Behind the ban
Rob Edwards’ main article on toxic waste considerably misrepresented Britain’s stance towards the Basel 鈥� Convention ban 鈥� Decision II/12 鈥� on exports to non OECD countries (“Dirty tricks in a dirty business”, 18 February).
I cannot speak for the other countries mentioned in your article, but it is quite wrong to claim that Britain is attempting to “engineer the demise” of the ban. We fully support Decision II/12 and, like a number of other countries, took immediate steps to prohibit the export of hazardous waste for disposal.
Decision II/12 did not seek to apply an immediate ban on the export of hazardous wastes for recovery 鈥� this is due to bite by the end of 1997. It is therefore wrong for Edwards to claim that our imports/exports plan, recently issued for consultation, highlights possible exemptions to the ban. On the contrary, the plan, and all our previous guidance, is wholly consistent with the requirements of Decision II/12 鈥� clearly identifying the specific conditions which have to be met before such exports for recovery may proceed.
One final point. Britain is not, as Edwards suggests, reconsidering its position towards the Basel Convention. We remain as committed as when we ratified the Convention in May last year. Our imports/exports plan takes us even further down the road of controlling the movement of hazardous wastes into and out of Britain.
Trade and aid
Fred Pearce, on the recommendations of David Pearce and Michael Grubb, takes the advocacy of emission permit trading to cut the amount of C02 industry spews into the atmosphere, a little too seriously (This Week, 21 January). While making economic sense and, in theory, able to “transfer” more advanced technology to the “South” (which is why the UN Conference on Trade and Development is so keen on the idea), the politics of the subject are, alas, inconsistent with the economics.
The industrially developed countries have no intention of “giving” energy-efficient boilers or photovoltaic cells to developing countries, rather they want to sell them profitably at prices which may well need topping up by aid.
But why should taxpayers in Britain aid Chinese industry, for example? Thanks to GATT etc., the industrialising poor countries are already serious competitors to many northern industries and skills, able to sell or employ cheaply because of very low wages and a wide disregard for human and social rights. The electorate would not like it, and rightly so given the increase in poverty and public squalor in many Northern countries.
The politicians and the Department of the Environment 鈥� perhaps busy with more important matters than attending UNCTAD in Prague (a lovely place for poor “countries” to meet) 鈥� probably find this line of argument more convincing than environmental economics riding on a global threat predicted by models not everybody agrees as being reliable enough for policy-making.
Bad taste works
Unfortunately our PR department can’t claim to be ex-hacks from the Sun, as Feedback suggests (February 25) but thanks for the compliment. We would also like to give Feedback an extra thank you for publicising “Getting to the bottom of bowel cancer”.
When you are trying to give people knowledge that may save their lives some day and find that embarrassment and coyness are stopping the message getting across, the priority must be to find the best way of breaking the taboo. We believe humour, tasteless or otherwise, is effective.
Feedback 鈥� you have just proved how right we are. Would you have written about it if we had called it “Bowel Cancer 鈥� the facts”? Actually, there is a brochure to go with the press release and readers can get a copy by sending a large sae with 5Op in stamps to ICRF, PR Dept, Box 123, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London WC2 3PX.
By the way, your readers might like to ask for our leaflet on testicular cancer at the same time 鈥� that’s called “A whole new ball game”.
Our literature is free, but of course as a charity trying to cut deaths from cancer, we do appreciate donations.
Not the only game
We wish to comment on the recent discussion on the article by Vadim Zhytnikov and James Nester which claims to have shown that “the possibility of explaining galactic mysteries with the help of a modified gravity theory looks quite improbable” (New 杏吧原创, Science, 7 January).
In reaching this sweeping but somewhat tentative conclusion, Zhytnikov and Nester restrict themselves from the outset to a very narrow class of potential alternative theories that are linear in the nonrelativistic limit; namely, only the dependence of gravity on the distance is modified, and the gravitational field due to a collection of masses is the sum of the fields produced by the individual masses.
Such theories are perhaps easier to analyse, but, as has been amply emphasised, they are not good candidates for alternatives to dark matter because they immediately conflict with a well established property of galaxies. The Zhytnikov-Nester theories inevitably lead to the prediction that the square of the rotation velocity of spiral galaxies should be proportional to the mass, or roughly, to the luminosity.
This is clearly contradicted by the observed relation in the form known as the Tully-Fisher correlation which is consistent with mass being proportional to the fourth power of the velocity. That is why any potential alternative for dark matter cannot, right at the outset, be of the form considered by Zhytnikov and Nester.
Once this is understood, the Zhytnikov-Nester results are hardly relevant. Alternatives to dark matter such as MOND, or Weyl gravity, right or not, are not addressed at all by their arguments. Zhytnikov and Nester acknowledge in their discussion that such nonlinear theories are exempt from their objections, but they dismiss the nonlinear theories with a vague statement.
In summary, the arguments of Zhytnikov and Nester concern only a narrow range of theories that are, in any case, not interesting as alternatives to dark matter. The broad conclusion, paraphrased by you as “Dark matter is still the only game in town”, is totally without base.
Titan targeted
Re your report on the Cassini mission (This Week, 18 February). The proposal to send markers to Saturn and Titan is going forward, with help from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Please note that Carolyn Porco, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona, Tucson, is one of the three inventors of the marker idea. She is on the Cassini imaging team.
What a family
We read with interest your article on the Turbinia, the steam turbine-powered vessel designed by my forebear, Charles Parsons (“The ship that launched a thousand grids”, 5 November). I thought you might be interested to know a little of this amazing inventor’s upbringing.
The background is one of pioneering work in science and engineering at Birr Castle in the very centre of Ireland, where Parson’s grandfather started by building what now seems to be the oldest suspension bridge surviving of its type anywhere. His father built what was the most powerful telescope in the world before the 20th century, and his mother won a silver medal for the photography she started in the very year she gave birth to Charles (1854). She left behind what is almost certainly the oldest fully equipped photographic darkroom anywhere.
When Charles was a small child he was not only photographed by his mother in the tube of the Great Telescope, but also painted by his father’s first cousin, Mary Ward, the first woman to publish, again at Birr, books on microscopy. Instead of going to school in either England or Ireland, he was tutored at home by those whom his father engaged as assistant astronomers and who had to double as boys’ tutors.
By the time others would then have been going to secondary school, he was working in the castle workshops, helping to make amazing machines, like the early steam car which then so tragically killed Mary Ward in an accident with him when he was only thirteen.
This was Birr Castle in the last century, the very Irish home which produced and moulded Parsons into the inventor he became. It is also the home now being developed into Ireland’s Historic Science Centre, to show a world beyond our own shores just where someone like Parsons actually sprang from.
We would hope that as the restoration of the Great Telescope is completed next year, and that of the workshops, foundries and other elements thereafter, many of your readers may be tempted to visit this Historic Science Centre, to see not just the link between Tyneside and Birr, but the inspiration for quite a few more “British” inventions like the Turbinia.
Digital spaghetti
A few years ago I wrote a programme for an Amstrad PCW8512 and Prospero Fortran, in which a stick of spaghetti was represented by 20 rigid rods connected at their ends by springy joints (Letters, 18 February). The computation showed that if the spaghetti were broken by, for example, bringing the ends closer together until the bend at the centre joint exceeded some limit deemed to be the breaking point, then in the subsequent motion, one of the other joints would be subjected to a bend which also exceeded the breaking point, but in the opposite direction.
This seemed to me to account for the observation which I had made of spaghetti breaking into two, three of four pieces, with roughly equal probability, and it also accounts for the observations of Oliver and Richard Nickalls, without requiring a specially weak potential fracture site on originally concave side. I abandoned these computations when I heard in a television programme that Feynman had made the same observation. I assumed that a much more sophisticated solution to the problem was in existence.
I used the same programme to test a story which I believe I heard about fifty years ago, though I have never heard it since. Let a stick be clamped at one end in a vice. The stick is then bent by a force applied approximately normally to the free end until it is about to break at the vice, where obviously the bend is at its greatest. The free end is then released and, surprisingly, the stick breaks. I know nothing of the history of this story, but its origin may perhaps lie in medieval or earlier experiments with catapults and slingshots.
The programme showed that the process of straightening the stick when the force is removed increases the bend at the clamped joint, and so causes it to break.
Oliver and Richard Nickalls seem to me to have solved “Feynman’s Spaghetti Problem” rather well. -I mentioned this to a colleague at work, Lloyd Joachim, who mentioned a “parlour trick” that has some very slight relevance:
Cut two holes in a length of paper near the ends. Try to pull the paper apart with a finger from each hand at either end, and tear the paper at both ends by doing so. This is impossible or at least extremely unlikely.
Thus “what is possible with spaghetti in two dimensions (or more) is impossible with paper in one dimension.”
Lunar rainbow
At approximately 5.10 am on Wednesday, 15 February, while delivering milk (I’m a milkman) in the village of Drayton, near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, I saw very briefly a rainbow by moonlight. I have been delivering milk since 1967 and I have never seen this before. There was a clear night sky, with short heavy showers from black clouds travelling quickly across the sky from west to east, and a big bright full moon.
At 5.15 am the moon was near to setting in the west. Approximately 25掳 above the horizon, I would guess. The western half of the sky was clear. The eastern half of the sky was dark with heavy rain and black clouds. My attention was caught by a lightening of the sky in the shape of a door with an arc top as if I was looking into a dimly lit room through an open door in the sky. Then a rainbow appeared along the full length of the arc. Then, within the space of approximately a minute, the rainbow began disappearing from left to right and then the sky went completely black again. (The rainbow was in the eastern half of course).
One of our milkmen working in Didcot, also saw this, but being a very complacent chap it was to him “Just a rainbow”. Our local village newsagent also saw some of the shapes.
This experience had a strange effect on me, in that it made me feel extremely happy (exhilarated) for the rest of the day.
Odour of worms
It used to be common knowledge that a puppy with “garlic breath” needs a good worming (Feedback, 18 February). Can this really have escaped the attention of today’s veterinarians, or is this a case of theoretical training obscuring practical experience? Or is it simply not true?
This reminds me that many human diseases also have characteristic odours, and it is surprising that the nasal talents of dogs have not yet been recruited to detect them, particularly in poorer countries. Far cheaper than a “CAT” scanner.
Charity needed
“Christians make better lovers” (Feedback, 4 February and Letters, 4 March).
Could I get them to make one for me?
Letteres to the Editor
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Boo for zoos
The biggest word in Colin Tudge’s article on The Zoo Inquiry is “if” (Forum, 28 January). He says that according to Ulysses Seal (Chairman of the Captive Breeding Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union) “鈥� if all the zoos in the world pooled their resources they could provide convincing breeding programmes for only about 2000 species 鈥� and 800 is probably more realistic”.
He is then honest enough to admit that this is a ridiculously small proportion of Terry Erwin’s (Smithsonian Institute) estimated 15 million endangered species, but by doing so he probably depreciates his own argument. If the world’s zoos could actually save just 800 species, and their habitats, many current zoo critics would be less aggressive about these institutions. But the supposition that the world’s zoos are going to realise this potential fails on two counts: the complexities of ex-situ breeding programmes (and subsequent reintroduction) and the poor standards of the majority of the world’s zoos.
Tudge must be aware of the recent publication Reintroduction of Captive-born Animals (Chapman & Hall, 1994), in which the authors conclude that of the programmes that they examined “only 16 (11 per cent) of the 145 reintroduction projects [as defined in their paper] were successful”. The Zoo Inquiry made an honest examination of the problems associated with these programmes, including pointing out the inherent dangers of introducing disease into wild populations and the high costs in terms of animal mortalities 鈥� as well as money. This is why the zoo community has reacted with such hostility to The Zoo Inquiry because, stripped of the veneer of the conservationist image, the majority have to own up to the fact that they are simply exhibitors of wild animals.
If the world zoo community is to play a leading role in ex-situ conservation programmes, where are the quality collections that have the scientific staff, the technical expertise, and the quality accommodation to make this hypothesis a reality?
My job is primarily to try to alleviate zoo animal suffering around the world and in the course of my travels I find very few collections that are praiseworthy. Of course things are horrendously bad in Eastern Europe and Africa, but I see little that is vastly better (save in presentation) in most of the zoos in Western Europe and America. Most started as menageries and most, despite some cosmetics, remain menageries.
If all zoological collections were of the quality of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust there doubtless wouldn’t be a debate about the validity of zoos going on, but they are not. Indeed as the late and greatly lamented Gerald Durrell said only last year: “The good zoos of the world can be counted on the fingers of one thumb”.
Limits of mysticism
Your correspondent A. Jago protests that science is inadequate because it cannot tell us why there is order in the Universe and it does not tell us how we should live our lives. Chrissy Philp, on the other hand, loves science because it is one of two ways for seeking truth, the other being the intuitive-feeling approach of the mystic (Letters, 25 February).
Jago, like many others, confuses science with rationality, believing the two to be synonymous, when in fact science is merely one subset, one kind, of rationality, a vital one, but still only a part of the whole. As such, it does not deal with all forms of rational inquiry and pursuits, such as how we should live. That is not its job.
It does, however, deal with “why” questions as well as many other “how” ones, but because it is rational and because “why” questions are often complex it deals with them carefully and rather slowly, seeking great amounts of information before attempting even tentative and appropriate answers. This tends to annoy many people, those who want quick ready answers to all their questions, and what’s more, want those answers to meet with their approval, cheer them up, calm their anxieties and boost their morale. But that isn’t science’s job either. That is religion’s job, mysticism’s job, intuitive-feeling’s job.
Why, the ancient Germans asked themselves, is there the world? Because, they answered themselves, Wotan had drunk a large amount of beer and urgently needed some place on which to relieve himself, so he created the world as a sort of primal chamber pot. The mysticism involved did not commend itself to the Judaeo-Christians so they worked out something with a bit more poetry in it, forgetting that “Malt does more than Milton can/To justify God’s ways to man”.
So much for mystic truths, of the intuitive-feeling kind.
It is not science’s job to supply answers to all our questions about why we are here and what are we to do about it. It is science’s job to make sense, as much as it can with the information it has. It is science’s job to seek the truth as honestly as it is able, not to proclaim that it has found it. That is religion’s job, mysticism’s job, fear and terror’s job.
We are all afraid of the dark. But that is no reason to surrender to it. And then lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that the surrender was really a great and glorious victory of the heart.
The medieval idea that because you don’t allow your judgement to be clouded by mysticism you are in danger of losing your heart is a non sequitur. On the contrary, once you cease to let reason be your guide and give reign to mystic, intuitive impulses, anything goes. My sense of wonder at me, the product of an anthropically determined human race, is severely curtailed when I recall just a few of the mystically inspired activities of that race-the mutilating clitoridectomy of women, the David Koresh affair, burning at the stake, suttee, religious wars enough to fill a book鈥�
By contrast, my nonbelieving friends take the view that, living in a bleak, hostile, inscrutable universe, it befits us to discipline ourselves to facing up to the fact. Which means that the only thing we really have is each other and the rest of the living world. Reason enough, surely, for mutual love and respect.
And A. Jago has simply not done his homework when he asserts that no mechanism exists by which non-mystic science can address such things as what science is and how we should use it. The philosophical, ethical and human implications of a nonmystic outlook are debated endlessly by the members of the British Humanist Association and the Rationalist Press Association, who include people like Sir Hermann Bondi, Fred Hoyle, Francis Crick, J. Z. Young, Richard Dawkins, Colin Blakemore, Lewis Wolpert, Peter Atkins and many other eminent scientists. They are joined by equally eminent philosophers (such as Karl Popper until his recent decease), legalists and authors.