Letters : Synod of scientists
The reaction of certain sections of the scientific community to the mounting
evidence for the efficacy of homeopathy resembles that of a synod of Victorian
bishops to the theory of evolution. Your editorial claims that homeopathy is
“contrary to the known laws of physics and chemistry”, but conspicuously omits
to mention which laws
(Editorial, 27 September, p 3).
The conclusion of the meta-analysis recently published in The Lancet
and discussed in your editorial was unequivocal: “The results of our
meta-analysis are not compatible with the hypothesis that the clinical effects
of homeopathy are entirely due to placebo.”
The overall conclusion was that homeopathy is 2.45 times as effective as
placebo. The figure of 1.66 which you quote is the least favourable of the 14
subanalyses performed. Despite this clear conclusion, your editorial works its
way round to suggesting, in the last couple of paragraphs, that homeopathy is a
placebo effect.
Your suggestion that applying scientific methods to homeopathy will destroy
its appeal is certainly novel, but contradicted by the observed facts. Sales of
homeopathic medicines are rising by 20 per cent per year, and this rise has
closely coincided with the advent of controlled clinical trials.
It is true that the claims made for homeopathy cannot be accommodated within
current scientific concepts, but they do not contradict any fundamental
scientific law or principle. The onus is on those who make such loose assertions
to substantiate them.
It is high time that the scientific community recognised and considered the
implications of the substantial clinical trial evidence for the efficacy of
homeopathy, instead of scratching around for pretexts to ignore or belittle
these challenging research findings.
We cannot agree that claims made for homeopathy contradict no fundamental
scientific law. If the principle of dose response, the law of mass action and
the second law of thermodynamics are not fundamental to science, then what
颈蝉?鈥抬诲
Letters : . . . . . . .
Leverkusen, Germany
There is a third alternative to dubbing and subtitles for films, though it is
rarely used. It involves the audience wearing headphones, through which they
hear a translation of the film script being read, but not “acted”, by a
competent reader. The original sound is still audible, and (surprisingly
perhaps) within minutes one subjectively perceives the actors to be speaking the
translated script.
The obvious advantage over the other methods is that those who understand the
original language can dispense with the system and enjoy the film without
distraction. For everyone else, the advantage over subtitling (quite apart from
the visual aspects) is that the whole text can be translated. In subtitles, up
to two-thirds is lost. Vis-脿-vis dubbing, an audio translation avoids the
usual problems of bad acting, bad directing and bad casting, as well as the
culture clash that results from, say, samurai appearing to speak Italian.
The system must be at least as cheap as subtitling, and much cheaper than
dubbing. Nevertheless, I have only ever experienced it once, in London’s
National Film Theatre about 30 years ago.
Letters : Cheese doesn't please
Tring, Hertfordshire
Feedback (27 September)
reports how bureaucrats in Norway have insisted that
cheese is used to bait mousetraps. What evidence is there that cheese works? I
have always understood that it was a myth.
I have had great success with unbaited treadle traps left in mouse runs with
a few porridge oats scattered nearby and on the treadle. Modern cage traps are
even better. A single trap will catch six or seven mice at a time and clear a
whole local population in a few days.
Letters : Corrections:
In the article entitled “A cooler hum”
(This Week, 5 July, p 6),
the range of temperatures quoted for the interior of a proposed
acoustic refrigerator is theoretical, not observed, as was implied by the
article. Practical tests with the prototype have not yet begun. When they do,
water will serve as the refrigerant, not a mixture of ethylene and water as
described in the article. More information is available at
http://widget.ecn.purdue.edu/~minner/TAC.html.
Also, credit for all the experimental results reported in the story entitled
“Cancer setback”
(This Week, 4 October, p 12)
should go to Maria Blasco of the
National Centre of Biotechnology in Madrid and her American collaborators Carol
Greider, Ron DePinho and Peter Lansdorp.
In the article, it may not have been clear to all readers that she and her
colleagues had generated the reported data showing that mice that are unable to
make an enzyme called telomerase were normal at first, but developed shorter
telomeres and increased chromosomal abnormalities with each successive
generation.
Letters : . . . . . . . .
Peter.Knight@bigfoot.com
Everything that I have been reading about homeopathic agents being more
effective when super-dilute has reminded me of a passage originally written by
Terry Pratchett: “A recent but short-lived line, which never caught on despite
the best scientific recommendation, was Bearhugger’s Homeopathic Sipping
Whiskey. It is a founding fact of homeopathy that the effectiveness of a remedy
increases with dilution. Jimkin decided, therefore, that this idea could
profitably be applied to his own product.
“Strangely enough, the slogan `Every drop diluted 1 million times!’ failed to
attract custom even though, in theory, merely being in the same room as an
uncorked bottle of the stuff should make the purchaser riotously drunk.”
(The Discworld Companion, p 36)
Letters : Plethora of plastic
Manchester
We are told that the Divx disc would cost less than $5 and would go
out of date two days after the customer hires it from the video shop, thus
making it disposable (This Week, 27 September, p 7).
Is anyone else overjoyed at the prospect of throwing yet more plastic in their bins?
What makes it acceptable to the mass market to replace a reusable product
(VHS) with a disposable one (Divx)? Even to conceive of such an idea in this age
of sustainable development is unethical.
Letters : Hilltop horrors
Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire Wales
You state that: “Onshore wind energy is already close to being competitive
with conventional electricity generation”
(This Week, 6 September, p 18).
However, is price all that matters and is wind power really green?
Wind turbines liberate less CO2 than any other means of generating
electricity and the energy is free. The crunch comes with the very low energy
density of the source, each turbine generating less than 1 megawatt.
In 1992 the Department of Trade and Industry indicated that 40 000 turbines
would be necessary to provide 10 per cent of Britain’s electricity needs. Since
then the power output of the average turbine has doubled, but experience shows
that 50 per cent of annual capacity is rarely achieved because of insufficient
wind.
Thus, we still need some 40 000 machines鈥攁 200-foot structure for every
two square miles of rural Britain. The reality is worse as the developers are
targeting the uplands and west coast, where winds are strongest. Already, many
magnificent vistas have been violated by wind turbines, for example those of
Carno, Cemaes and Llandinam in Wales and parts of the Cornish coast.
To achieve the magic 10 per cent, every hilltop and coastal cliff in western
Britain would have to carry a cluster of gesticulating monsters. Are our last
wild places to be sacrificed to the myth of green wind energy when the same
CO2 emission could be saved by a very small investment in energy
conservation? If each domestic user in Britain replaced one 100-watt light bulb
with a low-energy equivalent, the annual saving would approximately equal the
output of all existing wind turbines.
Letters : Untimely eclipse
s.paris@virgin.net
I read Marcus Chown’s review of Eclipse! with interest, but the
final sentence of the penultimate paragraph came as a bit of a shock
(Review, 4 October, p 41).
The next total eclipse that will be visible in Britain has been noted in my
diary for some years now, but I understood that it would take place on 11 August
1999 not 20 August.
Is this some plot by the hoteliers of Cornwall to persuade me to make two
bookings, or have other references been in error? Which is the correct date,
please?
Marcus Chown writes: No, don’t change your booking. The next total Solar
eclipse can be seen from Cornwall on 11 August 1999, not 20 August. We apologise
for the error. If you’d like to follow its track, try NASA’s roundup of eclipse
paths at
http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/eclipse/970309/text/paths-on-internet.html
Letters : Knee-deep in frogs
Finland
Your report of a “wave of deformed frogs” turning up across North America
mentions pesticides, sunlight and parasites as possible causes
(This Week, 13 September, p 18).
A possibility, completely overlooked, is that in recent years malformed frogs
have been allowed to survive and become more obvious due to a parallel decline
in natural predators in the water (carnivorous fishes) and on land (cranes,
herons, storks) that could have weeded out deformed individuals.
Other reasons to the ones mentioned in your article have also been discussed.
In order to speak of an “explosion” or a “wave” of deformed frogs, one needs
reliable figures about such populations in the past. If comparisons cannot be
made, how can one say the number of deformed frogs is increasing?
Since 1982, several thousand amphibians from a location in Japan have been
examined for deformations (Acta Hydrobiologica, vol 38, p 19). No
evidence has been found for a rise in deformations.
Letters : Wind-free world
Dublin, Ireland
Pete Minney shows that there is no wind at the North Pole, yet he lacks the
gumption to follow the logic to its conclusion
(Letters, 27 September, p 53).
His argument is not based on the rotation of the Earth but purely on an
arbitrary coordinate system devised by Western civilisation. It can be made to
apply to any point on the world’s surface by a shift of coordinates. Therefore
there is no wind anywhere in the world.
This has the disastrous effect of putting most meteorologists out of a job,
but solves the problem of El Ni帽o and its effect on global warming in one
fell swoop.
Letters : Double-tongued TV
Riniken, Switzerland
David Welch from Ottawa is in favour of dubbing television programmes until
separate audio channel technology has reached the marketplace
(Letters, 20 September, p 62).
Clearly, the television technology in Canada is rather behind
the times, at least compared with the German-speaking part of Europe.
In Switzerland, we have for many years had so-called two-tone transmissions
in which the left stereo channel carries the dubbed soundtrack and the right
channel the original soundtrack. Unfortunately, the number of programmes
transmitted in two-tone is very small. On asking one of the Swiss stations why
this was so, the answer was that not all films are available in two-tone.
Two-tone technology does, however, have a downside, especially for
English-speaking families in “exile”, like ours. Our selection of television
viewing tends to be based more on whether a programme is to be transmitted in
two-tone, rather than on its likely quality. One ends up watching a lot of
rubbish, without the consolation that it may at least improve one’s German.