TB or not TB
Pigeons may carry “only” the avian form of tuberculosis (Feedback, 1
October) but among illnesses associated with inhaling their dried droppings
are aspergillosis, histoplasmosis and ironically, “bird fanciers’ lung”.
A warning about these was issued to construction workers a few years ago by
the medical advisor to the Health and Safety Executive. His name was Dr. Bill
Parrott.
Incidentally, the 1984 Fowl Pest outbreak was traced to feed contaminated
at Liverpool by feral pigeons. The consequent 拢2 million cost of
slaughtering 820 000 hens was certainly not chickenfeed.
Junk the judges
Your article on the “Internet posse” which will “run junk e-mail out of
town” (This Week, 1 October) raised some worrying points. The last thing the
Internet needs is people deciding what can and cannot be said.
The Internet has no real rules about what people post or where, just a set
of informal constraints (“netiquette”) enforced by social pressure (usually
the sending of annoyed messages, or “flames”). Postings such as that of Canter
& Siegel are perfectly legal – just impolite.
Most users like myself simply sent them several rude messages to work off
our ire and then added them to our “kill files” – filters which mean that all
messages from that user or site will be ignored – like walking away from the
politician on the soapbox. Other users sent out “cancel” messages removing the
originals – like going round ripping down the politician’s campaign
posters.
In any case, for most of us it was a minor irritation. The Internet is big
enough to cope with all kinds of fools without resorting to censorship or
formal enforcement of netiquette.
Since Internet providers are commercial services who cannot afford to have
their connections overloaded by net reaction to such idiocies, the final
result of actions such as Canter & Siegel’s will be that they will find
themselves without a connection to the Internet – I for one will not mourn
their absence.
Your article also implied that all users pay for Usenet news – this is
untrue. Many people pay connection charges, telecom bills and some people
connected via certain commercial services pay per character downloaded, but
most Usenet newsgroups are free, the exceptions being certain commercial
information suppliers such as Clari. I myself receive an average of 400 Usenet
messages a day for only the cost of the telephone call to my service
provider
Seals and circuses
Whatever the validity of the capture of six Mediterranean monk seals
(Monachus monachus) for a captive breeding programme, am I alone in becoming
increasingly irritated that issues of conservation and animal welfare are
dogged by the continuing use of emotive rhetoric rather than science (This
Week, 24 September)?
The Geneva-based Bellerive group does little for its campaign by labelling
a French aquarium a “marine circus”. In fact, commercial aquariums in Hawaii
have played a constructive role in the welfare and conservation of the also
endangered Hawaiian monk seal (Monachus schauinslandi). Moreover, reputable
aquariums and zoos do have the advantage of holding facilities and experienced
staff to undertake such operation.
I find it ironic that Bellerive wish the proposed project postponed until a
wider scientific review is carried out by the World Conservation Union (IUCN),
as they decided not to take the published advise of this organisation when
they were involved in obtaining and releasing three bottlenose dolphins
(Tursiops truncatus) into the waters off the Caribbean Turks and Caicos
Islands in 1991. These three animals had been obtained from long-term
captivity in two British dolphinariums and were not originally from the area
of release. This action goes against recommendations laid out in the IUCN
position statement, Translocation of Living Organisms, September 4, 1987.
The ultimate fate of these dolphins and their impact on the islands’
resident dolphin populations is still unclear due to no long-term, structured,
post-release scientific research.
Commerical genes
I read with dismay your report concerning the attitude of British cancer
scientists towards patenting the genes that trigger breast cancer (This Week,
24 September). The fact is that, without a patent, industry is not interested;
without industry, no product is produced; if no product is produced no
patients will be treated or tested and the benefits of the original research
would be lost to humanity.
As those involved with orphan drug research will tell you, unless research
can be commercialised the benefits will rarely reach those who require
them.
Furthermore, our scientists should stop and think where the money comes
from to pay for their research. No one can afford to remain “unsullied” by
commerce, if the effect is to cut off one of the best sources of funding for
essential research. The Institute of Cancer Research should patent its
technology so that, through licensing, it could ensure that the benefits of
its technology reach humanity and secure the resources required to fund
further research. Without a patent you can guarantee neither.
If British scientists do not adopt the more commercial view taken by their
US counterparts, research in this country will wither, to the detriment of us
all.
Coal is cool
F.G. Grisley asks if it is true that coal-fired power stations emit five
times more radioactivity than is allowed from nuclear power stations (Letters,
24 September). The answer is no.
Correctly operating nuclear power stations emit little radioactivity. But
when they reach the end of their lives their radioactive cores remain. These
radioactive remains must be released to the environment. Their disposal
requires a choice of how best to emit it to the environment. Indeed, Nuclear
Electric propose leaving their dead power stations encased in concrete for
centuries: immense heaps of ugly nuclear waste.
The radioactive remains of a used nuclear power station is orders of
magnitude more than the natural radioactivity in all the coal used during the
life of any coal-fired power station.
The nuclear power industry spread many lies during the 1960s and 1970s. F.
G. Grisley’s question relates to one of these lies. Fortunately, the nuclear
power industry tends to be more honest today.
Save our data
Robin Harbour, in his “Is the pen still mightier than the sword?” (Forum, 3
September), raises the important problem of possible sabotage of
electronically stored data. When almost all personal, scientific, historical
and cultural data are stored in erasable and easily modifiable form, there is
a serious threat of losing them all in case of any world-scale calamity.
Harbour points out that the potentially most dangerous bottleneck is the
complexity of our electronic means of reading and writing, such as computers,
networks, optical discs, etc. What we need is a viable alternative to both
electronic (sabotagable) and paper (too bulky) ROM storage forms, such as can
be relatively easily accessed by simple devices like ordinary (light)
microscopes or (preferably) by unaided eye.
Reliable robust, easily reproducible, but difficult-to-change means of
information storage suitable for mass production (individual “Libraries of
Congress”) can undoubtedly be developed. Ten years ago I proposed isotopic
information storage as one possible candidate (A. A. Berezin, Speculation in
Science and Technology, vol 7, 1984). In an otherwise periodical crystal
lattice, various isotopes of the same chemical element can be used to store
information through their relative positioning (similar to codons in DNA). Is
there anybody else to suggest further ideas?
Letters to the Editor
Write to: Letters to the Editor, New 杏吧原创, King’s Reach Tower,
Stamford Street, London SE1 9LS, or fax to 0171 261 6464. Please include a
daytime telephone number, and cite the date of the articles mentioned. We
reserve the right to edit longer letters. Your letters may also be published
in New 杏吧原创 newsletters.
Correction
Correction: An incomplete internet address was given for the Community
R&D Information Service (CORDIS) at the end of a news item entitled
“Europe’s research `gold mine’ is opened up” (This Week, 24 September). The
full address is: cordis-helpdesk@dcfilx.das.net
Napoleon nailed
I was very interested in Tara Patel’s article (This Week, 24 September) on
the possible causes of Napoleon’s death. In 1946, as a boy on the way home
from school, I met a very old man sitting in the Sun outside a Home which had
been, not too long before, the local workhouse.
He claimed to be 96 years old, and I quite believed him. In the course of a
one-sided conversation he told me that his father had been a sailor on board a
ship that took supplies to Napoleon on St Helena. The old man’s father was 52
years old when he married, he said, so the arithmetic of father and son would
be about right.
What has lingered in my mind since then, and revived by the article in New
杏吧原创, were some of the old man’s words: “My father said that Napoleon was
very ill because he had a nasty habit of chewing his nails and then swallowing
them. He died from it eventually.”
Lingo lessons
I would like to thank Tony Jones for his very nice review (6 August) of my
book Fatal Words: Communication Clashes and Aircraft Crashes. However, by
focusing entirely on my description of the problem and my suggestions for
short and long-term technological solutions, he misses the main scientific
point of the book.
Language is an individual cognitive capacity that is typically exercised in
a social interactive setting. This dual nature inevitably brings about the
sorts of problems I describe, when the social and cognitive requirements that
are inherent in how language works fail to match as they are supposed to,
quite aside from whether people are being lax or irresponsible. It is this
inevitability that necessitates the development of automated tools such as
those I suggest.
People need to use machines as tools precisely because they are not
machines themselves. My main suggestion for the present is to enhance pilot
and controller training by providing them with a deeper understanding of the
nature of language and of the consequent need to use it more mindfully.
Beans and bindweed
The runner beans in my Hertfordshire garden always grow round their canes
in the sequence east, north, west, south. This creates a right-hand-thread
helix (anticlockwise if viewed from above) and is the reverse of the Sun’s
movement in the sky.
Right-hand threads are also formed by greater bindweed, contrary to Derrick
Grover’s observation (Feedback, 17 September), and wistaria.
Left-hand threads are formed by black bryony, wild honeysuckle and a
cultivated Japanese honeysuckle.
In June 1974, I plotted the movements of a growing runner bean tip with
nothing to climb on. It was 35 centimetres tall, growing in a pot. I placed a
lamp some distance above it so that a shadow of the growing shoot would be
cast on the table below, where its rotation could be plotted in pencil. It
swept out circles in the air in the same direction as if it were climbing, in
other words anticlockwise as seen from above, completing a circle in about two
hours. It thus made several circles in a day, in the opposite direction to the
northern hemisphere’s Sun which was not shining on it in any case. It also put
on about 4 centimetres growth in length in a day.
The following question appeared in the Reader’s Digest, September 1994:
“Why do runner bean plants wrap themselves clockwise round their support
pole?”
The answer given was as follows: “Runner beans grow towards the Sun. In the
northern hemisphere the Sun moves clockwise, and the shoots follow its path.
The phenomenon is reversed in the southern hemisphere.”
This would appear to be a very simple and satisfactory answer to this
question.
However, I have grown runner beans for many years and have always been
puzzled by the fact that they wrap themselves round the supports in an
anticlockwise direction. I have checked with a number of gardening colleagues
and it seems that their beans also think they are in the southern
hemisphere.
The reason why some plants, such as the runner bean and the field bindweed,
describe a right-hand helix, while others, such as the black bindweed,
describe a left-hand helix, is determined by their genetic make-up. Each
species will grow in its own way whether it is planted north or south of the
Equator.
I am sure that many readers will recall that this issue (with many others)
was succinctly addressed by the late and much lamented Michael Flanders and
Donald Swann. “Misalliance” (from the 1960 LP of their revue “At the Drop of a
Hat”) recounts the tragic tale of the right-handed honeysuckle and the
lefthanded bindweed.
The spoken preamble to the song recounts its origin: a display case at the
Natural History Museum outlining the habits of certain climbing plants. I
don’t know whether things have changed since the 1950s but, according to the
song, that display indicated that bindweed climbed in an anticlockwise
fashion, unlike Grover’s.
Both kinds of bindweed in my garden grow the same way as the runner beans.
Incidentally, I believe Flanders and Swann’s song was wrong, and the bindweed
and honeysuckle both grow the same way as well. But in the case of bindweed,
there is a species Calystegia silvatica, described in Keble Martin’s Concise
British Flora as “garden escape” and therefore presumably artificially
selected. This could be the bindweed Grover has in his garden.
At the risk of expanding this debate further, the honeysuckle in my
southern hemisphere garden in Canberra twines in the opposite sense to the
Flanders and Swann variety.
PET theme
The staff at The Guy’s & St Thomas’ Clinical PET Centre read “Hard sell
for particle physics?” (24 September) with interest but were disappointed that
the centre was not mentioned as one of the two main PET centres in Britain. To
the best of our knowledge Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge has not yet
taken delivery of its equipment and therefore does not have a functioning
centre.
The Clinical PET Centre at Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospitals was opened in
May 1991 as the first clinical centre in Britain and has since completed in
excess of 1200 patient examinations. The centre is equipped with a Siemens’
CTI cyclotron for the production of positron emitting radio isotopes of
fluorine 18, oxygen 15, nitrogen 12 and carbon 11 and two Siemens ECAT
scanners, one based in each hospital. The decision to purchase equipment from
abroad was taken after extensive consideration of the products available; this
included the cyclotron in production at Oxford Instruments, which at the time
of purchase was not a marketable product.
Pic-ture this
I’ve long been a reader of New 杏吧原创, which has supplied me with many
fine ideas, including the clues that led to the core notion behind my novel,
Blood Music. Now I see industry and information designers may be taking
another page from science fiction.
“Is this the end of abstract thought?” by Marek Kohn (17 September)
mentioned the use of icons or glyphs, three-dimensional representations of
complex data projected on computer screens. In my novels EON (1985) and
Eternity (1989) I wrote of a future human society that communicates by
projected “picts” – not pre-Celtic tribes but complex information packages
much like those suggested in BT’s research. These picts carried rich clumps of
context-sensitive information, and changed colour, shape, or pattern to convey
emotive as well as data content.
William Gibson mentions “glyphs” in Neuromancer but they seem to be
machine-code electronic text. I’m sure some other SF writers before me have
dabbled in this area, but can’t think of any offhand. Any New 杏吧原创
readers with better memories?
Poverty vow
Feedback speculates as to how the Manufacturing Science and Finance trade
union will accommodate chaplains in its structure. Adequate precedents have
been set by the civil service unions, and the Whitley councils that determine
pay and conditions in government departments and the NHS.
杏吧原创s in the public sector have always been grouped with those who
take explicit vows of poverty and obedience.
Hiding the booze
It is unlikely that the health benefits from Prohibition in the US were as
dramatic as David Concar and Laura Spinney claim (“The highs and lows of
prohibition”, 1 October). Their figures show a sharp fall in deaths from
cirrhosis of the liver three years before the new legislation came into force
in 1920, matched by an increase in deaths from other causes.
It seems more plausible that doctors either changed their practices,
responding to social pressure against alcohol by not recording an alcohol-
related disease on death certificates, or, being heavy drinkers themselves,
decided to make the statistics look better.
The authors write: the fact that reported deaths from cirrhosis began to
drop before the onset of Prohibition may have a different explanation. By the
time Prohibition began in the US, a broadly based temperance movement had been
in full swing there for a number of years. The decline in cirrhosis was surely
the result of increasing public awareness of the hazards of alcohol, not
doctors fiddling their books to make the situation look better. (In any case,
demonising a substance usually makes doctors look for victims – witness the
recent history of ecstasy abuse in Britain).
Frosty figures
It would be interesting to know whether the data for frosts in April
(Inside Science, 17 September) are actual or hypothetical numbers [They are
real – Ed]; but first there is a misprint on Fig 2; the green columns should
be labelled “Geometric Distribution model”.
Secondly: The histograms of the frosts in April look to me as if there are
two distributions at work, one geometric type, mainly responsible for 0, 1 and
2 frosts and one binomial type distribution, causing the peak at 3 frosts and
the long tail towards the higher numbers on the right and a shorter tail to
the left.
A period of 65 years is long enough for a change in the weather pattern
and a series of cold springs averaging 3 frosts could well have been followed
or preceded by warmer springs with 0 or 1 frost being the norm. A year-by-year
graph or a glance along the 65 numbers might have given a hint of Mother
Nature being her usual awkward self.
Forest chestnut
“A thousand years ago, a squirrel could cross England from the Severn
through the Midlands to the Wash without setting foot on the ground”
(“Greening the heart of England”, 24 September). This ancient chestnut,
probably propagated by some early advocate of state forestry, is odd coming
from Fred Pearce, whose articles I respect highly.
Much of Midland England was already open field in 994, probably under
compulsion from Alfred and his successors. Woodland was shrinking again after
Dark Age expansion, estimated by Oliver Rackham as 15 per cent on average in
the lowlands at the time of the Domesday Survey. There were wooded commons,
but these only occurred on an extensive scale in certain areas. The squirrel
would have been forced to follow a tortuous route indeed.
If there was ever a time since the Bronze Age when a squirrel could perform
this feat, it would have been when the parliamentary enclosures reached
maturity in the first half of the last century when hedgerow timber was
nurtured as valuable property of the landlord. Possibly the squirrel could
have managed it on the eve of the last War, despite neglect, elm disease and
the odd trunk road.
This said, the article was timely and useful. An expansion of woodland on
derelict land, and land blighted by the urban fringe, seems greatly preferable
to changing upland landscapes, which we may value as they are. Personally, I
welcome the higher densities now required to give the timber trees a good
start; thinning and, hopefully, coppicing in the future will give the
diversity required by other interests if we are prepared to be patient.