On the dot
I read with interest Michael Pinder’s “Time for a change” (Forum, 10 February, p 45). I was taken aback when I read there this sentence: “And does it have to be 12 am just because the Sun is overhead”?
No, it does not have to be am, it has to be pm.
Dwindling fast
“Free-for-all” exploitation of biological resources usually upsets ecologists, unless the resources are abundant. It is therefore surprising that Fred Pearce suggests that “free-for-all” grazing is the most sustainable way of utilising the native vegetation in Jordan’s Badia region (“Shepherds & wise men” 23/30 December 1995, p 24).
Most observers familiar with the Badia believe its vegetation is dwindling. It is not mostly “covered by grass” as Pearce states. Although the downward trend has not been monitored precisely, a study for the International Fund for Agricultural Development in 1993 concluded that the overall annual offtake of forage from Jordan’s rangelands had decreased by more than 50 per cent over the previous 15 years, in spite of the large increase in livestock numbers.
Cruel world
I note with interest that Tam Dalyell (Thistle Diary, 16 December 1995) was informed by junior home office minister Tim Kirkhope that tail docking was effectively barred by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons.
Your article “Off with their tails” (Focus, 30 September 1995, p 16) makes it plain that this is not the case. The widely held view of veterinary surgeons is now that the college’s stance against tail docking is unenforceable. The evidence is easy to see. A great proportion of young Rottweilers, Old English sheepdogs, Doberman pinschers and terriers can currently be seen to have had their tails docked.
If the government wants to see a genuine end to cosmetic tail-docking it must pass new legislation that is enforceable.
I must take exception to the sentence in your article (Science, 20 January, p 15), which states a researcher “studied adult monkeys which had lost a hand”. How careless of them!
The use of euphemism to gloss over the fact that these monkeys have had their hands (and perhaps other body parts) surgically amputated to facilitate the experiments can only depreciate the contribution that all laboratory animals make for the advancement of medical knowledge.
While efforts would be made to minimise the pain these animals suffer during experimental procedures, it can never be removed entirely and they will pay for our increased knowledge, ultimately, with their lives.
Please afford them a little dignity by not downplaying their situation to your readers.
I am writing to express my disgust at the experiments on mice carried out by Alan Steinberg and colleagues (“Shocking memories turn mice into stressed out survivors”, This Week, 10 February, p 7).
Administering a “severe electric shock lasting 10 seconds” amounts to nothing less than torture. Steinberg apparently seeks to justify his experiments by positing possible future research benefits for the study of post-traumatic stress disorder. However, such benefits are vague, distant and uncertain, whereas the suffering of large numbers of mice is absolutely guaranteed.
Any reasonable person would be aghast if such experimentation was conducted on humans, given the nebulous benefits; similar experiments in the US involving infliction of severe and unavoidable electric shocks on nonhuman primates have been greeted with public outrage.
The response to Steinberg’s experiments by all compassionate and reflective people, scientists and their fellow citizens alike, should similarly be one of disgust. Steinberg’s subjects may be mere mice, but the infliction of agony and misery is morally reprehensible regardless of the species concerned.
Dating cavemen
The earliest dated human occupation of a cave is considerably older than 47 600 years (In Brief, 27 January, p 11). The list is long, beginning with the site of Swartkrans, South Africa at 1.5 to 1 million years ago, extending through the middle and later Pleistocene in Africa, Europe and Asia.
In Britain, the occupation of Pontnewyyd cave took place about 225 000 years ago and the cave of Arago, southern France, was occupied 400 000 years ago. Even earlier dates for European cave occupation have been reported from Gran Dolina, Atapuerca, southern Spain.
These examples suggest that the “15 000 years older than all other traces of humans in caves that have been dated” referred to the earliest radiocarbon date for a cave and not the category of all dated sites.
Fly flamb茅
J. R. Catlin, who suffered a plague of flies, asked for a use for the pickled ones left over from his brandy and orange experiments (Letters, 6 January, p 45). Flies pickled in this way should be served as a main course, flamb茅ed with button mushrooms (avoiding the amanita type). I propose that we call this dish “fly button 脿 l’orange”.
A cure for the plague of flies might be a plague of frogs, which could provide a tasty starter before the brandy-soaked flies. Could anybody suggest a use for legless frogs?
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Questionable sums
The people in Pevensey Levels in East Sussex are right to get annoyed that their answers to the question of how much they would be willing to pay to conserve the Levels are being used in a cost-benefit analysis. The object of this is to see if the money actually being spent is worth it (This Week, 3 February, p 6).
If I am asked, “What would you be willing to pay to save the life of your daughter?” I will answer, “All that I have plus anything that I can lay my hands on.” This may, or may not, be enough.
If, on the other hand, I am asked, “What would you be willing to accept to see her killed?” I will answer, “An infinite amount.” In this case, my reply effectively (and quite rightly) gives me a veto.
Cost-benefit analysis predicated on willingness-to-pay (or contingent valuation) has no rational, scientific, or moral basis. Any recommendations or conclusions based upon it are fundamentally and irredeemably flawed and should be rejected.
They are the precise equivalent of saying that, in a democracy, individual voters should each be given a number of votes that is proportional to their wealth.
However, cost-benefit analysis predicated on willingness-to-accept is perfectly fair and reasonable. Unfortunately, authorities rarely carry out willingness-to-accept cost-benefit analyses because these are the ones that actually give ordinary people some control over what happens in their lives.
Random thoughts
Andreas Frew implies that a system of giving out research grants at random is a silly idea (Forum, Washington Diary, 27 January, p 50). I feel that random decision-making deserves a serious analysis and should not be dismissed in so cavalier a fashion.
The world is one of imperfect information, so while rational argument may reduce the possible courses of action, it rarely leads to a unique decision. We then have to invoke phrases such as “expensive” or “judgment” to resolve the problem.
Let me try to illustrate this. Some years ago, I asked my head of department for a decision. Some time passed so I went to ask what his decision was. He explained that he had difficulty in deciding because he did not have enough information. When pressed further, he admitted that he would never have enough information, so he made a decision, anyway.
The second example concerns research studentships in mathematics. There are certain topics in mathematics which are not studied much in Britain. Given a particular topic, there are two choices: one is to give it priority and try to revive the topic, the other is to ignore it and let it fade away. Both policies can be argued quite persuasively, but what criteria would be needed in order to make a rational decision and how could these criteria be evaluated?
Much of the modern craze for collecting data is to avoid having to admit that we are just using our judgment. We invent criteria which can be calculated in order to pretend that decisions are rationally based. Since the data are often meaningless, the process is equally meaningless.
Clever bird
I was very interested in “Stone me, those crows make tools”, (Science, 20 January, p 16). Crows 鈥� Corvus orru 鈥� in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens on the eastern slopes of Mount Coot-tha, have made another interesting adaption to their environment.
The ubiquitous toad (introduced to Australia from South America to clean up the sugarcane beetle) are in plague proportions in the botanic gardens and over the last couple of years staff have noticed an alarming increase in the number of crows also frequenting the gardens.
Crows have learnt to flip the toads onto their backs and to eat them by feeding through the upturned toad’s open mouth. Such a hearty meal is obtained despite the fact that the toads have a poisoned sac on each side of their head that when punctured has been known to kill domestic dogs and even snakes. “Jim Crow” is clever enough to acknowledge these poison sacs and only pecks between them into the toad’s stomach for its feed.
Yes, crows are amazingly adaptive to changed environmental conditions, with the added attraction for them in the botanic gardens of food scraps from unattended litter bins.
Kindness begins 鈥�
With regard to “Injured hedgehogs killed by human kindness” (This Week, 3 February, p 10), if you actually read the paper printed in The Veterinary Record it becomes fairly obvious that the hedgehogs mentioned were not killed by human kindness but by being released in a sub-optimal condition. The only hedgehog with severe dental problems at release was, I feel, unlikely to have been a juvenile as stated, but an adult whose dental condition had been worsening for some considerable time.
Each year thousands of hedgehogs are cared for at independent rehabilitation centres and all of them should receive complete medical and dental clearance before being released. Over the years an accepted protocol of treatment has been evolved which seems to have been ignored by the authors of The Veterinary Record paper. In your report Tony Sainsbury is quoted on the care and rehabilitation of hedgehogs, based presumably on his experience with the 12 hedgehogs which were used. Hardly a sound basis for scientific pronouncement is it?
We have all spent many years perfecting the rehabilitation of hedgehogs and understandably feel aggrieved that a few scientists should make hay with the fate of 12 of them. Our post-release monitoring in gardens, rather than badger-ridden Devon farms, shows that rehabilitated hedgehogs do indeed prosper after release 鈥� provided, of course, that they are fit when let loose.
To ascribe the care that hedgehogs received while at the RSPCA’s wildlife hospital as the cause for their mortality is absurd. All but one were killed by cars and badgers. In the two months I spent following these particular animals, and during other studies on hedgehogs, I have found that their propensity for being run over or eaten by badgers has little to do with where they spent the winter.
The article states that “only one third of them were still alive” after the period of monitoring. Perhaps the point of the study has been missed. Every autumn and early winter, thousands of underweight hedgehogs around the country are picked up by well meaning people. It is a fact that if a hedgehog weighs less than 450 grammes it will not survive hibernation. The following spring the hedgehogs are released into the wild, frequently far from where they were found.
The study that I undertook with Pat Morris of Royal Holloway College, London, was to find out how well these animals coped after their period in care. Many of the study animals were in appalling shape when they were first taken in. All of them would have died during the winter. I radio-tracked them to find out if they behaved like “normal” hedgehogs. This they did admirably, feeding, nesting and courting, and dying just like hedgehogs do. This work has been followed up by a study on Jersey. Here the hedgehogs all survived after “suffering” a winter of human kindness.
Far from a negative result, this study proved that the work put in by thousands of people around the country in caring for hedgehogs is not a waste of time. And regarding the “sore” gums (who asked the hedgehogs?), most wild hedgehogs develop tartar on their teeth anyway.
Sweeping statement
As the author of Thread of the Silkworm (a biography of the founder of the Chinese missile programme), I was appalled to read the following statement in the brief review of my book (6 January, p 37): “Unfortunately, the book has a fatal flaw: since his expulsion, Tsien has consistently refused interviews with Western journalists. He made no exception for Chang who wrote the biography without his help.”
One can only assume, then, that under this reviewer’s criteria, every unauthorised biography is fatally flawed, as well as biographies written by authors who have never met their subjects because those subjects were dead long before the projects began.
Every attempt was made on my part to interview Dr. Tsien. When no interview was forthcoming, I did the next best thing: I interviewed those people who knew him best 鈥� former colleagues, students, classmates, even Tsien’s own son. In the end, I conducted hundreds of hours of interviews on two continents and amassed thousands of pages of primary source material unearthed from private collections and from government, academic and corporate archives all over the United States.
The statement in your review serves little purpose other than to discourage authors from daring to probe into the lives of controversial, powerful individuals.
Far spreading
Your report on the recent Geneva Conference on the Health Consequences of the Chernobyl and Other Nuclear Accidents (2 December, p 4) gives a good overview of the state of the discussion. A correction is however necessary concerning the nature of the geographic spread of this epidemic. I did not say that thyroid cancer cases are concentrated in an area more than 200 kilometres north of the accident site, or that rain may have deposited the heaviest iodine contamination there.
What I really said was that in Belarus, the childhood thyroid cancer incidence rates are highest in the areas closest to Chernobyl, and diminish with increasing distance. Clearly increased rates reach to the West as far as Pinsk district, which is more than 270 kilometres from the reactor.
What a hash
I am afraid that James Follett is incorrect then he states that, “The entire English-speaking world refers to the # symbol as a hash” (Letters, 3 February, p 57). Having just returned from two years spent working in Massachusetts I can inform him that in the States # is referred to as “the pound sign” and is used as an abbreviation for lbs (pounds weight). It is also used as an abbreviation for number, equivalent to no. (#3 = no.3).
A “hash sign”, I assume, would mean a signal to a suitable vendor that you wished to pursue an interest in exotic herbs 鈥�
Is it really true that “the entire English-speaking world refers to the # symbol as a hash”? I was puzzled by automated US-based fax inquiry systems urging me to “now press the pound key”. Of course they meant the #, which I believe is correctly called the octothorn. I suppose the “hash” designation is a corruption of “hatching” which it resembles. Confusion like this can only occur in the “communication” industries. What is the chance of convincing people to call the “/” in Internet addresses by one of its proper names, the virgule or solidus?
Phone quirks
Being somewhat pedantic, I object to the use of the letter “O” for the numeral “0”, when expressing telephone numbers; this is also, astonishingly, programmed into the BT computerised directory inquiry system. Also, the expression of a number using two-digit combinations has always seemed much less prone to misinterpretation 鈥� “four, eight, six, double-three, five” or “forty-eight, sixty-three, thirty-five”. Is there any experimental evidence in this area?
Coal fired
Andy Macqueen makes some sound points on natural gas consumption (Letters, 3 February, p 56). But I take exception to his question: “Can you imagine a car or plane powered by coal?” The answer is yes.
In my novel A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! there is a coalfired flying ship. When John W. Campbell serialised this in Analog in the early 60s he did not think it would work (he was a physicist as well as an editor).
When I explained that the coal was very finely pulverised and burnt in a turbine, he let it stand. Though he did mutter “It would be hell on the blades.”
Greener than green
In his admittedly self-indulgent article, “Going for green in France”, (Forum, 6 January, p 41), Ian Fells mentioned the cutting down of 200-year-old oaks to make way for more Eurowheat at Ch芒teau des Fours.
As owners of this venerable relic, we hasten to put right what is obviously an editorial error: it was not we who cut down the oaks but the local farmer -much to our disgust. We remain greener than green, hence the low-energy light bulbs and sitting in the dark 鈥�
Patently useful
Feedback (10 February, p 76) congratulated the US Patent Office on making 20 years of patents available on the Internet-and congratulations are certainly due. But while we at the British Library are grateful for the recognition given in the column to our “helpful staff” we would like to rebut the statement that they “waste most of their working days patiently teaching an endless succession of new users to jump through quite unnecessary hoops”. The very fact that there is an endless succession of new users demonstrates that we are fulfilling a vital role in providing a much-needed patent information service.
The majority of new users need help to navigate through the patent literature, require more than access to just US patents and do not have easy access to the Internet. We provide for all of these needs.
There is a difference between finding references to a few US patents on spittoons, which might be simply accomplished on the Internet, and finding out whether your new idea for a dental spittoon with water supply has been revealed anywhere in the published literature. The latter might require other search techniques, perhaps carried out in the library. The hoops through which an inventor has to jump are a necessary part of the patent law, which requires absolute novelty. The CD-ROM searching is not inherently difficult and we have not found the CD-ROM software especially hostile, nor have our users.
Of course, if the Internet proves a valuable and reliable method of searching for patents then we would like to provide access to it as an additional resource for the users in our reading rooms 鈥� if the funds are available to so do.