat or humiliate those who are tall. From adolescence on, tall people have
to cope with the violent, quarrelsome, treacherous nature of short-arses.
Maybe this experience better equips the lofty for careers in business, politics
and the military. The truth is that bantamism – the psychotic tendency for
the diminutive to make life miserable for others – is the explanation for
much disharmony in our society, such as football hooliganism. Nothing should
impede the speedy delivery of gene therapy or anti-midget hormone treatment
to the undersized masses.
David Carter (6 feet 4 inches) Canberra, Australia
Letters: Wounded ducks
Ian Anderson (This Week, 16 April) reported some very controversial
results about the ballistics of duck shooting. In particular, since relatively
few wounded birds are recovered by rescuers there remained the question
of ‘where were all the wounded ducks’?
The answer to this riddle is quite simply that they do show up in X-ray
studies. It is easy to demonstrate that the actual wounding rates must be
of the order predicted by Russell. For example, according to the Australian
Wildlife Journal (vol 3, p 61) nearly 14 per cent of the black duck population
examined in southeastern Australia between 1957 and 1973 had embedded pellets,
while the harvest rate for this species ranged from 4 to 14 per cent over
the same period. It is elementary mathematics to deduce that around one
bird was wounded for every bird that was bagged.
Corrections would need to be made for wounding from previous seasons
but this would be offset by wounds where pellets passed straight through
the birds, and crippled birds that die soon after being shot. Russell’s
simulation results thus appear to be fully consistent with the other known
data.
Ralph Hahnheuser Edwardstown, Australia
Letters: Ridiculous rule
I read Barry Fox’s article on cut-price modems (Technology, 21 May)
with interest. About three years ago I returned from living in the US with
a laptop computer with built-in modem. I went to my nearest BT shop and
asked for an adaptor to plug it into my telephone socket. I was somewhat
surprised to be told that I was not allowed to use it and that no such
adaptor existed.
I was just as surprised to find this nonexistent adaptor for sale for
a few pence on a market stall. It seems that this is the sort of regulation
that just brings the law into disrepute.
There is a simple solution: abandon regulation of modems. If it is good
enough for the mighty AT&T what has BT to fear?
John Broomfield East Molesey, Surrey
Letters: Worse than dole
I was recently offered, and accepted, government funding to study for
a doctorate through the Science and Engineering Research Council. This will
provide me with roughly 拢4800 per annum to live on. Although not
generous, this is possible.
In the period between when I last worked and being offered my research
funding I have been living on Income Support and Housing Benefit, also provided
by the government. Should I carry on supporting myself in this manner I
would receive roughly 拢4500 per annum. (If I were receiving Unemployment
Benefit this sum would be in excess of 拢5000).
Although I love my field of research, a difference of only 拢300
is hardly an enticement to working long hours and weekends.
The education system in this country is often criticised at school level.
With the state of postgraduate study as it is, virtually relying on a person’s
enthusiasm and goodwill for any research to be done, is it surprising that
we lag behind our European counterparts in the field of science and technology?
Alice Hearne London
Letters: Uphill hybrid
I noticed in the article ‘Green hybrid takes to the track at Le Mans’
(Technology, 16 March) the statement that Chrysler’s Patriot car ‘will be
the first race car ever to use a hybrid powertrain’. Historians should not
overlook, however, the hybrid system developed by Ferdinand Porsche and
Jacob Lohner in which individual wheel motors were powered by an engine-driven
dynamo. A car of this type ran in the Semmering hill climb near Vienna in
1903; perhaps a hill climb is not a ‘race’, but it is certainly competitive.
John Twin Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire
Letters: Correction
In ‘The furits of walking on two legs’ (New 杏吧原创, Science 14 May),
a reference was inadvertently left out in the course of editing. Readers
wanting to know more about the new fossil skull from Hadar should turn to
Nature (vol 368, p 449.
Letters: Scum score
Readers have been led astray by Ralph Lewin’s assertion that the dark
film on tea arises from the protective waxes on tea leaves which have floated
to the surface (Feedback, 15 January; Letters, 5, 19, 26 February and 16
April). This hypothesis does not explain why tea scum only forms when black
tea leaf is brewed in hard water which contains calcium and bicarbonate
ions, and never when brewed in distilled water, or distilled water containing
calcium chloride, or in soft water. Nor does it explain why tea scum even
develops on infusions of instant tea which contains no insoluble material.
Experiments carried out in our laboratory have shown that tea scum consists
mainly of polyphenolic tea components oxidised at the surface by oxygen
in the air, mediated and accompanied by calcium carbonate from the water.
No scum forms if one removes from the water either the calcium ions (for
example, by an ion exchange filter) or bicarbonate ions (for example, by
adding acid, as in lemon juice or simply by making a sufficiently strong
cup of tea). The effect of milk is still under investigation.
Michael Spiro Imperial College, London
Letters: She does shave
Rocha is more sexist than the author she/he comments on. ‘God doesn’t
always shave’ makes no gender assumption; whereas Rocha’s ‘Don’t you know
that She doesn’t shave’? does. In our household she shaves, he doesn’t.
Yours beardedly,
Andrew Millard University of Oxford
Letters: She does shave
H. A. F. Rocha (Letters, 28 May) objects to Malcolm Dixon’s male chauvinism
in his assertion that ‘God doesn’t always shave with Occam’s razor’, and
assures us that She doesn’t shave. But how does God keep Her legs trimmed
– Occam’s depilatory cream?
Simon Cuthbert Glasgow
Letters: Cat rap
I was gratified to read that someone has finally declared war on that
arch pest the domestic cat (‘Should the cat take the rap?’ 21 May). It’s
just a pity it took Australian and not British nerve to fire the opening
salvoes.
I’ve been championing this particular cause for many years now, often
provoking furious debate with cat-lovers in the process. Alas, it seems
my polemic falls constantly on deaf ears and stony ground. I am fast approaching
the view that cat fanciers are devotees of some obscure religion. Regardless
of what argument you use to reduce theirs to the absurd they still cling
tenaciously to their sacred totem: that cats are a force for the good (they
mean their own good but this is seldom conceded).
A much deeper irony is the cat’s ability to escape moral censure. When
the well-heeled repair to the moors to vent their instincts on our native
grouse, a storm of protest erupts. But when the neighbour’s cat (from a
good home with regular meals, etc.) vents its instincts on the native thrush,
wren or whatever else it can get its paws on, not a word of reproach is
uttered. I’ve watched helplessly as local cats, no doubt hunting on full
stomachs, subject yet another distraught victim to a long and painful ordeal
before dispatching. And there hasn’t been an animal activist in sight.
If the cats do not possess freedom of choice then their owners do. Or
should the choice, in some form of social legislation, be made for them?
Steve Bates Newcastle upon Tyne
Letters: Melting moon
Re Arthur C. Clarke’s letter of 21 May. I was wondering: did a comet-ignited
flash fire on Jupiter melt Europa’s surface? Of course, the chance of Jupiter
being ignited by Shoemaker-Levy 9 seems extremely unlikely, but I ask myself:
could the impact start local flash fires at the interface of the hydrogen
and water ice clouds? This would not be a nuclear reaction but a chemical
one, drawing the oxygen necessary for combustion from the water ice. Could
it have been previous fires of this nature that relatively recently melted
the surface of Europa, rather that tidal stresses?
As Io’s surface is constantly changing we will see no trace of such
a calamitous event on its surface. Or did such an event heat it up in the
first place? What of the other moons? Well, maybe they weren’t in alignment
with the previous crash sites at the time. Or maybe for the larger moons
the heat flash may have dissipated by the time it reached Ganymede . . .
Reg Stone London
Letters: Black-eye blues
I was delighted to read that left-handed users of assault rifles tend
to suffer from spent cartridges being ejected into their eyes (The Last
Word, 28 May).
Significant progress could be made towards world peace if a new rifle
could be designed which gave black eyes to right-handed users as well as
left-handed ones. Perhaps a deluxe version which ejected the cartridge into
the user’s eye before firing it could be invented too if a market could
be found.
I, for one, am prepared to help create this market. Given recent news
about how easy it is to bribe arms buyers, I publicly pledge 拢100
towards a new international black-eye peacemakers’ fund. By making these
rifles and bribing all major arms buyers, its sole objective is to re-equip
all the world’s armies with the new deluxe black eye rifle.
Barry Johnston Chester
Letters: Tricky characters
Alan Reekie complains that international e-mail is difficult because
few people have software that supports the ISO standard character set for
accented characters (Letters, 14 May). Presumably he means ISO 8859 part
1, which is suitable for Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French,
German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.
There are three other parts for other European languages, as well as other
ISO standards. I imagine that he is also talking about DOS, since fonts
for Windows and Mac are widely available and easy to install, and Windows
has a character set compatible with ISO 8859 part 1.
I can supply (free) software to display ISO 8859 part 1 characters on
a normal DOS EGA/VGA text screen, with a public domain key utility program
to make typing easier, and instructions. These work with most modern PC
compatibles and applications. I could make up other character sets, including
non-roman ones, as needed.
Sorry, I’m not on the net, so please send a formatted PC disc (any type)
with return mailer. Perhaps some kind person would save me trouble by putting
the programs on a bulletin board.
Ralph Hancock 17 Queen’s Gate Place London SW7 5NY
Letters: Mug matters
Martin Hocking has missed out an important part of his calculation.
The energy cost of an item does not finish with its manufacture. Taking
a cradle-to-grave approach, there are the additional energy costs of transport
and disposal of 70 cups, compared with one mug.
There is also a land cost in disposables (of a landfill site) or a pollution
cost in incineration. Not to mention the environmental cost of litter in
the towns and countryside, and the energy spent to clear it up. When was
the last time you saw a ceramic cup thrown under a hedge on a lay-by?
Kay Skippins Tregaron, Dyfed
Letters: Mug matters
Re ‘Green cups’ (In Brief, 21 May). It surprised me to find you implying
that using a ceramic mug 1006 times would be remarkable. As a teacher, I
use my work mug three times a day: I imagine other people have similar tea
or coffee requirements. I bought my present mug at the Assocation of Science
Education Annual Meeting in 1989. This means I have used it approximately
3060 times. Is that really unusual?
B. K. Wallis Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire