Letters : Egomania
by e-mail
I see that according to Marcus Chown, some of George Smoot’s colleagues
didn’t like him hogging the limelight a bit early and taking more credit than
was perhaps due (Review, 30 November 1996, p 43).
Well, from where this mere reader is sitting it doesn’t matter tuppence. I am
not interested in who discovered or worked on what research, only in the
results. Knowing that one and one makes two is far more useful than knowing who
first noticed this.
The Universe is full of facts to be discovered and potential inventions.
Sooner or later, on the road of increasing knowledge, someone will find them.
Being the first looks less important from such a long view. Names of scientists
could even be viewed as just marks on the spines of books to help find them in
the library.
I am a psychology undergraduate and I just want to know how the mind works,
not who found out this or that bit. Remembering the names of theorists is a
waste of my valuable time and mental capacity foisted upon me by tutors who hope
that someday some poor student might have to remember their name (unlikely).
Maybe we should have a moratorium on scientists’ egos鈥攎ake it
obligatory to publish under a pseudonym. What a lovely break for the rest of us.
Plus we get the bonus that people wouldn’t be scared of losing reputations. They
might take bigger risks and so make faster progress.
The more I think about it the more I like it. In the spirit of this, I’ll
sign off as:
Cranialjax鈥攁n assumed name
by e-mail
Letters : Doctors online
London
The news item on Medline contained many errors (In Brief, 7 December 1996, p
16).
The new version of the British Medical Association’s free Medline service
went live on 11 November and has worked without a second’s downtime ever since.
In its first month, 1124 different BMA members logged in, conducting over 10 000
online searches. Over 5000 members have downloaded the new client software.
There are now three routes through to BMA Medline: client/server or Telnet
access via the Internet and direct dial via a modem. The Internet routes provide
local-call access for all BMA members. A third Internet route, to enable direct
searching from any Web browser, will be launched with the BMA home page on 22
January.
The speck of reality in your story is that for the first three weeks a series
of glitches made dial-up access more difficult than before, particularly in the
evenings and at weekends. Within 24 hours we had a solution that enabled most of
the dial-up users to log on and our library staff conducted searches for anyone
else who was in difficulty.
It is not true that the BMA merely provides a link to the US National Library
of Medicine’s own Medline service. We offer a complete, self-contained online
search system running in the BMA library’s own computer room, based on a copy of
the NLM’s Med-line database. This is supported by documentation and a help desk
service developed for BMA members.
Letters : Paint it yellow
Madras, India
Perhaps if your urban contributors Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain had spent
twenty years of their lives in an Indian village, as I have done, they might
have noticed yet another and more novel use for the root that yields turmeric
(“Pirates in the garden of India”, 26 October 1996, p 14). Village women
periodically assume over whatever parts of their skin that can be seen a deep
yellow, for the application of turmeric paste over the whole body keeps them
entirely free of undesirable superfluous hair.
Unfortunately, this is a messy business liable to stain not only skins but
wash-basins and bathtubs. Therefore the practice has been discontinued and has
now been forgotten among affluent, middle-class city dwellers.
A fortune awaits the chemist who can isolate the active depilatory in
turmeric. No more ladies with hairy legs to shave, or wispy moustaches to
embarrass.
As for the neem tree, there are reasons to think that its insecticidal
properties may have been somewhat overrated. See Nature (Asia &
Pacific edition), p 532, 7 December, 1995.
Letters : Space laser
Edinburgh
From my limited knowledge of lasers I had often wondered whether they
occurred in nature or were entirely human artefacts. Your report on “stolen
starlight” (New 杏吧原创, Science, 16 November 1996, p 16) seems to
show a laser effect in space for the first time.
Letters : Useless, not
by e-mail
The “useless” keyboard characters referred to in Feedback (7 December 1996)
do indeed have a use. If you are using your PC to connect to a mainframe
computer, pressing Sys Rq (or system request) asks the host application to send
a test request message.
As for the fallen-over L, which I agree does not seem to translate to a
character when using my PC as a PC, when I am using an emulator to connect to
the mainframe, it appears as shown on the keyboard, and is a very useful symbol
equivalent to the word “not” when programming in such languages as COBOL. I
would be most distressed if manufacturers were to suddenly start leaving it off
their keyboards.
Letters : Mucho milk
Christchurch, New Zealand
Can we kiss the low fat way of life goodbye (This Week, 16 November 1996, p
8)? Or maybe I should have gone to maths class instead of reading New
杏吧原创 in the school library 40 years ago? (It brings back memories,
that old blue and black cover depicted on page 58.)
By my calculations, to get 3.5 grams of conjugated linoleic acid a day, even
at the boosted rate of 4.5 milligrams per gram of fat, we should have to drink
22 litres a day of full-fat milk. Even if the 1 gram a day of CLA already
consumed in a typical American diet comes entirely from other sources, we would
still have to drink about 16 litres a day.
Not much room there for those life-enhancing veggies.
Letters : Explosive drugs
Cambridge
I read with interest your article on targeting drugs (New 杏吧原创,
Science, 7 December 1996, p 22), where you state that a pi-facial bond has an
energy of 4.5 kilojoules. If you had an ounce of this stuff, combining it would
release about 1026 joules, or 1019 times as much as that released during
uranium fission, weight for weight.
The article should, in fact, have said 4.5 kilojoules per mole鈥擡d
Letters : Plugged out
Camberley, Surrey
Re the item on unplugging life support systems in South Africa (Feedback, 28
September and 30 November, and Letters, 14 December, p 52): Harold L. Klawans is
a clinical neurologist practising in the US. One chapter of his book Trials
of an Expert Witness (1991) is about an elderly woman who reached a
condition where she required continuous artificial ventilation, but retained
mental alertness. After a while, she asked for a TV, but was found dead
immediately after the TV was installed.
Her family sued the hospital, though they did not know the details of why she
had died. The hospital defended, but settled the case the day before a
particular porter was due to give evidence. Apparently the porter had delivered
the TV, looked around for a socket to plug it into, failed to see a free one,
briefly unplugged various plugs, replacing them if they seemed to be doing
something (like beeps stopping), until he pulled out the plug for the artificial
respiration system. That apparently didn’t produce any obvious effect, so he
plugged the TV in and walked away.
Letters : . . .
by e-mail
I am glad to hear that the story was an urban myth. I found it hard to
believe, as it sounded very much like an incident that happened with my last
employers, Spectra-Tek UK Ltd, of Malton, North Yorkshire.
About 1990 we installed an automation system at a Shell France site near
Paris. Then the Shell staff complained that the system was shutting down every
day at 5 in the afternoon. The fault was eventually traced to the cleaner who
came in at that time and plugged in his vacuum cleaner.
In a variation to your story, he didn’t disconnect our computer, but the
extra load on the mains was enough to convince our system that a power failure
was in progress, so it shut itself down to preserve data integrity.
I don’t know if this is the origin of the hospital bed story, but we did
install a similar automation system at the Caltex Milnerton oil depot near Cape
Town a year or two earlier, and it’s possible that one of our engineers passed
the story on to the Caltex staff during a maintenance visit.
Letters : Good old Gauldy
Milton Keynes
Your piece on quicksand stirred some old memories for me (“And the earth did
swallow them up!”, 21/28 December 1996, p 26). As deputy director of the
Institute of Jamaica in the late 1950s, my father was responsible for the
removal of Lewis Gauldy’s remains from Fort Augusta, at the western end of
Kingston harbour, to the Anglican church at Port Royal.
Gauldy is a legendary figure in Jamaica, for he was swallowed and
regurgitated by the quicksand not once but twice鈥攁 double deliverance that
is reputed to have changed him from a sinful man to one of great piety, or so it
says on his tombstone.
The institute was reluctant to move Gauldy, but as his grave was threatened
by erosion and was likely to slip into the sea, the decision was taken to
proceed. As Gauldy’s lead-lined coffin was lifted from the old grave, a workman
slipped and dropped his end of the box. “Take care,” cautioned someone. “If Mr
Gauldy wakes there could be trouble.”
The casket was then taken across the harbour on the royal launch and
reinterment took place under a bishop’s watchful eye. That evening at dinner
time, Jamaica was shaken by the most violent earthquake since the beginning of
the century, doing some damage and taking two lives. A third of the Fort Augusta
graveyard returned to the sea, Gauldy’s former grave with it.
Pure coincidence, of course. But still, like all Jamaicans who do not wish to
challenge the nonexistent gods, I mutter the ancient motto: “Jack Mandora, me no
choose none!”
Letters : Mad fishes
Cambridge
Let me get this straight. In the near future, to meet increasing demand, fish
will be bred for faster growth, intensively reared, pumped full of antibiotics
to prevent infections and fed with meal made from other fish (“Blue
revolutionaries”, 7 December 1996, p 32).
Does this not sound horribly familiar? I think I might become a vegetarian
now, before PSE (piscine spongiform encephalopathy) makes its appearance.