ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

Letters : Hitler's oil

London

While I agree with Richard Courtney about the importance of synthetic
fuel to Nazi Germany during the Second World War, I do not share his certainty
that the bomb that destroyed his parents’ home, like the one that fell on my
home, was carried by a bomber driven ultimately by coal (Letters, 23 March, p 64
and 6 April, p 52). The Reich had access to natural oil through stockpiling and
war booty early in the conflict, when Britain suffered its heaviest bombing, and
later exploited the Ploesti fields in Romania.

Nor do I accept Courtney’s claim that the bombing of the Ruhr was intended
primarily to disrupt the manufacture of synthetic fuel. This industrial
heartland and arsenal of the Reich provided a variety of vital targets in
addition to oil installations, and Krupps of Essen was heavily bombed during the
first “Battle of the Ruhr”, waged from March to June 1943.

Although a plan to concentrate on oil plants in the Ruhr was agreed between
Britain and France in March 1940, this “oil plan” was not fully implemented by
the Royal Air Force until late 1944, mainly because of Bomber Harris’s
implacable opposition to it. The US Air Force, under Carl Spaatz, made oil
plants throughout Germany and beyond—Ploesti being a notable
example— priority targets.

Courtney’s attempt to attribute the defeat of the Wehrmacht in Russia to a
need to capture the oilfields of the Caucasus results in a ridiculous
telescoping of two years of bloody, confused fighting, which included the battle
of Stalingrad. But Courtney’s travesty has a germ of truth: Hitler did say that
without the Caucasus oilfields he could not win the war.

Letters : Toe tapping

Llanllechid, North Wales

I have just seen Stephen Browning’s defence of Morse code, citing its
usefulness in amateur radio communication (Letters, 9 March, p 53). Radio was
also my reason for learning it but its simplicity can make it useful in other
circumstances. When I found myself in intensive care wearing an oxygen mask that
prevented me speaking, I was able to send and receive to my wife, a former Girl
Guide, through movement of my toes, and that in spite of deep sedation.

Having had a little experience with stroke patients, I have often thought
that they would be able to communicate much more effectively if only they had
learnt Morse. I suggest there are many circumstances which might arise, in
mountains for instance, where Morse signalling might be effective, especially if
everyone around had learnt it. I suggest that, far from deserving its obituary,
Morse should find a place in every school curriculum.

Letters : Old images

Königswinter, Germany

How did it happen that NASA—and the media around the world,
including New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ (This Week, 16 March, p 5)—hailed recent
Hubble images of the planet Pluto as the first ever to show surface detail? As
early as the 1 November 1994 edition of the Astrophysical Journal,
post-repair Hubble images of Pluto have been in print which show about as much
surface detail as the raw images presented this year. Granted, the prestigious
astrophysics journal is not read much in the planetary community, but how these
images could have been “overlooked” is a mystery.

Letters : Scottish wine

Barry, Glamorgan

Thistle Diary is concerning about the disappearance of sea ice in the
Greenland Sea, probably due to global warming (23 March, p 62). It is feared
that this may lead to cooling of the climate in Europe.

The last time Greenland warmed up, Viking farmers settled there. But Europe
didn’t cool down: it warmed up too. In Norman times, there were vineyards in
Scotland.

After 700 years, the Greenland climate cooled and the Vikings left. At the
same time Europe experienced what has been called “The Little Ice Age”. The
River Thames used to freeze over in winter.

If Greenland is now warming up again, why should Europe not do the same, as
it did 1200 years ago?

Letters : Garden hash

Wetzikon, Switzerland

A quick and highly unrepresentative survey of friends has confirmed my
impression that # is almost invariably referred to as gartenhag,
“garden fence” in this part of Europe, though my opinion is that “garden gate”
would be more appropriate (Letters, 30 March, p 54 and 2 March, p 50).

The @ symbol which no e-mailer could possibly do without, delights in the
name of affenschwanz—monkey tail.

Letters : Grounded

Wirral, Merseyside

Jonathan Dordick seems to have come up with an excellent innovation with
his superabsorbent nappies (Technology, 30 March, p 21). My son is at the
climbing stage, and weighing him down with more than a kilogram of urine-soaked
nappy could be just the trick to keep him at ground level.

Letters : Cyber abuse

Recent articles on Internet censorship have argued against attempts to
control content mainly on the basis of the impracticalities of available
technical mechanisms (Off with its head, 16 March, p 44 and Forum, 6 April, p
48). The conclusion drawn is that censorship will work to the detriment of
legitimate activities such as research and commerce. However, both articles are
written from the viewpoint of responsible, male (and probably white)
users.

My perspective is different. I have to deal with the victims of cyber abuse.
Occasionally, this takes the form of complaints from female students who have
been exposed to pornography displayed on screens in public computer rooms. This
is rightly construed as a form of sexual harassment.

More frequently, staff and students have been the recipients of unwanted
e-mail, usually merely irritating in content but sometimes in the form of
vicious and personally targeted racial or sexual abuse. This kind of e-mail is
always disguised, either by being sent via anonymous remailers, or by using the
mail facility in recent versions of Netscape, or by telneting via the SMTP port
of distant hosts. Our auditing facilities show that abusive e-mail usually
originates from outside our own institution.

This abuse is a new psychopathology—”cyberstalking” —and its
victims are understandably traumatised by it.

I do not believe that my institution is worse off than any other in these
matters. I despair of the focus on pornography, as usually this is something
that an Internet user has to seek out actively. E-mail arrives whether you want
it or not, and few users realise they are “at risk”.

I have no solutions but am seriously considering amending our registration
forms to a include a “health warning”.

Letters : The 2000 crash

Limerick, Ireland

I must take issue with your attitude to the year 2000 problem in computer
software (Feedback 6 April and 13 January). The century date change is a real
problem and it will affect many organisations that rely on their computer
systems.

There are some problems with old hardware, as reported in your column, which
include the BIOS of many existing PCs. However, the major problem lies in
software, especially the legacy applications on which most large organisations
in the developed world rely.

The cause of this software problem is the widespread use of two-digit years.
The cure is to find every occurrence of this throughout these systems and
replace it either with a four-digit year or some code that can reliably infer
the correct century.

You dismiss the problem with the remark “old mainframes may need
reprogramming”. In fact this will be no small matter. It is not unusual for a
large organisation to have 20 000 to 30 000 programs of an average of 1500 lines
each—amounting to tens of thousands of lines of code, each of which must
be analysed to see if a two-digit year is being used. The necessary changes must
be introduced into the programs, and if necessary the stored data too. Finally,
the converted programs must be tested. Many sites are running to capacity and do
not have the spare resources needed to make the changes, let alone the equally
important task of testing.

We have analysed sample code from 15 different organisations, including
international banks, airlines, pharmaceuticals companies and local government,
and can categorically state that all 15 will fail due to year 2000 problems.
These represent about 10 per cent of the companies that we have had contact
with. The other 90 per cent are either representative of the “ostriches” or have
only just realised the enormity of their problems.

Every large organisation in the developed world faces this huge conversion or
redevelopment task at the same time and against a fixed deadline. I leave you to
consider the effects of several large organisations simultaneously being unable
to trade in the first months of the year 2000. This is a matter that needs to be
taken extremely seriously. Don’t fiddle with your VCR while more than Rome
burns.

Letters : Multiple benefits

It was no surprise to read that mycorrhizal symbiosis brings with it more
than one benefit to the plant (New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, Science, 16 March, p 20).
There is no rule against this. Any adaptation must make sense within the whole
picture.

Unlike a laboratory experiment, life is made up of multiple challenges, none
of which wait in turn. A successful adaptation is likely to be multifunctional.
The difficulty is to discover which of these functions is the most
important.

Just because mycorrhizas occur in soil rich in phosphate, does not mean that
their primary function cannot be related to phosphate acquisition. Over
evolutionary time, this symbiotic system will have evolved in such a way that
the fungus can enter the plant. Thus obtained, the door key may now be used to
allow entrance even when the service is not needed—every double glazing
sales person’s dream.

Furthermore, members of one of the relatively few plant families that do not
form mycorrhizal associations, or that do so weakly, the Proteaceae, employ
another means of improving phosphate acquisition: they possess cluster roots.
Now there is no indication that these are recent adaptations (the Proteaceae are
generally regarded as rather early angiosperms), nor that they provide
protection against pathogenic fungi.

It would seem much simpler to conclude that nutrient acquisition is the name
of the game for mycorrhizas and cluster roots, while other benefits are useful
additions.

Letters : …

Belfast

I was very surprised to see the letter from Martin Gregorie about his
experiments on the ability of computers to cope with the next millennium
(Letters, 23 March, p 63). He appears to have taken the same tack as Feedback,
and made the same logical error.

Certainly one can change the date easily, as he did, and most modern
computers will cope with the year 2000. But now try the following: set the clock
to 23.59 on 31 December 1999, wait a minute and see what happens.

You will invariably find the date has reset to 1 January 1980. Now you can
see where the problem will lie as computer clocks, all over the world reset on
the stroke of midnight. Of course it should be easy for someone to work up a
patch to reset the clock back for a pause of n seconds and then reset
it forward by the same interval to hop over midnight, but no one has done it
yet, and think of how many platforms it will have to work on.

The other point this raises is why the date resets to 1980, at least on
PCs—I haven’t tried it on other machines. Would any computer historians
among New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´’s readership know this?

Anyway have fun trying this, as I’m sure I’ll not be the only one pointing it
out.

Letters : Fast track

Sheffield

I wish to point out erroneous information about the capacities of
conventional trains (“Star Wars express”, 6 April, p 32).

First, the author says: “At speeds of around 300 kilometres per hour . . .
`The wheels literally spin out from under you’ ” and “a train pushes a huge
cushion of air in front it and this effectively limits its top speed to around
320 kilometres per hour. The only way to reach speeds approaching 500 kilometres
per hour is to build elevated tracks . . . that allow the air to pass under the
train.”

Well, I am afraid that France’s TGV-Atlantique 325 reached a speed of 515.3
km/h in trials in May 1990, and this without using elevated tracks. Nor can the
possibility of collisions with animals be a justification for elevated tracks.
Existing fast tracks are fenced, ruling out this possibility.

In any case, if Seraphim is to reach such speeds it is unlikely to do so on
existing tracks because they usually curve too sharply in places. Furthermore,
the joints between rails of old tracks are very inconvenient, at least for the
passenger. It would be better to replace these with the welded, bumpless track,
as has been done on some British lines.