Letters : . . . . .
w.garvin@qub.ac.uk
Your story reminded me of H. A. Brown’s theory that the poles become heavier
over time due to precipitation. At a certain point the Earth rotates through 90
degrees, with the poles coming to lie where the equator was originally. This
hypothesis has been used to explain the various catastrophes that have befallen
life on Earth, such as the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Apparently, Brown was thought a bit quirky, but his theory was eventually
used as the basis for a novel, and a very good read it was. The Hab
Theory, by Allan W. Eckert, was published by Sphere Books in 1977. It was
based around the idea that the next rotation will take place in the near
future.
Letters : . . . . .
MNG5@compuserve.com
This is clear evidence in support of the theory of continental drip.
Initially all land lies at the North Pole, which is therefore up, as we all
know. Then the land slowly drips down, which is why all continents are
pear-shaped with little driplets at the bottom (like Sri Lanka and
Madagascar).
When all the land has dripped to the bottom, north becomes south (thus
explaining the periodic shifts in magnetic poles as well) and it all drips back
again.
Letters : Breathing easily
London
David Prichard misses two crucial points when he argues that destruction of
the ozone layer would kill oxygen-producing organisms and thus increase global
warming (Letters, 11 October, p 58).
The first is that the stock of oxygen in the atmosphere is very large
compared to the annual turnover which occurs through photosynthesis. If
photosynthesis were to cease entirely on the Earth, the oxygen in the atmosphere
could keep all animals breathing for thousands of years before its concentration
fell significantly below the current 20 per cent. (This is not as reassuring as
it sounds: without photosynthesis there would be nothing to eat, so animals
would die of starvation鈥攂ut certainly not of asphyxiation.)
The second point is that practically all the matter produced by
photosynthesis becomes a food source for one organism or another within a
relatively short time. The organisms that Prichard cites may well generate
oxygen when they are alive, but once they become food for something else, their
biomass is very rapidly converted back to carbon dioxide and returned to the
atmosphere.
The issue of oxygen production is frequently raised in relation to the
destruction of rainforests, with such emotive phrases as “the rainforests are
the lungs of the world”. The reality is that rainforests, or any other
vegetation for that matter, have almost no influence on the level of atmospheric
oxygen. Virtually all the biomass generated by the forests is consumed as food
in one form or another, and the oxygen created by photosynthesis is matched by
an equivalent uptake of oxygen used for respiration.
If the rainforests were to disappear, there would be a huge loss of habitat,
and many plants and animals would die, but the balance between oxygen supply and
demand would remain unchanged, both locally and globally.
Letters : Young bucks' brains
Chandlers Ford, Hampshire
I was so intrigued by your item suggesting that Herman Melville knew about
BSE/CJD (Feedback, 27 September)
that I got Moby Dick out of the
library. Alas, when I found the passage (chapter 65, “The whale as a dish”)
where he compares whales’ brains with calves’, I found that a little creative
misreading has been going on.
My copy has it: “Some young bucks among the epicures, by continually dining
upon calves’ brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their own, so as
to be able to tell a calf’s head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires
uncommon discrimination.”
In other words, young bucks are really stupid, but eating calves’ brains
eventually improves things to the point where they have some slight
intelligence.
Nice story, shame about the facts.
Letters : Sexy snails
Bradfield, Berkshire
I was very sorry to read that members of the team investigating Noah’s flood
(4 October, p 24)
were so traumatised by their experiences on the Black Sea that
they began to find molluscs sexually attractive (“Back on dry land the team
began dating these snails.”). Was there no counselling available?
Letters : Manchester cited
Manchester
The generally informative article by Sheldon Glashow was not strong on
historical accuracy
(“Blessed is the weak”, 11 October, p 28).
Both the date and
place for Ernest Rutherford’s alpha-scattering experiment were wrong.
The experiment was set up in 1910 and carried out at Manchester University by
Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden under the supervision of Rutherford. The
laboratory is said to be weakly radioactive to this day.
Manchester is certainly blessed to have been the site of this significant
advance in our understanding of the atomic nucleus.
Letters : Cornwall eclipsed
Williamstown, Massachusetts
The incorrect date given (it should be 11 August 1999) is not the only
problem with Marcus Chown’s concluding statements in his review of Philip
Harrington’s new book Eclipse!. Chown states that he has booked a hotel
in Cornwall to view the eclipse and implies that others should do the same
(Review, 4 October, p 41, and
Letters, 18 October, p 58).
First, the region of Cornwall in totality is too small to accommodate all the
the people who will want to go there, especially given the road capacity. All
roads inward will probably be closed the day before.
Second, the weather forecasts show only about a 10 per cent chance of clear
weather for the event in Cornwall. The British Astronomical Association is going
to a Channel island, and people in general are advised that the weather
forecasts are somewhat better along the track in Germany and much better as far
east as Hungary and Romania.
Baily’s Beads (not Bailey’s, as Chown had it) and the corona shining in the
dark sky should not be missed.
Letters : Correction:
Guido Caldarelli of Manchester University points out that
he did not lead the research described in the story “Boom to bust”
(This Week, 18 October, p 12).
He collaborated in the work with Yi-Cheng Zhang and Matteo
Marsili, who began the project, at the University of Fribourg in
Switzerland.
Letters : Milking toxins
Olathe, Kansas
The increased levels of dioxin in the environment are a consequence of
recycling and waste incineration, notes Fred Pearce
(This Week, 4 October, p 21).
This contamination is partly responsible for nursing mothers passing dioxin
to their babies via breast milk.
The hormone prolactin can induce lactation. So it seems probable that giving
the hormone to women who later intend to nurse children, then collecting their
milk and discarding it, could significantly reduce levels of the toxic material
in their body tissues, and would safeguard nursing infants.
The level of chlorinated compounds such as dioxin is highest in the breast
milk for the first child and lower for subsequent children. So inducing
lactation before the mother nurses that first child might prove helpful. Are
there any harmful side effects in inducing lactation in a woman before she
becomes pregnant?
Indeed, if induced lactation is an effective way to remove toxins from bodily
tissues, would trying the treatment in everyone past puberty cause problems?
Would giving prolactin to men cause them to lactate? And would collecting and
discarding their milk reduce the levels of toxic substances in their bodies?
Letters : Too many males
We are concerned about John Manning and colleagues’ report on variations in
the human sex ratio, published in a letter to Nature and reported in
your columns (This Week, 27 September, p 11).
The authors present data on first and second-born children in 301 families,
which ostensibly support the notion that offspring of “older” fathers and
“younger” mothers are more likely to be male.
The nonrandom origin of Manning’s sample, its small size, and the age
groupings chosen for analysis are cause for concern. In the general population,
the normal sex ratio is around 1.06, yet Manning and colleagues report a ratio
of 1.26 (168 boys to 133 girls) among first-born children, and 1.17 (303:258)
overall. Within first births they demonstrate a trend in increasing sex ratio
with grouped parental age difference, but the groups are nonstandard (the age
differences are -9 to -1 years, 0 to 5 years, 5 to 15 years) and produced
unequal numbers of children (43, 201 and 57 children, respectively).
The largest group of children (born to parents with an age difference of 0 to
5 years), which will contain most of the above-mentioned male excess, dominates
the statistical analysis, and such a bias could alone be responsible for the
observed results. Further, all the national patterns highlighted by the authors
in support of their claim that “dominant” fathers are more likely to sire sons
have alternative and generally more plausible explanations.
Manning’s article is in many ways typical of studies in this area, much of
the evidence for various theories being almost anecdotal, but often presented as
established fact.
In a large, unbiased, population-based analysis of 549 048 linked
first-to-fifth order births (live and still) occurring to 330 088 mothers in
Scotland, we found no evidence that gender determination is influenced by
parental social class, whether assessed using paternal occupation at
birth鈥攑robability or p value is 0.12鈥攐r maternal occupation
at time of booking her first pregnancy (p= 0.57). Further, apart from
random variation, the sex ratio of 1.06 remained constant at all birth orders
(p= 0.18), and did not vary with any of the many parental
characteristics on which we had information.
Manning’s report does not alter our conclusion that, taking the population as
a whole, there is little evidence that the human sex ratio is anything other
than a chance process, albeit one in which the probability, at around 51 per
cent, is always slightly biased towards a male child.
Letters : Pirouetting poles
n.d.corbett@sms.ed.ac.uk
Having read your snippet on pole-shifting
(Feedback, 11 October), I decided
to do a bit of research on the Net on the subject. From what I found, much of
the pole-shift theory was put together by a Charles Hapgood in the 1950s. He
says that the centripetal force on a large unbalanced pole would cause the
Earth’s rigid crust to move over its underbits (sorry, I don’t have the correct
terminology to hand). Even Albert Einstein was interested, saying that Hapgood’s
theories “electrified” him.
There is evidence to show that the last great pole-shift was only about 10
000 years ago, and we may well have another one in the next century鈥攇lobal
warming is making the icecaps thicker. There is some interesting material on the
subject at http://www.lauralee.com/rflemath/ecd.htm. There are also
plausible reasons given as to why Antarctica could be the lost continent of
Atlantis, plunged into the polar cold.
Letters : Funding fossil fuel
Southampton
As a former Shell exploration geophysicist and green activist, I find it
heartening to see Shell finally make a significant move into the market for
renewable energy sources with its announcement last month that it is to invest
in developing solar power.
However, taxpayers are still funding fossil fuel expansion. Many European
countries, including Britain, reward companies that are exploring and developing
oil and gas reserves with favourable tax treatment or low royalties. Governments
must now reduce subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and do more to boost
renewable energy technologies.
The money handed out to the fossil fuel and nuclear industries is holding
back the rise of solar renewable energy technologies. It reinforces the
dominance and influence of the traditional industries, and takes much-needed
money away from the alternatives. It also undermines the European Union’s notion
of truly competitive energy markets.
Letters : Last word on Y2K
g1smd@amsat.org
Geraldine Fenton assumes that it is better to leave your PC on when the date
changes to 1 January 2000
(Letters, 27 September, p 53).
This fails to take into account that when an IBM-compatible PC is left on at
the end of 1999, the resultant “2000” date shown by the “DATE” command is only
the DOS date, not that held in the real-time clock (RTC) chip. Using a utility
to view the RTC contents will show it has rolled over from 1999-Dec-31 to
1900-Jan-01. Programs using a two-digit year or this incorrect RTC date will
fail at the start of 2000.
The RTC is crystal-controlled and stable. It is kept going by a small battery
while the machine is switched off. The DOS clock is interrupt-driven. It can
lose several minutes a day. After the machine has been switched off, DOS rereads
the RTC when the PC is next switched on.
The RTC date will roll over from 1999-Dec-31 to 1900-Jan-01 whether the
machine is on or off at the time. When DOS reads the RTC, if the RTC date is
outside the range 1980-Jan-01 to 2099-Dec-31, the DOS clock will default to
1980-Jan-04. This condition does not change the RTC date. So the next day the
RTC will read 1900-Jan-02, then 1900-Jan-03 and so on. The DOS date will default
to 1980-Jan-04 each and every time the machine is rebooted, causing problems to
users whether their programs use the RTC or DOS.
Only if the machine is left on at the end of 1999 does DOS correctly advance
to 2000 on its own鈥攁nd then, only those applications that use the DOS
date/time with a four-digit year will carry on working. Leaving the machine on
at the end of 1999 will not correct the problem with the RTC. At the next reboot
the DOS clock will still go wrong because of the wrong date fed from the RTC.
Without user intervention, programs using the RTC will always fail, whether the
machine is left on or not.
Using DOS version 3.3 or later, the “1900” date in the RTC can be corrected
at the DOS prompt by using the “DATE” command. Even if the date shown appears to
be correct you still need to type the date in again. You are only looking at the
DOS date not the RTC. Pressing “enter” only will not update the RTC.
Only on the very latest machines does the BIOS intercept the 1900 date from
the RTC at reboot and correct it to 2000; the rest leave the RTC at 1900 and DOS
defaults to 1980. Even so, most new PCs are not currently capable of putting the
RTC date right if the machine is already on and running when 1999 ends.
Using utility programs like VIEWCMOS.EXE, 2000.EXE, DOSCHK.EXE will show
these things to be true. These can be obtained free by following the links at
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/dstrange/y2k.htm.
The above explanation for DOS applies equally to Windows.
A fuller version of this letter is available on the New 杏吧原创 Web site at:
/ns/971108/letter.html. This correspondence is
now closed until January 2000.