Letters : Tanks for the memory
Sydney
Was anyone else reminded of “Seagoon MCC” when they read of plans by
Britain’s Defence Clothing and Textile Agency to develop decoy tanks to attract
enemy fire (“The vanishing point”, 6 December, p 32)?
Lance Corporal Seagoon, in an effort to prove himself mad and gain discharge
from the armed forces, suggested the placement of cardboard tanks on Salisbury
Plain upon which the Germans would waste thousands of bombs . . . cardboard
bombs as it turned out.
Will Spike Milligan be able to claim prior publication on this idea?
Letters : . . . . .
skinks@unsw.edu.au
Bob Herbold, chief operating officer of Microsoft, seeks to demean his
company’s critics by associating them with Qantas
(This Week, 6 December, p 20).
It should be pointed out that Qantas’s products have never crashed. How about
yours, Bob?
Letters : Costly coffee
Simon.Briscoe@btinternet.com
I am writing to try to explain the rash of daft product warnings that have
recently appeared on supermarket shelves
(Feedback, 13 December).
It all stems from the ridiculous lawsuit that arose after an American (yes,
where else?) woman bought a cup of coffee from a “drive thru” McDonald’s, and
then drove off with it between her legs. When she subsequently spilt it in a
rather unfortunate area, she sued Macdonald’s for not telling her that the
coffee was hot.
McDonald’s and all the other major fast food companies have since placed
warnings on all hot products. It is interesting to note that these warnings are
not carried on their hamburgers.
It seems that British supermarkets either believe that the British are as
daft as the Americans or have no wish to be sued for a customer’s careless
behaviour.
Letters : Sight and surfing
London
I was interested to read your article about the French project that will soon
enable blind people to surf the Internet
(This Week, 6 December, p 15)鈥攂耻迟
did you realise that blind people have been surfing for at least two years, and
that in Britain more and more blind people are coming online?
I have been blind for six years and quickly became computer literate to help
overcome some of the inconveniences that my lack of sight causes. Like many
blind people throughout the world, I touch-type on an ordinary qwerty keyboard,
the text on the screen being relayed courtesy of some cute software that sends
it to an external speech synthesiser that sounds a bit like Stephen Hawking.
Blind people who are proficient Braille readers have the option of using a
braille display, where the information appears under the fingertips in
electronically produced Braille.
Access to text on the Internet is done the same way: I perform hot-key
functions to read specific parts of the screen, so my access, if not as easy as
folk who are fully sighted, is still very possible. Obviously graphics are
beyond my reach, and I am often frustrated by visual icons that do not have text
labels attached to them鈥� but despite all that, I am a keen surfer and
regularly access the Net.
The Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), Britain’s leading
organisation working on behalf of the one million blind and partially sighted
people in the country, has an excellent Web site which contains a wealth of
information of interest to all visitors, be they sighted or visually impaired.
Its address is http://www.rnib.org.uk and I highly recommend it.
Letters : Fighting genes
Canberra
The first edition of The Selfish Gene (1976) ends with the words “we
have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on Earth, can rebel
against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
The endnote to the 1989 edition is even more explicit: “We, that is our
brains, are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against
them. As already noted, we do so in a small way every time we use contraception.
There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large way, too.”
Richard Dawkins is thus no hard and fast determinist, and Tim Ingold’s “rage”
against him (Review, 22 November, p 56) is garishly misplaced.
Letters : Unauthorised
Maidenhead, Berkshire
I have had brought to my attention a letter from Anisa Abbasi, purportedly on
behalf of Wyeth Laboratories, which appeared in your publication under the
heading “Fake fat”
(Letters, 4 October, p 49). I would like to make it clear
that the letter was written without the company’s knowledge or authority and
does not state the company’s position.
Letters : Facing it out
Leicester
When reading Marcus Chown’s article
“Dying to know” (20/27 December, p 50)
about a physicist threatening to shoot himself 10 times with a quantum gun to
prove the many worlds hypothesis, I was reminded of a scene in Carl Sagan’s book
Contact.
In that scene (Chapter 10) Ellie Arroway has a heated discussion with
religious leaders and makes the following offer to prove her faith in science:
“There’s a big Foucault pendulum out there. The bob must weigh five hundred
pounds. My faith says that the amplitude of a free swing can never increase. It
can only decrease. I’m willing to go out there, put the bob in front of my nose,
let go, have it swing away and then back toward me. If my beliefs are in error,
I’ll get a five-hundred-pound pendulum smack in the face.”
The difference between Chown’s universe and Ellie Arroway’s is that one of
the religious leaders made her carry out her experiment (at the Smithsonian in
Washington).
Letters : Number nine
john_wales@hotmail.com
In his response to Feedback’s comment on the Cambridge dons
(15 November),
Nils Erik Grande asks “but why `ninthly’ in both cases?”.
I would suggest that the answer might lie in Miller’s magic number, 7 卤 2,
which gives limits to the maximum number of pieces of information that the human
brain can hold simultaneously in short-term memory.
Miller thus gives a range of 5 to 9, and I would assume that Cambridge (and
Oxford) dons are at the upper boundary鈥攃ompared to mere mortals like me
who struggle at 5. So, the don in question has thought out his argument before
starting to talk, has all his points ranged neatly in short-term memory, and
ticks them off mentally as the discussion progresses. Thus, a limit of 9 is not
surprising.
See http://www.living-history.org/nc5talk/hrair.html for more
information on Miller’s magic number.
Letters : What's in a name?
If the subject of nominative determinism is not quite closed
(Feedback, 13 December),
I wonder if any reader could confirm my late father’s claim that at
some time between the First and Second World Wars there were at Oxford three
professors of surgery, Gore, Blood and Slaughter.
Letters : Hot air at Kyoto
Wellington, New Zealand
The nations meeting at Kyoto have set targets for reductions in emissions of
greenhouse gases under the impression that this will influence their
concentration in the atmosphere. But this impression appears to be false.
According to the latest figures for the concentration of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere, from C. D. Keeling’s site at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, the increase of
CO2 in the atmosphere has been constant, at 3.1 gigatonnes each year
for the past 25 years. Yet CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil
fuels have increased from 4.23 gigatonnes in 1971 to 6.51 gigatonnes in
1996.
An increase of 54 per cent in emissions has had no effect at all on the
atmospheric increment. So why should paltry reductions of 5 to 8 per cent have
an effect?
Letters : Prozac and cons
Cambridge
Discussions about a drug such as Prozac should take into consideration the
view that the seriousness of side effects from a prescribed drug should always
be considered in relation to the seriousness of the disease
(This Week, 6 December, p 14).
Depression is a potentially fatal illness (up to 17 per cent of untreated
patients kill themselves). Prozac and related selective serotonin re-uptake
inhibitors (SSRIs) are widely prescribed despite their known side effects and
withdrawal problems, because they have at least three advantages over older
antidepressants which are not mentioned in your article.
Firstly, they are far less lethal in overdose, a very important gain in a
drug of this class.
Secondly they often work more quickly鈥攊n two weeks rather than six,
which may also save the life of a suicidally depressed patient.
Thirdly, the side effects, while common, often decrease or disappear once the
patient stabilises on the drug.
A further point is that the article compares data on the tranquillisers (not
antidepressants) temazepam and diazepam, dating from 1963, with much more recent
data on the SSRIs. But medical and lay awareness of the importance of reporting
side effects and withdrawal symptoms has greatly increased over that time
period, elevating the number of adverse reports.
Letters : Moving to Mars
Neston, South Wirral
After reading Richard Gott III’s article on the need for space colonisation
to ensure our species’ survival, I have given some thought to how this could be
done (“A grim reckoning”, 15 November, p 36, and
Letters, 6 December, p 54)
A modification of Robert Zubrin’s Mars Direct plan seems to be the best way
forward. The booster that appears in the Direct scheme uses off-the-shelf
shuttle hardware and can lift 120 tonnes into orbit and send some 47 tonnes to
Mars.
For Gott’s idea we shall need more lift. Therefore the solid rocket boosters
on Zubrin’s design should be changed to liquid fuel boosters that can be reused
after they have parachuted or flown back to the launch site. The result is a
vehicle that can place some 130 to 150 tonnes into orbit and throw 60 to 70
tonnes of that directly to Mars.
If I were in charge, the strategy for the colonisation project would go
something like this:
2004鈥擳wo unmanned cargo vehicles depart from Earth containing living
quarters, nuclear power plant and rovers.
2005鈥擟argo vehicles arrive at Mars and aerobrake/ parachute down to
land.
2006鈥擳wo more boosters lift off from Earth. One is a cargo vehicle
while the other contains the eight colonists.
2007鈥擟olonists arrive and begin building habitat.
At every launch window after that date, two cargo vehicles would be launched
to build up the colony. By 2015, a large colony complex would exist, built
partly using indigenous materials.
As Gott points out, time may be limited before our civilisation collapses so
we must start now on this venture or not at all.
Letters : Altruistic Microsoft?
Hong Kong
Notwithstanding Roderick Buck’s belief in the reasonableness of Microsoft’s
request for addresses and fax numbers
(Letters, 22 November, p 67), I am not
convinced of Microsoft’s benignity or altruism.
When I recently tried to get some information from the Microsoft Network Web
site, I received demands that the site set cookies in order to serve me better.
There was no way around this. I could not find the information I wanted unless I
allowed the cookies to be set. I declined.
This strikes me as an invasion of privacy. A reasonable company would permit
the customer to make a choice, as do all other sites I have visited.
Now I read of complaints about a “snooper” function built in to the latest
version of Internet Explorer (4.0) which puts the tin lid on this. Microsoft
apparently claimed that it can be turned off, but how many users would know
this? And who could trust it to work anyway?
To be convinced, visit http://www.cdt.org/privacy/ and try the
demonstration.
Given all this, we might reasonably fear the possibility of demanded
addresses and fax numbers being used in ways we would not appreciate. In a
benign and trustworthy context, Buck is probably right. In this one, no way.
In any case, to be on the receiving end of a mailshot should be the result of
a positive request by the recipient, not by default. I am sick of “ticking the
box” so as not to receive junk.
Letters : Island diet
Bath
Christopher Williams emphasised the importance of not taking a
“single-substance approach” to the threat posed by pollution to human
intelligence
(Letters, 13 December, p 56). Another, related consideration that
arises from the study in the Faeroes, linking mercury in diet to problems in
mental development
(This Week, 22 November, p 4), might be whether or not this
link could have been foreseen.
In 1987, it was reported that long-term intakes of total mercury and
methyl-mercury in the Faeroes were close to the critical level decreed by the
WHO at which negative health effects might be expected. Dietary guidelines for
total mercury and cadmium were also exceeded.
Not surprisingly, the researchers involved recommended that the population of
the Faeroes should significantly restrict consumption of pilot whale tissues.
Whale kidney and liver, the main sources of the metal contaminants, are
apparently no longer eaten in the Faeroes.
In 1994, in The Science of the Total Environment (vol 149, p 97), I
and some colleagues presented data on other contaminants in pilot whale blubber.
Using these and reported dietary intake levels, we calculated that the islanders
would be likely to be exceeding the US Food and Drug Administration’s tolerable
daily intake level for PCBs.
In the US, 2 parts per million (ppm) of PCBs is the official limit in food,
compared with the mean PCB level we found in pilot whale blubber of 20.6 ppm.
Similarly, we found that dieldrin levels were likely to exceed FAO/WHO
acceptable daily intakes.
Recommended dietary limits are generally calculated for an individual
chemical or a closely related group of chemicals. This does not seem to be an
adequate approach where a variety of contaminants with potential synergistic
effects are present in food.
However, on a simple quantitative basis, we felt that the PCBs probably
represented the greatest threat to the consumers. Indeed, dietary levels of PCBs
for the Faeroese were comparable to those of people who eat sports fish from the
Great Lakes, where developmental abnormalities had been associated with
consumption of contaminated fish in the 1980s.
Whilst the effects seen so far in the Faeroes are associated with exposure to
mercury rather than organochlorines, they are perhaps just the tip of the
iceberg of possible consequences. Surely, the time has come to stop taking an
unnecessary risk by eating such highly contaminated food.