Letters : . . .
via Internet
It reminds me of the joke: “What do you call a fly with no wings? A walk.” It
has to be said that calling them “non-flies” or “flightless houseflies” is
particularly uninspired.
Letters : Rain and grain
Cambridge
I refer to the article, “Will India starve if rains fail?” (This Week, 19
October, p 10). Cereal harvests were plotted against time, but the years chosen
were not evenly spaced. This gave the (false) impression that yield had recently
plateaued. If the data were plotted correctly, with a linear timescale, no such
plateauing is evident鈥攊n fact, grain harvests appear to be still
increasing steadily.
There is genuine cause for concern about the increase in world grain
production not keeping pace with increasing demand due to an ever-expanding
population and increasing standards of living. Several recent articles in
New 杏吧原创 have described this, and it is a pity to weaken support for
the alarming truth with alarmist untruths.
Letters : Pencilled out
via Internet
I too used to think the zero-gravity ballpoint pen was a fine example of the
US space programme squandering money (Feedback, 26 October and Letters, 9
November, p 50)鈥攗ntil I bought a removable cartridge hard-disc drive for
my Mac.
The instructions contained a dire warning about writing on the cartridge
labels in pencil. Apparently, pencils create graphite dust when you write with
them. Being conductive, the dust can play havoc with some delicate electrical
devices (such as removable disc drives).
I assume this was the reasoning behind the US preference for ballpoint pens.
I would not wish to belittle the Soviet space effort鈥攖hey had much more
powerful launchers than the US. However, this meant that there was less pressure
on Soviet engineers to miniaturise devices used in capsules, and therefore
(perhaps) their equipment was less susceptible to damage by clouds of drifting
graphite dust.
Letters : Bad times
Guildford, Surrey
Catching up on my New 杏吧原创, I read about the virus warning from
Penguin (Feedback, 12 October). I recognised this as the Goodtimes virus that I
have received a number of warnings about this year. The only change in the story
was the ability to send itself to every name in the address book.
Each time I receive this message I then set about mailing everyone else who
is listed as having received it, encouraging them to tell people that this is a
hoax. This got me thinking about what a virus is. I suppose it is something that
has the ability to hide itself in files and get onto a computer, and have the
ability to be spread rapidly all over the world causing havoc. If this is the
case, then Goodtimes really is a virus.
Has any other message ever been spread so rapidly across the globe, getting
onto millions of computers and causing worry and anxiety for computer
owners?
Letters : The Pohl effect
Palatine, Illinois
In “Welcome to the Costa del Venus” (27 July, p 30) astronomer Fred Taylor is
quoted as saying that no one knows why Venus is so much hotter than even its
carbon-dioxide heat-trapping blanket can account for.
Well, perhaps I do鈥攁t least I have a notion, which I originally
published a decade or so ago. As we all know, the Earth is an oblate spheroid,
its equatorial radius a number of kilometres greater than that to the poles.
This is a consequence of centrifugal force; but, oddly, the equatorial bulge is
greater than can be accounted for by the Earth’s present rotational velocity and
must be left over from a time when our planet spun faster.
The bulge is held in its extended position by the rigidity of the Earth’s
crust. But, at some future period when the Earth has slowed a bit more, the
weight may overcome the strength of the crust and the bulge will collapse. Then
enough energy, expressed as heat, will be released to raise Earth’s temperature
to something close to that of Venus.
I submit that this may be what happened to Venus. In addition to producing
the present temperature, it might have some bearing on the curiously recent age
of much of the Venusian surface.
If this should happen to turn out to be actual science, rather than the idle
fantasies of a science-fiction writer, I require that in all future studies of
the matter it shall be described as “the Pohl effect”. Nobel juries may wish to
take note.
Letters : Aeroflops
Dundee
I was intrigued by your report on flightless flies (Feedback, 26 October). It
seems that these houseflies may have a mutation in the same gene that gives rise
to the rudimentary phenotype in fruit flies.
This well-known gene codes for the multienzyme polypeptide CAD which
catalyses the first three steps in the biosynthesis of pyrimidine nucleotides.
The flies have stubby wings and the females are destined to be sterile (their
eggs do not contain the nucleotides required as nutrients for the developing
embryo).
The flies will only survive to breed if raised on jelly that contains uracil.
Thus the breeding stocks should survive with uracil in the diet, but wingless
flies will be obtained if the eggs develop without nucleotides.
Letters : Conflict of interest
I must support the Israeli greens in their contention that there is a
conflict of interest in the combined agriculture and environment portfolios of
their new government (This Week, 14 September, p 6).
As the former chief director of the Directorate of Environmental Affairs and
Conservation, within the Department of Agriculture and Environmental Affairs of
the North West Province of South Africa, after the new government came to power,
I, too, experienced a conflict of interest.
During the first few years of the government’s existence we were given the
job of researching the formation of a new directorate to cater for the needs of
previously neglected environmental concerns in the province. Our research showed
clearly that if the interests of the nation were to be best served in protecting
the environment and maintaining or enhancing people’s quality of life, the new
directorate should be free of interference from other governmental interests. We
recommended that the directorate should be a separate body reporting to the
provincial (or national) head in the form of a monitoring “watchdog”
organisation.
My experience with the combined Department of Agriculture and Environmental
Affairs was that the environmental function always played second fiddle. Because
agriculture was seen to be a national priority, its needs and policies overrode
those of the fledgling Directorate of Environmental Affairs, to the point where
three years later it is still struggling to get government funding to establish
the most basic monitoring, evaluating and protection capacity. A similar
situation exists at the national level.
I do, however, also agree that the manner in which the greens operated within
the Israeli Department of Environment, would not be in everyone’s best interests.
Government has a role to play in setting macro policy and strategy. It should
maintain an open and accommodating perspective on inputs from nongovernmental
organisations and the private sector鈥攂ut ultimately it has to make the
decisions on an informed basis, and be accountable for its actions. It is not
the role of the greens to make the ultimate decisions.
Letters : Less of the loaf
Brighton, Sussex
Kurt Kleiner’s piece highlights many fallacies in the current views of world
food production and distribution (This Week, 26 October, p 8).
The major reason why people in developing countries convert unspoilt land to
agriculture is not to grow food for the local population, but to grow cash crops
for export. The World Bank seems bent on forcing developing countries to build
unsustainable economies on the back of cash crops and raw material exports.
The “green revolution” in the 1960s and 1970s did not so much boost food crop
yields in developing countries as increase the crop output of richer countries,
especially the US, allowing them to dominate the world food markets. Wheat often
displaces indigenous foodstuffs in developing countries because local people
develop a taste for it from foreign food aid.
Kleiner’s piece argues that wheat production must be stepped up to stop the
world going hungry. This kind of “technical fix” argument is now acknowledged as
being largely responsible for much of the inequalities in world food
distribution.
What developing countries really need are new trade paradigms and new
investment opportunities away from large-scale cash crop farming towards a more
equitable and sustainable mix of indigenous food production and exportable cash
crop production. The $27 million allocated by the World Bank and other
international agencies to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre
would perhaps be better used for this purpose.
Letters : Patently public
Banstead, Surrey
I refer to “Pirates in the garden of India” by Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain
(26 October, p 14). The patenting requirements in
Europe and elsewhere are considerably different from those of the US.
In most countries apart from the US, to be patented an invention is required
to be new and inventive over the “prior art”, which is defined as including
everything which has been made available to the public by means of written or
oral description, by use or in any other way.
Thus in such countries it is simply not possible to obtain a valid patent for
an alleged invention which is merely traditional knowledge or is obvious from
such traditional knowledge.
American law is somewhat different in that the state of the art excludes
public knowledge apart from printed publications or patents. Thus it is possible
to obtain valid patents in the US for inventions which would not be elegible for
patenting outside the US.
Letters : Whether prediction
Victoria, Australia
The article “Far out forecasting” by Robert Matthews (Features, 12 October, p
37) seems to accept in a rather uncritical way the reality of statistical
forecasting of events that are rare, such as damaging floods.
For example, he reports that Dutch workers have applied extreme value theory
to estimate the height of sea wall needed to withstand “one-in-10 000-year”
floods.
Is this credible? The past 10 000 years spans the Holocene period of earth
history. During this time, there were major changes in the amount and
distribution of monsoon rains, related to slow changes in the planetary orbit.
As a result, lakes developed in what is now the hyperarid Sahara.
In the next 10 000 years, such orbital changes will, of course, continue. On
top of that are the potentially larger environmental changes wrought by people,
such as the enhanced greenhouse effect. One of the possible effects of this is
considerably increased storm intensity in some areas. The distribution of
changes over the Earth’s surface seems likely to be complex; it is certainly
ill-understood at present.
All of this seems to suggest that the distributions of extreme values of
climatic variables are unlikely to stand still in coming decades, let alone
millenniums. The application of statistical methods that do not account for
future environmental change runs the risk of being seriously erroneous.
Letters : Insect aliens
Ume氓, Sweden
The prospect of finding complex life elsewhere is even bleaker than Ian
Crawford stated (Forum, 5 October, p 52 and Letters, 2 November, p 53).
Of the multicellular animals, arthropods cannot produce land-living animals
larger than a land crab, because animals with exoskeletons must literally change
their skeletons as they grow, and big arthropods must therefore let the sea
carry their weight until the new skeleton has stiffened.
Of more than 30 animal phyla, only the chordates/ vertebrates had the
evolutionary potential to produce large land-living animals, and only an obscure
group of them (lobe-finned fishes) was “pre-adapted” to develop legs. So the
chances are that most other worlds have no land animals more complex than an
insect.
On a more positive note, nature has produced two separate organisms with
extraordinary intelligence (parrots and hominoid primates). Since their last
common reptilian ancestor lived more than 250 million years ago, they have
developed their complex brains independently of each other.
It seems that once life has made it past the amphibian stage, even a random
evolutionary process will keep producing organisms of increasing complexity and
with more and more sophisticated brains.