Letters : . . .
South Fremantle, Western Australia
I have confirmed that my Toshiba T2130CS, purchased in October 1995, with
BIOS dated 6/6/95, does not correctly handle the change of century. A DOS
application set to 31 December 1999 clocks over from 23:59:59 to 00:00:01 on 1
January 1980. This was using MS-DOS 6.2; the same result was obtained with
Windows 3.1.
How many computers will be capable of handling the change of century
correctly? Potentially this is an even more dangerous sleeper than the
Michelangelo virus.
Letters : What a gas
Kirribilli, New South Wales
In the interesting article “Is CS the wrong solution?” (Focus, 30 March, p
12), there is no translation of the abbreviation CS, whereas MIBK
(methyl-iso-butyl ketone) is spelt out in full.
My Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary informs me that CS is formed
from the initials of two American chemists, B. B. Corson and R. W. Stoughton,
and that it is a tear gas that also causes choking. This information may be of
interest to your readers. Rightly or wrongly, our police carry guns and CS is
not an issue.
Letters : No drought of ideas
London
I believe your piece on the environmental toxin dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO)
was unnecessarily alarmist (Feedback, 18 May). Many organisations are aware of
the dangers posed by this chemical and are taking appropriate
countermeasures.
Here in Britain, Yorkshire Water has the problem well under control, having
virtually eliminated DHMO from all its reservoirs and rivers. If only everyone
was so conscientious.
Letters : . . .
Harlow, Essex
Feedback is right to criticise the myth that as midnight of 31 December 1999
travels westwards around the world it will be rapidly followed by a wave of
crashing computers (Feedback, 6 April). This will not happen. Though Doherty is
correct when he says that most PCs will have problems with the system date, the
situation is rather more complex than he describes.
A comprehensive description of just how IBM-compatible PCs will be affected
can be found at http://rampages.onramp. net/~gtbecker/. To answer Doherty’s
question: all PC dates default to 1980 because that is the year in which the IBM
PC was created.
The real problem is not the system date, but what your applications do if you
now enter a date in the next century, or if at some time in the new century you
enter a date in this one.
Charles Stanley-Smith gave a good answer to this (Letters, 20 April, p 58).
Interested readers can find a clear description of the impact of the problem at
http://www.s390.ibm. com/stories/tran2000.html. Despite its source, this applies
to all makes of computer.
I am not connected with IBM in any way. I’d just like to add that my PC and
all my applications are now “2000 proof”. Are yours?
Letters : . . .
City Beach, Western Australia.
Having tried the experiment suggested by Doherty, I can reassure New
杏吧原创 readers that DOS version 6.20 handles the transition from 31
December 1999 to 1 January 2000 correctly.
Unfortunately, it does not follow from this that all is well. I have already
experienced the chaos which will almost certainly occur. In January 1981 I was
working with the database used by the Western Australia prisons department. The
mainframe was switched off over Christmas, and when it was rebooted the operator
entered the date as 5 January 1980, instead of 5 January 1981.
The first batch of prisoner release records we submitted were rejected, as
the program didn’t approve of prisoners being released before they had been
arrested. When we realised what had happened, we had to find and correct all the
records which had been accepted because the term was greater than one year. This
nightmare lasted several hours.
All then appeared to be well until the monthly bills went out. Commercial
customers were unhappy about receiving a bill for an extra 31 536 000 seconds of
running time.
This sort of thing will be all too common in January 2000. The computers will
not actually crash, but I suspect that the operators will wish they had.
Letters : Seal of contention
Canada
Debora MacKenzie makes misleading statements regarding the studies I and my
colleagues have been conducting on the northwest Atlantic harp seal (“Seals to
the slaughter”, March 16, p 34).
Your readers should be aware that the survey methodology to estimate seal pup
production, which is negatively presented in your article, has indeed been
published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and accepted as a standard.
Moreover, the 1994 pup production estimate and population model has been
peer-reviewed at national and international scientific meetings and accepted
without dispute. In addition, the diet studies have been published in scientific
journals and the consumption model is currently under review for
publication.
The complexity of ecological interactions between harp seals and Atlantic cod
has not been ignored and is the focus of our current research. Peter
Meisenheimer’s suggestion that harp seals may significantly benefit cod
populations by eating illex squid is unlikely. Information already available in
the published literature indicates that although illex do eat Atlantic cod, they
have been scarce in Newfoundland waters for over ten years and constitute only a
small portion of the harp seal diet. Also, studies of the seasonal distribution
of illex and harp seal show that there is very little overlap between the two
species in Newfoundland; generally illex are present when harp seals are in the
Arctic.
Further, the comments about potential biases in the diet data due to seals
feeding on discarded fish from the commercial fishery are at odds with the
published data. In fact, the proportion of cod in the diet in the 1980s, when
the fishery was active, is lower than that seen in 1992 and 1993 when the
fishery was closed.
The article also suggests that the current harvest will reduce the harp seal
population, which has been estimated at around 5 million and has been growing at
a rate of about a quarter of a million per year. This year’s total allowable
catch was set below the estimate of replacement yield, meaning that even if the
full catch is taken, the herd should continue to grow.
Letters : Radiant Cornwall
Falmouth, Cornwall
With reference to the article by Rob Edwards on natural radiation (This Week,
4 May, p 4), I would like to take Stuart Neilson to task for saying that
Cornwall’s high life expectancy may be a result of other factors, such as
greater affluence.
Neilson has got it seriously wrong. Cornwall must be one of the poorest
counties in England in terms of income per capita. However, we do have some of
the most beautiful scenery and pleasantest people in the country; I think it
more likely that lack of stress rather than affluence contributes to our happy
longevity.
Letters : Snowed under
Englewood, Colorado
Many would agree with Vincent Kiernan’s characterisation of McMurdo Station,
Antarctica, as a frontier town (“The far frontier”, 13 April, p 32), but the
article’s emphasis on “uneasy peace” and “tension” between scientists and
support staff is contrived.
My company, Antarctic Support Associates, exists to support scientists and
their research in the US Antarctic Program. The reference to aloof “science
nerds” admiring cosmic ray effects in a cloud chamber amused us because all
seven participants were support staff鈥攏ot National Science
Foundation-funded scientists.
Rudy Dichtl, identified as a scientist, is in reality our manager for science
technical support. Support diver Jim Mastro, another employee, is portrayed as
blaming “stuck-up scientists for much of the tension”. Mastro took pains to
emphasise that arrogant scientists are a tiny minority and that, for the most
part, scientists and support personnel work together smoothly to further the
goals of the US Antarctic Program.
I attribute reduced alcohol consumption more to improved hiring and evolving
American standards than to on-site warnings that abuse will lead to a plane
home. For whatever reason, McMurdo has two, not three, bars, down from four in
the 1980s.
Kiernan’s articles give insight to the largely unknown tasks of supporting
Antarctic science. We were happy to donate time to the effort and believe it
important to correct the names of search-and-rescue specialist Bill McCormick
(not McCartney) and computer specialist Karen Joyce (not Joy). Readers puzzled
by the picture of McMurdo should know that it was printed backwards.
Letters : Crash program
Liding枚, Sweden
Eugene Doherty claims that at the turn of the century a PC will invariably
reset its date to 1 January 1980 (Letters, 20 April, p 58). Though this may be
true for some systems, Doherty is seriously overstating the problem.
The date of a PC will usually not reset to 1 January 1980, unless the backup
battery is flat or removed. In some old PCs, a proprietary program retrieves
time from the machine’s real-time clock on start-up, but usually DOS does it.
While a PC will ignore any year after 2099 or before 1980, it should cope with
the next century. Whether this also applies to programs is up to the
programmer.
I’ve tried Doherty’s trick with 8088, 80286, 30886, 80486 and Pentium
machines with MS-DOS 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.21, 3.30, 4.01, 5.0, 6.0, 6.2 and 6.22,
and also an 80286 with DR-DOS 6.0, all computers with different BIOSs. They all
switched to year 2000 after 31 December 1999.
By design, the real-time clock of a PC delivers a number to the operating
system that it uses to calculate the date. Zero for this number was set at 1
January 1980. This is why no date is defined by the PC real-time clock before
1980. The date of the PC will run till 31 December 2099. Setting the date after
2079 requires all four digits to be entered. At midnight on 31 December 2099 the
date will not change, but on most systems switching off and on again will set it
back to 2000.
Still, errors due to imprecise notation of years will soar in the first days
of the new millennium. Some years ago, a 107-year-old Swedish lady got a call to
enrol in primary school. I do not shrug my shoulders at the turn of century
problem. We all have to keep an eye on computer (and human) output, to check
that it is reasonable, even if we can’t be sure it is correct.
Letters : . . .
Huddersfield
I am most surprised to discover that Davies’s article contained no critical
appraisal of attempts to explain the origin of the Universe by applying
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the concept of quantum fluctuations. In
the intellectual chess of cosmological theorising, such a move is both confused
and erroneous, for the following reasons.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is an assertion of the impossibility, in
principle (that is, it is an assertion of metaphysical impossibility), of the
precise and simultaneous measurement of wave and particle properties of
light/matter. His gamma-ray microscope “thought experiment”, by which he sought
to demonstrate the truth of this assertion, also demonstrated that the origin of
this uncertainty is the act of measurement itself: the more precisely one
measures, and thus knows, the position of an electron, the less precisely one
can measure, and thus know, its momentum. As such, the uncertainty principle
cannot rationally be employed where measurement is itself impossible in
principle.
So-called “acausal” quantum fluctuations are submicrophenomena interpreted
via quantum theory’s axiom of probability, conceived as an attempted
mathematical resolution of wave-particle duality. They are, and can only be,
absolutely independent of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, for this assumes,
and is utterly reliant upon, strict Newtonian causality鈥攁s is made evident
by his thought experiment above.
Moreover, the assertion that there can be no underlying cause for a physical
event is one of pure metaphysics. How can it be open to experimental
confirmation or falsification? Is it not the axiomatisation of scientific
failure鈥攊n other words, justifying giving up the ghost by asserting on
faith that failure to find the cause is proof that there is no cause to
find?
Both cosmology and quantum physics claim to have reached the ground-zero of
causality, the former because science has overextended itself by seeking to
construct a whole class of theories, the veracity or otherwise of which lies
beyond the possibility of confirmation/falsification; the latter because science
altered its metaphysical foundations in order to save the appearance of
consistency in the face of the inescapable contradiction (or paradox) of
wave-particle duality.
Letters : . . .
Wassenaar, the Netherlands
Thanks for the interesting article. I would just like to say that in my
opinion the “sceptics claiming that the laws of physics have no real existence”
are right. We have no idea what real existence means, because we are “in” the
Universe we want to describe.
Intelligent beings in a two-dimensional “balloon” Universe can only try to
invent laws describing their shadow world. In the same way, our physical models
are mere inventions and not discoveries. Our scientific theories therefore
reveal more about the way we think than about reality.
This opinion does not exclude, of course, the possibility that our (narrow)
“laws of physics stand at the base of a rational explanatory chain”.
Only an “ultimate observer”, far beyond our limited four-dimensional
space-time, can discover the real laws of physics and catch a glimpse of the
“mind of God”.
Letters : Phantom feeling
Berkhamsted, Herts
I read with interest Alison Motluk’s article on phantom sensation in
amputated limbs (New 杏吧原创, Science, 4 May, p 13), having lived
with a left leg mid-thigh amputation for 52 years. The sensation transferred
from a good to a “phantom” limb may involve another facet not directly
discussed.
In the main, the experiments described in the article involve touching the
patient on, say, a good limb and noting that the patient then feels an identical
sensation in the phantom limb. I have found that I only have to think of, say,
my left big toe and the appropriate missing digit tingles. This effect has not
diminished over the years鈥攊n fact it’s quite comforting.
Could the quoted effects be at least partly attributed to this? If the
patient is aware that a good limb is being touched then, knowing the aim of the
experiment, surely his or her mind can signal the expected sensation in the
phantom limb.
My own experiences would seem to bear this out. I have always put it down to
my brain knowing a limb has been touched or thought of, and delivering the
appropriate sensation via the severed nerve endings, as would happen prior to
amputation.
Letters : . . .
London
Davies states that the Universe is on a one-way slide to maximum entropy and
must one day run down.
This does not apply if there is sufficient matter in the Universe to ensure a
gravitational collapse, in which case, as the Universe collapses, it becomes
more ordered and the entropy gradient is reversed. In this way the Universe
might be cyclical, with many phases of creation and destruction.
Letters : Micro Universe
Oxford
Paul Davies’s logic in his article “The day time began” (27 April, p 30)
conveniently steers round a blind spot that neither he nor the other populists
in this field have addressed in any of the books I have read over the past 30
years.
The theory of spontaneous鈥攁nd thereafter continuous鈥� expansion of
the Universe from a no-thing/no-time singularity appears to be supported by
observations of the expanding cosmos, measurable via the red shifts of distant
objects, the ubiquitous background radiation and other phenomena. Davies employs
the often-used analogy of the expanding surface of a balloon to describe the way
that space is expanding. The blind spot, frustratingly ignored, is the question
of where the macro expansion of the cosmos stops on the sliding scale down to
the micro, atomic and subatomic levels.
Where is the physical boundary of the expansion of space? Atomic and
subatomic particles are mostly space, as is eloquently illustrated by the
analogy of a pea at the centre of St Paul’s dome (the nucleus), surrounded at
the periphery of the dome by flying sugar grains (electrons). Is the space in
all these particles expanding? And if not, why not?
Where does Davies’s expanding Universe macro/micro scale cut off?