Letters : TV learners
Preuschdorf, France
The study you reported does not necessarily show that television is a more
effective medium for teaching than the printed word (This Week, 15 March, p 5).
But it may well show that children who have watched television all their lives,
to the detriment of their reading ability, will learn more readily through the
medium to which they are accustomed.
What they learn, and the depth of the learning thus shovelled into them, is
another thing entirely.
Letters : Virus warnings
London
E-mail “viruses” are definitely hoaxes (Feedback, 22 March). In fact, it is
my view that the e-mail warnings about them are the real viruses鈥攃ertainly
they spread like one, they are proving almost impossible to eradicate, and they
irritate the hell out of me. I receive the “Penpal Greetings” warning about once
a month. For a comprehensive list of them, see:
http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html.
However, recent hackings into Microsoft Internet Explorer do lead to the
possibility of real plain ASCII e-mail viruses. Basically, Internet Explorer is
rather too enthusiastic about interpreting HTML and will allow programs to be
run via Web pages. I know this also extends to Usenet news, and I suspect mail,
too.
Details of these problems can be found (with some delving) on Microsoft’s Web
site, somewhere under http://www.microsoft.com/ie. Microsoft has released a fix
to cure these problems, so only users who have not applied the fix will be
vulnerable.
Incidentally, Microsoft announced recently that it will be delaying the
release of the next version of Explorer pending a full security review.
Letters : Open scare
Cambridge
We are dismayed by your criticism of Grahame Bulfield, director of the Roslin
Institute, for seeking renewal of Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food
funding for the institute following the cloning of a sheep (Editorial, 15 March,
p 3).
You yourself say that “Dolly is both awe-inspiring and genuinely scary if
placed in the wrong hands”. Exactly. Cutting public funding to Roslin at this
critical stage is precisely the way to push the work into the wrong hands.
Conversely, you suggest that “the current scare about meat hygiene” demands
“research to improve the safety of food”. Surely what is really needed for food
safety at the moment is not more research so much as effective legislation and
food inspectors who are not corruptible.
The more significant the research, the more important it is that it should be
led democratically rather than driven by the profit motive. There is ample scope
for the private investor downstream of research breakthroughs. Let’s keep the
scary ones out in the open where we can all see, think about and debate the “big
issues” that they raise.
Letters : . . .
London
I’ve received several e-mails of the kind you describe, apparently warning
about this or that infected message, and always urging the recipient to forward
this information to friends and colleagues. This is the mechanism of
transmission: human recipients who are taken in by the hoax e-mail promptly
replicate and disseminate it to their e-mail contacts, and so the hoax message
itself is the virus.
So, in that spirit, I urge you to forward this information to all your
colleagues and friends so that their hoax-detection systems may be primed to
respond quickly the next time they encounter such a viral communication, by
deleting it without forwarding it.
Letters : . . .
Reading, Berkshire
With the advent of ActiveX and its great security measures, it is now
possible to do something like this.
All you have to do is send an e-mail with the main body in HTML format
containing a hostile ActiveX applet. In some browsers, such as Netscape and
newer versions of Internet Explorer, this page will be displayed automatically
along with its applets.
Without going into details that might help would-be hackers, this would not
be much different to the Quicken hack (This Week, 22 February, p 4).
I don’t know about the rest of you but I hope that nobody else has thought of
this. Like Steve Graham (Letters, 8 March, p 10) I will turn ActiveX off when
and where it is possible (but I will leave Java on as it is far more
secure).
Letters : Dwarfs and giants
Portsmouth, Hampshire
Isaac Newton’s “shoulders of giants” phrase is always quoted in the first
person singular: “If I have seen further than other men it is because I have
stood on the shoulders of giants” (Feedback, 15 March). This implies that Newton
thought up the expression himself, which is not true.
Newton was in regular correspondence with his scientific European mates and
would have heard the words of Bernard of Chartres, who was Chancellor of
Chartres Cathedral in France in 1114.
Today one can buy a postcard from the tourist shop bearing Bernard’s words,
which in full say, “If we can see further than the ancients, it is not because
of our own strength of vision, but because we are borne up by them and carried
to a great height. We are dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants.” This
predates Newton by about 600 years.
When Newton wrote to the “short bloke” whom he wanted to insult, he was well
aware that the expression wasn’t his own and that Hooke knew of the phrase by
Bernard that specifically mentioned “dwarfs”.
So Newton did not invent the famous phrase nor did he make any pretensions of
having done so, and all books which attribute those words as originating from
him are wrong.
Yes, the Royal Mint cocked up the orbits of the planets on the old 拢1
note, and will now compound the error by printing “shoulders of giants” along
the edge of the new 拢2 coin, implying that Newton originated it, which he
didn’t.
Letters : Laid out
Gloucester, Ontario, Canada
Donald Pritchard’s letter criticising the use of the word “lay” fails to take
one important factor into account (Letters, 8 March, p 51). The distinction
between “lie” (intransitive) and “lay” (transitive) is dying in modern English,
as is the distinction between “who” and “whom”.
Language conservatives who maintain that the difference is crucial to English
are wrong on two counts: one has to do with the transitive/intransitive
distinction in general, and the other with lay/lie in particular.
Generally speaking, the transitive/intransitive difference does not always
require different verbs in English. Examples include: “break”, “open” and
“close”. I can say either “the boy broke the glass” or “the glass broke”, where
the first one is transitive and the second one intransitive. Note that the verb
does not change its form.
More specifically, the lie/lay distinction is not that old. The belief that
two verbs must be used in complementary circumstances stems from the late 18th
century. Bishop Robert Lowth “invented” the formal distinction (in much the same
way that he invented the double negative rule in 1761). In fact, the two verbs
stem from the same source (licgan in Old English).
The point is that the loss of distinction is not crucial to understanding.
English is constantly changing: some forms survive and some do not. In any
event, the hue and cry raised over “lie” and “lay” (Pritchard is not alone in
this) should be laid/lain aside.
Letters : . . .
Tasmania
May I suggest that everyone gets a copy of a wonderful book by the eminent
sociologist Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants: a Shandean
Postscript, with a foreword by Umberto Eco.
“The Post-Italianate Edition” was published in 1993 (University of Chicago
Press, ISBN 0 226 52086 2). This work deserves the appellation tour de
force and is an intellectual adventure. It looks at the long history of the
“OTSOG” statement in the context of “the battle between the ancients and the
moderns”.
Letters : Impossibly fast
by e-mail
A vital piece of information was not included in Hank Hogan’s otherwise
interesting and informative article about modems (“Lightning speed”, 15 March, p
32). The article concentrated solely on the speed at which Joe Bloggs can
connect to his service provider. Speeds of up to 40 megabits per second
downstream were mentioned, but not once was it made clear that these throughputs
are usually not possible on the current Internet.
Take British service providers. Most of them are lucky if they have a 2 Mbps
link to the Internet. It is true that the large providers, such as Demon and
Pipex, have 45 Mbps links to the US, and no doubt these are extremely costly.
But most Web sites are connected at speeds of only 64 to 512 Kbps. There is just
no way the current Internet infrastructure can support access rates of 40 Mbps,
and it probably won’t for some time (I would estimate between 8 and 10
years).
The reality is that the Internet backbone needs to grow and mature massively
before speeds like these will ever be possible.
Letters : Ill-conceived
Folkestone, Kent
According to your article, the morning-after pill could be “taken up to 72
hours after intercourse to prevent conception” (In Brief, 8 March, p 10). In
actual fact, what it prevents is that part of conception which involves the
implantation of the already fertilised egg into the lining of the womb.
No pill taken three days after sex can prevent ovulation and fertilisation
that has already occurred鈥攖here would have been a chapter on it in A Brief
History of Time.
Pro-life groups oppose the morning-after pill because they believe
fertilisation to be the starting point of a human life. Pro-choice groups seem
happy to blur the distinction between fertilisation and implantation, despite
the fact that the only good choice is an informed one.
Many couples are happy to use contraception (the type that prevents egg and
sperm cells from meeting) but would draw the line at the morning-after pill if
they knew how it worked.
Letters : Bloodthirsty plants
Melbourne, Australia
Turbocharging plant growth by providing them with a gene encoding haemoglobin
(New 杏吧原创, Science, 8 March, p 21) is a remarkable, and as yet
inexplicable phenomenon.
Another “plant” has an even more specific taste for haemoglobin. The malaria
parasite can derive its nourishment solely from haemoglobin. Ensconced within a
red blood cell, the parasite steadily devours the surrounding haemoglobin. While
the hapless blood cell is being eaten, it is also acting as a kind of Trojan
Horse, cloaking the voracious invader from the immune system. Having consumed
almost the entire blood cell contents, the parasite progeny synchronously
rupture their host cells and invade fresh ones, thereby inducing the cyclical
fevers diagnostic of malarial infection.
But what has malaria got to do with plants? Malaria (and related parasites
like Toxoplasma) contain a chloroplast鈥攖he subcellular structure
of plants and algae in which photosynthesis occurs (New 杏吧原创,
Science, 15 March, p 18). Malaria probably doesn’t photosynthesise (but to our
knowledge this has never been experimentally tested) and the function of the
shrivelled chloroplast is enigmatic. Nevertheless, the presence of a chloroplast
redefines malaria (and related parasites) as plants in the broad sense, and
these “plants” have a devastating appetite for haemoglobin鈥攎alaria kills
more than 2 million people each year.
Letters : Browsed off
Houten, the Netherlands
I received a press blurb from Microsoft the other day with a lot of figures
explaining how the use of Internet Explorer is skyrocketing. On the other hand,
according to the press release, the use of Netscape has declined by 160 per cent
in the past half year.
How on earth do they know all this? Does my browser, and yours, make itself
known to the sites it visits? What else do the browsers tell the world about
themselves: the computer they’re on? The person who uses them?
Or is Microsoft guessing?
Letters : Wrong weed
London
“Marijuana as medicine? Tough-on-drugs America is finally coming around to
the idea that the evil weed might do some patients a power of good” (“Turn on,
tune in, get well”, 15 March, p 14).
Evil weed? Not according to the death tolls in Britain, as taken here from a
recent parliamentary Early Day Motion: “Cannabis and Tobacco Use, 25/1/94, Paul
Flynn MP. Description鈥擳hat this House notes that each year in the United
Kingdom deaths attributable to drug use are: cannabis 0, heroin 100, alcohol 25
000, and tobacco 110 000 and that society jails cannabis users while spending
拢100 million plus on tobacco use; and calls for a Royal Commission to
investigate drug use.”
I think you’ll find it is tobacco that has always been referred to as the
evil weed, and rightly so.
Letters : Beatles of Bidston
Noting the correspondence and articles about the fortuitous juxtapositions of
names (most recently, Letters, 22 March, p 54), I find it very unsatisfying that
a joint paper by two of the directors of Bidston Observatory (the present
Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory) has never appeared. Their names? Former
director G. W. Lennon and present director B. S. McCartney. The location of
Bidston Observatory? Merseyside, of course.
Letters : . . .
Neston, South Wirral
We live in an age that can peer into the farthest reaches of the cosmos and
yet some of us still act like terrified children every time a good comet
(Hale-Bopp) comes by.
Why don’t you buy a pair of binoculars, Mr Goldberg, and enjoy the comet for
what it is, a most beautiful and harmless sight.
Letters : Going cuckoo?
by e-mail
I was interested to see the conjunction of an advert for the Church of
Scientology, a protest from the celebrated poet Peter Redgrove concerning the
award of an Ig Nobel prize to pioneers of the neuroscience of yoga, and Amnon
Goldberg’s interesting account of correlations between comets and world events
(Letters, 15 March, pp 50 and 51).
Is this the first cuckoo of the Millennial frenzy? Can we at least expect a
firm denial from your publisher that New 杏吧原创 is being positioned
for a merger with the Fortean Times? The absence of such a denial might
provoke suspicions of a conspiracy.
Letters : Maths of meme
Evanston, Illinois
In his review of my book Thought Contagion, John Casti said that he
would like to see “something akin to the theoretical constructs and modes of
transmission that people use to describe mathematically the spread of a
contagious disease or the diffusion of various types of genes throughout a
population of hosts” (Review, 8 March, p 42) After reading his review, I drew
his attention to a paper I wrote which accomplishes exactly what he wants at
http://www.mcs.net/~aaron/mememath.html.
Unfortunately, the material was far too technical for inclusion in the trade
hardcover Thought Contagion, even as an appendix.
Letters : Adams had it
Auckland, New Zealand
I was fascinated to read about the quantum computer and the possibilities it
presents (“Wake up to quantum coffee”, 15 March, p 28). However, it might pay to
check that Douglas Adams doesn’t already have patents on this. There are certain
similarities with his Infinite Improbability Drive: “All I have to do is give it
a fresh cup of really hot tea, and turn it on!”
Also, the starship Heart of Gold travels by superimposing itself on every
point in the Universe, as do Feynman’s electrons, which take every possible path
to their eventual destination simultaneously. I suggest that quantum computer
scientists Neil Gershenfeld, Amr Fahmy et al guard their doors carefully for
fear of rampaging mobs of respectable physicists.
By the way, I note Adams’s work predates Feynman’s by six years.
Letters : Patent potency
Cambridge
The February 1997 US patent 5 602 390 in the name of Walter L. Colterjohn Jr
cites as a reference US patent 2 548 870 (1951), also in the name of Colterjohn
Jr On the assumption that they are one and the same, Colterjohn has the
distinction that over half of all US patents ever issued fall between these two
of his. Does anyone know of an even wider spread?
Letters : Singing drill
Llanharan, Pontyclun
I was interested in the reference to using material such as silica gel to act
as an acoustic “drill”, to vibrate rock apart during mining operations (New
杏吧原创, Science, 8 March, p 17). Although it’s some time since I read
them, this sounds similar to a technique discussed by the author Anne McCaffrey
in her science fiction books The Crystal Singer and
Killashandra.
From what I remember, the crystal singers have perfect pitch and sing the
correct tone/note to tune their mining equipment to extract the valuable
crystals required for construction of interplanetary communication systems. Now,
with the news of this Canadian study, the technique is beginning to sound almost
plausible.
Letters : Limited lifetime
Bracknell, Berkshire
Re your comments on the MityLite torch (Feedback, 15 March). I am always
amused by the concept of a “lifetime guarantee”, which presumably promptly
expires if the guaranteed object dies.
Letters : Correction
Correction: In the 8 March 1997 issue, Julie Wakefield incorrectly reported
that the Environmental Genome Project, launched by the US National Institute of
Environmental Health Sciences, plans to sequence genes from 20 000 Americans
(This Week, p 7). The correct number is 1000.
Letters : Corporate clones
Cleveland
I was most interested in your articles about Dolly the sheep (This Week, 1
March, p 4 and p 5). My company has been cloning managers for years. The Human
Fertilisation and Embryology Authority is still deliberating as to whether the
product falls within its remit.
Letters : Surgery song
Chichester
I couldn’t believe my ears while waiting to be put through to my doctor the
other day. The song playing was that one which starts: “If it takes forever I
will wait for you . . .” Humour in the NHS, or just coincidence?
Letters : Fast, not loose
Bendigo, Australia
An important property of any consumer material nowadays is its
biodegradability. That 16-letter word has called forth another, the adjective
for not having it: nonbiodegradable. I suggest that the scientific community
should start using (for the latter) the 7-letter word biofast. With luck, the
world will follow.
I can quote a good precedent: bacilli which keep a stain when soaked in
sulphuric acid (they are all mycobacteria) are known as acid-fast bacilli, or
AFBs. Hyphens are not so popular now as they were when that term was coined, so
I do not favour bio-fast. I have seen dress material claimed as colourfast, and
the term fast colours is well understood.
Unfortunately there does not seem to be an acceptable antonym for fast. The
logical one is loose, but bioloose does not seem right.