Passenger pigeons
In my experience, the sight of pigeons hitching a lift on the underground is nothing unusual (Letters, 2 September). I too have often travelled from Paddington, westwards in my case 鈥� not infrequently in the company of a pigeon, sometimes even two.
It raises fascinating questions. Do they just fly across the line and get the next train back? How many round trips a day do they make? Do they decide in advance how far to travel? Do they study the timetables?
Do they have a central information service that monitors the various District Line routes (I’ve never seen a pigeon on the Piccadilly, for example) for their relative values as feeding grounds 鈥� incidence of discarded crisp packets, chip bags, half-eaten sandwiches and similar delicious nourishment, so liberally spread around on our great urban transport system? I shouldn’t be in the least surprised.
I reckon there are plenty of potential PhD theses here. After all, if David Lack made the swifts that nest in the tower of the university museum here world-famous, why not the metropolitan pigeon commuters as well?
After eight years of departing from Ealing Broadway by Central or District Line, I can recall observing nonchalant pigeons travelling one stop on either line on at least three occasions. As Rachel Robson remarks in her letter, neither us passengers, nor the birds, took the slightest overt interest in each other and the pigeons always hopped off at their stop rather than winging it.
I remain hopeful that one day I will see how the training of the revenue protection teams stands up to dealing with this particular class of undesirable fare dodger.
I have seen a pigeon passenger on the Piccadilly Line’s overland stretch towards Heathrow. It travelled for two stops before getting out with other passengers. Fortunately, no ticket inspector was on board.
A pigeon, calm as you please, hopped into my Northern Line carriage at King’s Cross and stood quite calmly near the door. The tourists did the cooing, not the pigeon; they thought it was an added London attraction and tried to tempt it with crisps, but, unusually, the bird wasn’t interested. It appeared to know where it was going and as soon as the doors opened at Euston, it flew out.
The second occasion was during a Piccadilly Line journey to Heathrow three weekends ago. This time the pigeon waddled in at an overground station, Hounslow Central. A bird-phobic passenger shooed it out, whereupon it repeatedly walked back in, to be hustled out again every time. The bird appeared quite determined to make its journey and when it was shooed out for a final time, just before the doors closed, it made one final frantic swoop towards the door, rather in the manner in which some human passengers launch themselves at tube doors just before they close.
From observing the birds, I feel quite sure that travel, not food, was their purpose. Pigeons are intelligent and easily trained and I see no reason why they should not have cottoned on to the fact that travel by tube saves their wings 鈥� especially as there are so many deformed and crippled pigeons in the city.
The Victoria Line between Victoria and Pimlico has regular avian commuters and other lines have birds of humble origin now living above their station
At Bank they leave unwanted deposits and several pigeons have recently lost their seats at Westminster.
The attraction is presumably the shelter and discarded food scraps that also keep the rodents happy.
The ultimate opportunist was the pigeon that chose the maternity ward of a London hospital in which to lay its egg.
About a year ago, a pair of pigeons hopped onto the Circle Line at Aldgate, stayed by the door and alighted with purpose at the next stop, which was Tower Hill. How did they know the platform for Tower Hill was on the same side of the carriage as that for Aldgate?
During 1974-76, I regularly encountered a single pigeon of light reddish colouring boarding the underground at Paddington and disembarking at the next station. Could it be the same bird that Robson saw 鈥� perhaps now having graduated to a senior citizen’s pass? Or has the habit been passed on to the next generation. And if the latter, is there a genetic component in this?
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Costing calamity
The fundamental problem with the calculations of the value of human life by David Pearce and his colleagues (This Week, 19 August) is that they were carried out on a willingness-to-pay (WTP) basis rather than a willingness to accept (WTA) one.
The team’s choice of WTP had the advantage of making it the exclusive arbiter of the value of the damage likely to be done by global warming, enabled it to operate without reference to what the victims of warming, such as small island states faced with oblivion from a rise in the sea level, might be willing to accept as compensation.
If it had adopted WTA instead, the compensation demanded could have been so huge that the high levels of fossil-energy use on which the Western economic system is based could not continue.
But WTP has serious drawbacks too. In particular, the values it uses are based on how much money people have and, as a result, it distributes the damage likely to be caused by global warming in an absurd way, with the most costly aspects of the death and destruction seeming to occur in the wealthy countries.
If WTP calculations are done correctly, the maldistribution they produce is so extreme that almost everyone would find their use ridiculous and invalid. The figures show the OECD countries suffering five times as much damage as the rest of the world, despite having only a fifth of its population.
But Pearce and his team never reached this conclusion because a mistake crept into their work which survived peer review and was only pointed out by a non-economist attached to the Global Commons Institute (GCI). Their error was to take damage estimates expressed in terms of each country’s domestic price levels and divide them by its gross domestic product expressed in terms of the current exchange rate, in order to arrive at the proportion of its GDP that was likely to be lost as a result of warming. In other words, by using domestic purchasing power on the one hand and international purchasing power on the other, they divided apples by oranges.
This increased the damage figures for the poorer parts of the world so significantly that alarm bells did not ring and the team was not alerted to the fact that it was using the WTP approach in a confused and inappropriate way.
In his letter to New 杏吧原创 last week, Samuel Fankhauser said that the costs of the damage done by global warming and the costs of abating that damage should not be compared. We at GCI agree that they should not be compared because they are paid by different sets of people. The damage done by warming will hurt everyone and its costs are therefore truly global. The assessment of this should be based on WTA. The costs of abatement however, should fall exclusively on that minority of humankind which is causing the pollution and which is benefiting from doing so. The curtailment of this should be based on the axiom that “the polluter pays
What this means in this case is that those who cause climate change through using fossil fuel should pay adequate compensation to those who suffer the consequences. And what is adequate compensation? The best approximation has to be whatever sum is produced by WTA calculations.
In short, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group III reconvenes to discuss this issue in Montreal next month, Pearce and his colleagues should be told to revise their chapter to properly reflect the global scale and distribution of the damages. If they won’t do this, they should withdraw their chapter so another team may be assembled to prepare a replacement using the WTA approach.
Harmful hygiene
I was deeply alarmed to read of Charles Gerba and his team’s discovery of the terrible danger lurking in dishcloths (This Week, 2 September). Is there someone I could call to have mine trapped and safely removed from the kitchen before it leaps off the drainer, dripping death and destruction?
Seriously, while I appreciate the very real dangers of bacterial contamination in meat, I am more concerned by the apparent drive to sterilise our entire environment. Has anybody checked what is living in most human mouths recently? It’s not nice in there. Should we stock up on a lifetime’s antibacterial mouthwash or should we relax just a little in the knowledge that humans have evolved in an environment richly filled with other organisms, many pathogenic but held for the most part in an exquisitely honed, harmless balance?
We, our immune systems and our unique collections of microbiological hitchhikers are surely designed to be part of that balance. I for one would sooner take my chances with a reasonably often-washed dishcloth than a battery of antibacterial, antifungal, (antihuman?) chemicals. Perhaps this is why we don’t have many people to dinner at our house?
Not our problem
Your item dealing with the Brent Spar Troll was, I thought, a trifle bilious in tone (Feedback, 19 August).
To answer the point raised, since Shell is only the development operator for the Troll project, the decision on what to do with the platform at the end of the field’s life will rest with Statoil, the Norwegian state oil company, which takes control of Troll next year.
Given the rate of technological advance, even since the start of the project’s development, it would probably be importunate to second-guess, 50 years or so in advance, what solution might be arrived at. There again, your Feedback correspondent may have made a breakthrough in crystal ball technology which he/she has yet to share with the rest of us.
Nice nitrate?
In his article about cancer and nitrates (New 杏吧原创, Science, 26 August), David Bradley reveals that he is not much given to reading back numbers of the magazine. If he had looked back to 8 October 1988, he could have avoided repeating the hoary old chestnut that he dragged up when he referred to “nitrate, from drinking water contaminated with fertilisers”.
It was well established even back in 1988 that, although a small amount of the nitrate in drinking water comes from fertilisers, the bulk of it is produced as the ever-busy microbes go about their business in the soil. Not much has changed in the past seven years.
The title of the article, “Iron clue to cancer from nitrates”, was dubious too. Nitrate does not cause cancer, certainly not in the stomach as used to be widely assumed. At least two epidemiological studies tested for a link between nitrate and stomach cancer and found none. Also, workers in fertiliser factories absorb far more nitrate than comparable workers 鈥� you can taste the fertiliser as it dissolves in your saliva 鈥� but their death rate from stomach cancer was found to be almost exactly the same as that of the other workers. The most likely reason is simply that nitrate is not reduced to nitrite in the adult stomach because of the acidity.
Finally, can we please have “nitrate” in the singular and not in the plural as in that title. Nitrate becomes of interest when it dissolves in water – that is what the fuss is all about 鈥� and all salts containing nitrate dissociate in water. So, as Gertrude Stein might have said, a nitrate is a nitrate is a nitrate.
No cheap ride
Paul McKinley has fallen for the hype (Letters, 9 September). The DC-X Space Clipper is indeed a cheap and cheerful experiment, but it definitely does not offer any access to orbit, certainly not in its present form.
It has demonstrated some manoeuvrability, but little else. To quote a recent Aviation Week article about the last of the present series of test flights: “The most challenging aspects of SSTO [single stage to orbit] design were not dealt with at all in the most recent, 7 July flight. The DC-X did not demonstrate crucial thermal protection technology. Empty, it weighs five times more than would be allowed for an orbital vehicle. Structurally, the SSTO concept remains unproven.”
NASA is just starting on the hard, expensive road that might, or might not, make the concept viable. The cheap and cheerful ride to orbit is still a very long way away, both in time and gigabucks 鈥� mere megabucks won’t be enough.
Anarchy, yes
It was a good try by Jonathan Halliwell as far as it goes, but the architecture did not stop at the Pompidou Centre, Lloyd’s Building or Sydney Opera House (“Arcadia, anarchy and archetypes”, 12 August). One can hardly turn around and already another generation appears on the scene.
Take, for example, Peter Eisenmann, who designed the Wexner Centre of the Visual Arts, Ohio (1990); or Arquitectonica’s husband-and-wife firm of Bernardo Fort-Brescia and Laurinda Spear, noted for The Atlantis, Miami (1982); or Coop Himmelblau’s Skyline Tower in Hamburg (1985); or Daniel Libeskind who created City Edge, Berlin (1987).
What have they got in common? They are all representatives of deconstructivism, a most contemporary architectural style. There is no obvious symmetry in their buildings, no clarity or order. Their style is just an opposition to postmodernism. Anarchy, yes but no archetypes.
They also all seem to reflect the spirit of our times 鈥� the modern cultural scene, with its cult of the new, with its upvaluation of the transitory, the fleeting and the ephemeral.
Shuttle shocks
Your article on the space shuttle indicates that risk analysis results predict a 50 per cent probability of another shuttle loss by 2015, if shuttle usage remains constant (This Week 2 September). In reality, 51 per cent of the main engine launch risk is embodied in main engine features whose design changes were not included in the current estimate. If these and other design changes address the risk, then shuttle performance would be expected to better the current estimate.
Secondly, both the initial 1 in 78 and the 1 in 248 odds cited are median estimates of launch risk only and are therefore comparable. While the current study included total mission risk, its median estimate was 1 in 145 missions.
Finally, at the end of the article our report was misquoted; the following critical words in italics were omitted. The actual quote referred to the automated data screening process we had preferred to use for our study. This process did not prove practicable. “This was because record codes which could have more effectively screened the records were missing, incorrect or inconsistent in many cases.”
We did not find the data itself lacking. In fact, the shuttle engine data set was quite comprehensive and complete compared to other data sets SAIC has reviewed.
Fleming cheek
Perhaps I can add another, and perhaps final contribution, to the recent debate over the discovery of penicillin. I have been researching the history of the discovery and development of penicillin for some ten years now. In that time I have seen, and in some cases responded to, numerous criticisms of Fleming. Such criticisms range from the view that Fleming merely “rediscovered” penicillin to the slander that he was a slovenly, untidy and somewhat lazy scientist.
These generally unscholarly criticisms appeared to have reached their zenith in the last chapter of Gwyn MacFarlane’s biography of Fleming, which despite its obvious bias, the critics greeted with universal acclaim. However, worse was to follow when in an edition of the BBC television science programme, Horizon, Ronald Hare (a one-time colleague of Fleming) was induced to describe Fleming as a third rate scientist.
While Fleming’s reputation has been unscrupulously attacked in this way I have never yet come across any adverse criticism of Florey. I was therefore surprised to find that my comments about Florey (which I believe were measured) upset Paul Hewlett (Letters, 2 September).
The impression is often given that Florey came across penicillin out of the blue. In fact, as I pointed out in my previous letter, he was well acquainted with Fleming’s discovery from its inception.
One of the most frequently aired criticisms of Fleming is that he failed to realise the therapeutic potential of penicillin. My so-called criticism of Florey was the expression of the view that, like Fleming, he too initially failed to see what, with the knowledge of hindsight, now appears obvious.
I am a great admirer of the work of the Oxford group and would be quite happy to see a moratorium on criticism of all those involved in the discovery of penicillin. As I pointed out in my letter, the Nobel Prize Committee clearly got it right when they shared the accolades for the discovery and development of penicillin between Fleming, Florey and Chain.
Swimming in sherry
Just a minor point, but in his review of Color and Light in Nature (26 August), James Bedding quotes a reference to the River Negro in South America as being blood red in colour and infested with piranha.
May I correct this myth in case your readers are put off swimming there? In my experience, the dark, peaty water resembles sherry, like that of Loch Ness. As for piranhas, neither I nor the team I was with encountered anything more fearsome than catfish in months of diving.
The locals manning the air compressor were far more dangerous.
Points for progeny
Women fare worse than men in every culture, as measured by the UN “gender development index” (This Week, 19 August). But this may in part be due to the fact that the index awards no points for continuous intimate contact with one’s progeny for months or years after birth. This contribution is at least as important in human terms as income, literacy or school enrolment.
Staircase wit
In her piece about excavations in a Yorkshire churchyard, Georgina Ferry writes that archaeologists have produced even higher estimates of left-handedness than the most recent 13 per cent, recording 16 to 19 per cent rates in medieval skeletons (New 杏吧原创, Science, 26 August).
Castles built in this period took advantage of the dominance of right-handedness for their defence, through the design of spiral staircases. The defenders may be assumed to be the ones further up the staircase. It is easier for a right-handed person to wield a sword from above if the staircase descends counterclockwise as viewed from above. This design was therefore adopted to put the attackers at a disadvantage.
However, castles with five or more spiral staircases often have one constructed in the opposite direction. Presumably it was accepted that 20 per cent was around the break-even point, that there would be about this many left-handers defending the castle.
It is presumably at least partially due to evidence of this kind that it has long been believed that the level of left-handedness will approximate to 20 per cent once social pressures have been removed. However, I would be interested to know whether the study of a single churchyard (at Wharram Percy in Yorkshire) significantly adds to this belief.
Left-handedness is sometimes said to run in families. If there is indeed a genetic effect, does a single churchyard at a time of limited travel and intermixing represent a realistic sample?