Letters : . . . . .
London
My twin sons, aged 26, one living in Norfolk, the other in Dublin, were both
burgled for the first time on Christmas Eve 1997, losing similar items. Is this
amazing, genetic, or as I suspect, an irrelevant coincidence?
Should they be simultaneously burgled in future, I will inform you.
Letters : . . . . .
Hamburg
Crematoriums in Germany must be equipped with filters to remove dioxins. But
not all crematoriums have been able to afford the expensive equipment needed, so
we now have corpses being ferried round the country, and the ashes being
transported back. Mix-ups have occurred.
Letters : Scalding hot
Gideon_Hallett@3Com.com
While warnings on hot food may seem “daft”, as Simon Briscoe maintains
(Letters, 17 January, p 52),
they are frequently there for a good reason. In
addition, his quoted example is so at variance with the facts of the case as to
be verging on the apocryphal.
I stumbled across the details last May whilst browsing the Web; they can be
found at http://caoc.com/mcdonald.html. Examination of a few salient
points might make the case seem less ridiculous.
Mrs S. Liebeck of Albuquerque was the passenger in a stationary car when the
incident in question occurred. The coffee, in line with McDonald’s policy at the
time, was served at a temperature of between 85 掳C and 90 掳C. In the ten
years before this incident (1982 to 1992), there had been 700 reported cases of
scalding attributed to McDonald’s coffee. McDonald’s had stated that they had no
intention of reducing the “holding temperature” of their coffee.
Mrs Liebeck suffered third degree burns over 6 per cent of her skin area,
spent eight days in hospital and underwent skin grafts. She pursued a claim for
$20 000 compensation against McDonald’s, who decided to fight the case.
The judge and jury found in Mrs Liebeck’s favour, describing McDonald’s
behaviour as “reckless, callous and wilful”, and awarded her compensation of
$160 000. This was lower than it might have been, as the court found her
liable for spilling the coffee on herself.
Following the case, the “holding temperature” of McDonald’s coffee was
reduced to 70掳C.
I found Briscoe’s letter to be rather patronising in tone. It is somewhat
ill-founded to assume that the average American citizen or judge is any more
foolish than, say, the average BT Internet subscriber.
Letters : Right of appeal
J.Kirkpatrick@geog.utas.edu.au
A part of my abstract for a conference on ethical behaviour in scientific
research in environmentally sensitive areas was quoted by Ian Anderson to show
that “some scientists protested that they were unfairly singled out”
(This Week, 20/27 December 1997, p 16).
This misrepresents my position. I believe that there is a problem, and that
action should be taken to solve it. However, I argue that complicated guidelines
and criteria supported by complex bureaucratic processes that affect all
researchers, ethical or not, are not the way to deal with the problem.
I do argue for the right of rapid public appeal to a tribunal in relation to
any approvals of research by management bodies that could reasonably be
considered to be in violation of the principle of benefiting the future of
nature.
Letters : Stretcher case
London
In answer to John Rogers’s request
(Letters, 17 January, p 53), I suspect he
and I may be the victims of an urban myth. An elderly acquaintance with the same
surname as me claimed to have been in an RAF stretcher party during the Second
World War. The other three members were Butcher, Gore and De’Ath.
Letters : Launched by light
South Africa
As one of the first civilian scientists to propel tiny objects with Britain’s
most powerful laser over twenty years ago, I would like to compliment New
杏吧原创 on bringing the topic of laser impulse space propulsion (LISP) to
a wider readership
(“On wings of light”, 10 January, p 34).
Leonard David captures the enthusiasm of the leading American scientists in
starting to develop what has to be a more intelligent and eco-friendly way of
getting into space. The laser “fuel” can indeed be ice or air, and even if it
isn’t, laser launching will require some twenty times less fuel than
conventional chemical rockets. (Each shuttle launch “liberates” tonnes of
noxious chemicals into the atmosphere.)
But why only mention Leik Myrabo? There are dozens of eminent laser
scientists working in the field of laser ablation. And what of other nations?
Clearly David never asked anyone, say, at Livermore, or in Britain at the
Rutherford Laboratory Central Laser Facility.
Also Myrabo’s “air-breathing” stage can only be a first (though very useful)
step in getting out of the atmosphere. The major energy contribution has to
happen in space, which is why LISP will have to be done from a high mountain.
Otherwise you “lose sight” of the target. And lower atmospheric air is never
clear enough for long-distance transmission of laser beams.
Could not one of Ian Whadcock’s attractive drawings have been replaced with a
box containing such facts as that the great German engineer Erwin Saenger
invented light propulsion some fifty years ago?
Finally, might I mention that the South African physicist Andrew Forbes and
his colleagues obtained very similar propulsion results to Myrabo’s using the
uranium isotope separation laser at Pelindaba. This was a “fun” experiment and
is reported here for the first time.
Given that laser launching will have to be from a high mountain top
(preferably on the equator since most useful trajectories are equatorial), and
that a poor climate excludes Chimborazo in Ecuador, I leave it to New
杏吧原创 readers to work out which extinct African volcano may one day
become an international space centre.
Letters : Hot numbers
Melbourne, Australia
Italian testing for prime numbers
(This Week, 10 January, p 18) using atomic
transitions at the Nth quantum energy level will be useful for code
breaking when N gets up to the order of 10150. The liberated quantum
of energy would give the code breakers a nice, warm feeling.
Letters : Top hole
hugh.harries@mcmail.com
The idea of wearing a hat to improve the golfer’s swing is not new
(This Week, 10 January, p 11).
Read Those in Peril on the Tee by P. G.
Wodehouse: “His other pet failing, the raising of the head, had been checked by
the fact that he was wearing a top-hat . . . the unseen influence of generations
of ancestors who had devoted the whole of their intellect to the balancing of
top-hats on windy days.”
Letters : Way out
Sarawak, Malaysia
As Julian Weaver
(Letters, 20/27 December, p 81)
says, “w” is pronounced
“double-u”, but surely that leads to “sex[tuple]-u” not “hex-u”.
After experimenting with “tribble-ja” (a derivative of schooldays “dub-ja”
for the letter) I now prefer the term “wibble-u”, though I do note that
“way-way-way” is being used in this region鈥攑ossibly derived from the
Indonesian pronunciation of the letter which is “way”. A variant on that is
“three ways”.
Letters : In praise of pesticides
Brentwood, Essex
Your Editorial of 10 January,
regarding the banning of bromoxynil-tolerant
cotton by the US Environmental Protection Agency, reads more like an exercise in
pesticide-bashing than a considered scientific argument.
At no point in the piece was any comment made on the validity of the science
on which the EPA based its increase in safety margins by an additional tenfold.
Nor was any mention made of the chemicals that were replaced by bromoxynil.
Perhaps bromoxynil is safer than the products it replaced?
The article also stated that bromoxynil is a carcinogen and mutagen. While
this may be true, it is also true that parsnips, mushrooms and black pepper
contain carcinogens (namely psoralens, hydrazines and piperine, respectively)
and that lettuce, rhubarb and string beans, among many others, are known to be
mutagenic. Government authorities haven’t yet banned the population from eating
them, and it is important that the true risk to health from pesticides be
assessed and understood before jumping on the “all-pesticides-are-bad”
bandwagon.
There are risks associated with all chemicals, be they pharmaceuticals,
medicines or pesticides. The focus needs to be on sound scientific principles
and a balanced perspective, which includes remembering the huge contribution to
human health that has been made and will continue to be made by those very
pesticides.
Letters : That's impossible
Poynton, Cheshire
Thanks to the article by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart
(“That’s amazing, isn’t it?”, 17 January, p 24),
I will now desist from boring my friends with the
astounding fact that last year I bumped into my sister, quite by chance, in
Disneyland Paris, when neither of us knew that the other was going to be there.
Dinner parties will never be the same again.
Unfortunately, I will not be able to use the article as ammunition to stop my
bridge-playing friends making the utterly preposterous claim that they know
someone who knows someone who once had a “perfect deal” in a randomly dealt
hand.
It is not true that the number of games going on at any time, anywhere in the
world, is high enough for there to be a reasonable chance of this happening. The
probability is so small that it would require every single living person in the
world to play one million million deals before the chance of a perfect deal
occurring was even as large as your favourite set of numbers coming up in the
National Lottery.
The probability of any one player getting all 13 cards of a suit (with the
other cards shared randomly among the other three players) is much larger, at
about one in a hundred billion per deal. But even this probability is so tiny
that the chances of the event ever having happened in the history of bridge must
be very small indeed.
However, seemingly honest and reliable people do occasionally report perfect
deals. The explanation is simply that the deck was fixed when their backs were
turned, the dealer engaged in some sleight of hand, or the deck had not been
properly shuffled after the previous hand.
Letters : No such law
Those who argue for retention of “Britain’s quarantine laws” on the grounds
that they might protect against entry of zoonotic diseases other than rabies are
deluding themselves
(This Week, 17 January, p 14).
We have no quarantine laws as
such. The European Union forbids obstruction of the free movement of capital,
goods and services between member states, except as authorised by EU law. In
this context, animals are “goods”.
Quarantine of pet animals on entry to Britain is enforced under the Rabies
(Importation of Dogs, Cats and other Mammals) Order 1974, as amended. It enjoys
a continuing derogation from Brussels and it is specifically, and only,
concerned with rabies control.
There is, of course, no reason why we should not have statutory controls over
Leishmania, Echinococcus and other infections of animals if we
wish, but they are matters which should be legislated for independently.
Controls should not be imposed arbitrarily or dishonestly by misuse of the
rabies order, particularly if this interferes with the overdue review of the
anti-rabies legislation now in progress.
Letters : Human flesh is best
Tonbridge, Kent
Wayne Conlan raises biosafety fears about using human tissue rather than
animal tissue for research
(Letters, 6 December, p 55).
He ignores the biohazards which certainly do exist with laboratory animals.
During the development of polio vaccines, thousands of people were inoculated
with a vaccine contaminated with live SV40 virus. This originated from the
monkey kidney cells used during the vaccine’s manufacture and could cause
cancer. The Marburg agent, a hitherto unknown virus, killed several of those
handling the monkey tissues. And in the case of rodents, hantavirus infection
has led to epidemics among laboratory workers and others.
Apart from saving animals, the chief advantage in using human tissue for
research is that results are directly relevant to humans. But there are also
advantages in biosafety. While human material for transplantation or research
can be screened for pathogens known to be prevalent in the donor population, it
is impossible to test for viruses not yet discovered and which produce no
symptoms in their natural hosts.
This is the major fear with xenotransplantation and it could lead to a
devastating new plague, just as HIV is thought to have arisen from a monkey
virus. Likewise, no one can guarantee that any laboratory animal will be safe to
use and abuse.
Letters : Hungry for life
Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Garry Hamilton suggests that it is hunger that drives the fetus out of the
womb and starts off the process of birth
(“Let me out”, 10 January, p 24). But
when my first boy was born, he didn’t succeed in drinking breast milk
straightaway (yes, it has to be learnt). I was told that a baby doesn’t need to
eat or drink in the first three days after its birth. It can easily live on its
reserves. And in fact he did.
So if a baby has reserves of fat or whatever else, how can it be under stress
as a result of hunger?
Letters : X-ray mirage
Oegstgeest, The Netherlands
Your item on NASA’s X-ray mirror
(This Week, 3 January, p 13) claims that a
new mirror technology will allow space to be mapped using X-rays for the first
time.
Astronomers have been able to do this for about twenty years. NASA itself,
not to mention the space agencies of Japan, Italy, Europe, Germany (and probably
others) have been successfully exploiting grazing incidence X-ray optics for
quite a while.
New 杏吧原创 has in the past published some of the images obtained
with those instruments.
Letters : Cremation controls
Leatherhead, Surrey
S. M. Blyth will be relieved to know that crematoriums have to comply with
strict pollution control measures as laid out in the Secretary of State’s
Guidance鈥擟rematoria Pollution Guidance Notes
(Letters, 10 January, p 51).
Crematoriums throughout Britain are currently being upgraded to meet these
new guidelines, which are enforceable by local authorities.
These guidance notes state that each cremator must be continually monitored
for gases and particulate emissions. Temperatures should be maintained at high
enough levels to optimise combustion performance, thereby reducing emitted
pollutants, while stack gas velocities and stack heights must be sufficient to
prevent the discharge plume being affected by downwash.
So S. M. Blyth can, ahem, rest in peace with respect to potential downwind
pollution from crematoriums.