Speechless apes
Your article about “chimp speak” and the work of Robert Provine, Kim Bard and colleagues (This Week, 20 January) touches on what is really only a side issue to the question of why the apes cannot speak.
The fundamental reason why humans can speak and other mammals cannot is because of the difference in the geometry of the throat and associated area. When humans and apes are born their larynx is relatively high in the throat, making the production of a wide range of sound difficult. The benefit is a reduced risk of choking on foreign objects. In human infants aged 6 to 8 months the larynx “drops”, enabling a much wider range of sounds, but not so in apes. “Neurological control of the flow of air” may be present but as a symptom of a much more fundamental difference.
Humane control
I accept that the decline in red squirrel populations is a cause for urgent concern (“Red or dead?”, 20 January), and that grey squirrels can have undesirable effects other than their alleged displacement of reds. However, those who propose to control grey squirrels by means of warfarin poisoning should be prepared to demonstrate to the public that no option causing less suffering is practical.
In particular, we should explore the possibility of encouraging a form of forestry planting that would allow the red squirrels to outcompete greys for access to food. The red squirrel is considerably lighter than the grey and this should allow it access to food on the ends of small branches which could not bear the weight of the heavier species.
Lifting force
C. M. Davies (Letters, 27 January) is critical of Timothy Jenson’s assertion that the lift of an aircraft’s wing is due to downwash (Letters, 6 January). If the lift generated by an aircraft’s wing is solely due to the pressure differential between its upper and lower surfaces, then the results of the following simple experiment with a stream of tapwater and the back of a spoon cannot be explained.
Set a tap running to produce a regular gentle stream of water. Hold the handle of a teaspoon between two fingers so that it is free to pivot. Position the back of the spoon next to the descending column of water and observe the result. The spoon is attracted into the descending flow of water, which is itself deflected by the curved back of the spoon. The force pulling the spoon into the flow of water is quite marked. However there is no water on the inside of the spoon to provide the required increase in pressure. It is the change in the direction of the stream of water (an acceleration) that provides the attractive force. Lift over an aircraft’s wing is similarly produced as Jenson asserts.
Graphic costs
I found the chart which appeared in the editorial “In the public eye”, (3 February) quite alarming: no scale, no description of the data.
Assuming that this was a chart of the percentage of GNP spent on research, and assuming that it covered the average over a number of years stretching over at least one business cycle, does it really tell us very much? The definition of expenditure on R&D in the private sector is partly a function of accounting conventions; the amount spent by the public sector, particularly in the US, includes military expenditure.
I would suggest that a better measure of the amount of effective research within the economy is the balance of receipts and payments from licences and patents.
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I am sympathetic to the sentiments expressed in your editorial on R&D spending. However, if you condemn the public ignorance of important statistics, you should not simultaneously employ the abuse of statistical display widely used by irresponsible or ignorant newspaper editors. The bar graph representation you offer at the centrep of the page has an invisible and unremarked offset zero about twice the height of the whole thing and not until one reads most of the article does one discover the figures that make it possible to deduce this.
Safety warning
Having just used the Heathrow to Edinburgh Shuttle I can assure Tam Dalyell (Thistle Diary, 3 February) that the cabin crew on both outward and return journeys did, as part of their safety presentation, say that laptop computers and games machines should not be used during takeoff and landing. Judging by the number of passengers talking and reading newspapers during the demonstration, it is no wonder that the message did not sink in.
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Jewish year
Ian Stewart quotes the Jewish calendar as being a good example of a lunar calendar tuned to accommodate the solar year (“A day in the life of a year”, 6 January). The history of the Jewish calendar, though, is even more bizarre and complicated. Although the intricate astronomy was well understood, the Jewish calendar has only been fixed (that is, had rules for standard length of months and leap years, etc.) since the 1st century.
Before that time, in accordance with the anthropocentric view of the Jewish universe, each lunar month was individually observed and testified about at the temple supreme court in Jerusalem. The declaration of the new month was then spread by mouth, and also by pyres from hilltop to hilltop, all the way to Babylon.
This procedure has modern repercussions. The Samarians were constantly lighting fires to try and change the calendar date to correspond with their reckoning of festival dates, so pyre lines were not relied upon. Even now in the Diaspora, Jews in Israel celebrate some festivals for two days instead of the one in recognition of the time that had been needed to clarify the date.
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I enjoyed Ian Stewart’s article on the history of the calendar. But it contained so many facts and figures that there were bound to be errors for us readers to point out. Here is my contribution.
Protestant Finland could not have hung on to the Julian calendar until 1918, since the country belonged to Sweden at the time that it adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1753. Stewart must have had Orthodox Russia on his mind. Until recently the Russians celebrated their glorious October Revolution in November, and no, this had nothing to do with vodka: in 1917 Russia was still using the old calendar.
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Following the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in Britain in 1752, and the skipping of 11 days, country superstitions attached themselves to the dislocation of festivals, with the timing violation being seen in some cases as boding evil.
In Herefordshire it influenced blackberry picking. Instead of regarding the best of the crop as only being available before Michaelmas on 29 September, the change brought the belief that the devil spits on blackberries gathered after 11 October.
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May I draw attention to a rather dubious arithmetical result in your feature on calendars. I query the accuracy of the statement that a ratio of 1461/4 multiplied by 4 would produce a total of 1491.
This sentence should have read “鈥� if the tropical year were exactly 365.25 days, a ratio of 1461/4, then 4 years would be exactly equal to 1461 days 鈥�” 鈥� Ed.
Double click
Sorry to disappoint Feedback (6 January) and Genevi猫ve Manda and Philip Stewart (Letters, 10 February), but butiner does not just apply to the Qu茅becois; neither in this case, does it mean “plunder” or “gather nectar”. Butin has (perhaps regrettably) become established as the French for a computer “button”, so butiner is simply the equivalent of “clicking” around the Web.
Below the belt
I enjoy watching boxing on television but am aware of the dangers and disturbed at the implications of encouraging youngsters to take up the sport (This Week, 20 January). If boxing could be made safe, at least in the area of brain damage (all sports have some risk of physical injury), then the very real benefits of physical fitness, discipline, camaraderie and self-esteem could dominate the debate. If boxing could go the way of the many Eastern martial arts, the problem would fade away: simply make “above the shoulders” as taboo as “below the belt”, and the sport could be safely advocated for youngsters while not taking away much of the spectacle.
Crime on camera
The publication of figures on the effectiveness or not of closed-circuit TV (This Week, 23/30 December 1995; Letters, 13 and 20 January) all assume the need to combat increasing levels of crime. Nowhere is the point made that there is a wide gulf between current perceptions of crime and its actual incidence. This trend is clearly identified in the 1995/96 British Social Attitudes report which has a chapter devoted to the fear of crime.
One of the aspects of the continual increase of surveillance systems is the corrosive effect it has on our sense of public space. The cameras only reinforce the message that we should be fearful of the person walking behind us.
Mutant snakes?
It is not clear whether Don Hostetler (Letters, 23/30 December 1995) is annoyed by my not believing in the evolution of snakes (a notion that I could never have endorsed) or by my suggestion (Forum, 11 November 1995) that the evolution of the poison system of snakes is difficult to explain as a result of a mere interaction between mutations and natural selection. I meant the latter.
In my communication I mentioned nine apparent evolutionary coincidences leading to the poison system of snakes. Even if only one of these coincidences is borne in mind 鈥� the convenient presence of cannulated fangs and a poison gland adjacent to one another 鈥� the issue of the probability of their simultaneous occurrence is scientific and legitimate.
Darwin himself complained about being misunderstood. He said: “In the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in the most conspicuous position 鈥� namely, at the close of the Introduction 鈥� the following words: ‘I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.’ This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation 鈥�” (On the Origin of Species, Mentor edition, p 112).
Road rage
According to your Editorial “The rage over roads” (6 January): “There is no shortage of alternatives to the motor vehicle. Instead of driving, we can walk, cycle, catch the bus or train 鈥� and even conduct our exchanges over the Internet.”
I live in a country town, which, like many others, has grown up around a cruciform road network. I am unable to drive for medical reasons. My wife suffers from long-term illness and has great difficulty in walking, let alone driving.
The existing public transport copes well with passengers living close to its routes. But there is no way country people, especially those over 70 like myself, can walk the distances necessary to rely on public transport for all their needs, even for shopping.
The traffic in towns like my own is not only private traffic, it also carries the HGV traffic necessary to provide us with food and our other needs, and allows the many movements of plumbers, electricians and other building tradesmen who keep our town and our homes in good order.
The increase in population and its needs inevitably results in an increase in traffic. There is no panacea of the sort you seem to be advocating. As an engineer with many years’ experience in systems and network design and management, and also as a local councillor, I can say categorically that the only solution to the traffic problems of my own town, and no doubt those of Newbury and many other country towns, is the diversion of traffic by an unqualified commitment to country town bypasses.
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Old people sometimes have their uses, they remember things which others find it convenient to forget. I have lived for most of my 76 years in the neighbourhood of Newbury. When I was at school in the early 1930s I travelled between Winchester and Newbury by train. The train started at Southampton and after Newbury went on to Oxford on a route which was mainly parallel to the A34.
It was not an economic line even then, yet we were told that it remained in operation because of its strategic importance as a link between the industrial Midlands and the port of Southampton. Eventually, however, money prevailed over strategy and the line disappeared.
Restoring this railway would cause far less environmental damage than building a bypass through country which is outstandingly beautiful and hitherto undisturbed. The cuttings and embankments, for instance, are still there. Nor would such a revived line generate more traffic, as the proposed bypass undoubtedly will.
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Unlike Colin Carritt (Letters, 3 February) I am in full agreement with your comments on the futility of building the Newbury bypass. His support for this scheme would be more credible were he more familiar with the facts. For example, the planned road goes to the west of Newbury not to the east as he supposes. He concedes that the road may “affect open countryside” but perhaps is unaware that the Government’s Landscape Advisory Committee concluded that the area affected was “an intimate and quintessentially English landscape completely unable to absorb the impact of a major highway”.
From his description of elderly people waiting to cross the A34 in Newbury one might conclude that this road passed through the town centre; in fact the section to be bypassed is itself a relief road built in the 1960s that passes to the east of the main shopping area.
The tragedy of this scheme is that, despite the enormity of the destruction, relief from congestion will be partial and will last for 7 to 10 years at most.
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I am a Newbury resident and was delighted to read your well-balanced article on the Newbury bypass. So to read Colin Carritt’s letter made me feel almost desperate. Claims have been made that 20 00 local residents have pledged their support to the bypass. That represents less than a quarter of the total population of Newbury, so what about the opinions of the other three quarters?
Most Newbury residents don’t believe it will make a ha’penny bit of difference to the traffic situation in Newbury, especially if the infilling between the western route and Newbury (up to 10 000 new houses) goes ahead as planned.
The residents of the new houses will increase the population by 25 per cent, increase traffic congestion, and increase the already intolerable stresses on an already inadequate infrastructure.
Only 5 per cent of the traffic in Newbury is long-distance through traffic 鈥� the people the new route will benefit. Some 80 per cent of the traffic is local and will be completely unaffected by the western bypass.
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I see that New 杏吧原创, like many people, seems to be suffering from motorcycle blindness. Nowhere in your article are they referred to. Why?
If you are on a motorcycle, traffic jams happen only to those unfortunates stuck in their tin boxes. Motorcycles spend very little time idling, so are less polluting. While car drivers are stuck in the traffic, we are relaxing on the beach.
I could go on but this is all very irritating to non-bikers, who seem to see us as outlaw types who are likely to bite the head off a kitten at the drop of an axe 鈥� sorry, I mean hat.
Language centres
In “Why English is hard on the brain” (New 杏吧原创, Science, 20 January), Taeko Wydell and Brian Butterworth express amazement about a patient, “AS”, being able to read Japanese fluently, but having trouble reading English. They are quoted as saying, “If there is a specific brain area for reading and a person has impairment in this area, in theory all his languages should be affected”. Yet it has been known for more than twenty years that different scripts are read in different areas of the brain.
Sequential scripts are best handled in the left hemisphere, while the right is best at recognising whole words. Medical science has long known that, say, a Chinese accident victim with damage to the left hemisphere may still be able to read and write whereas a European accident victim with damage in the same area of the brain may not 鈥� and vice versa with the other hemisphere. Stroke victims who can no longer read English are helped by being retrained to use whole word strategies 鈥� that is, they use their right hemispheres to read if their left hemispheres are damaged.
Wydell and Butterworth also imply that the case of AS poses the first challenge to “conventional” theories about dyslexia. In 1987 Vellutino published his work disputing the “faulty visual processing” explanation for dyslexia. He showed dyslexic children were as able as “normal” readers at learning to write the characters of an unknown script. Hebrew was used for this study.
Some dyslexics may have visual impairment, but for most the problem is one of trying to read a sequential script such as English in the right hemisphere of the brain which is poor at sequential processing. Since reading is a visual skill, most children start reading English with the right hemisphere, and after about a year switch to the left. Those who do not make the switch are labelled as dyslexic.
English is not “hard on the brain”, it’s easy on the imagination! The right hemisphere is the creative area of the brain. When we read English fluently, we read with the left hemisphere and leave our right hemisphere totally free to imagine and create. Perhaps this is why the Japanese are so worried about the lack of creativity among their graduates.