Letter
I once worked in a lab based on a sewage farm analysing unmentionable
substances, and the term “jobbie” was commonly used.
I was part of a team called Contaminant Effects, which we were not unhappy
with. However, the powers that be decided to rename us Sludge Chemistry, which
was probably more accurate but a whole lot less pleasant.
When we objected, we were asked to supply alternatives, of which my
favourites were “Boys from the Brown Stuff” or “Geo-jobbie-ology”. The matter
was resolved by amalgamating us into a much bigger section whose name I have
forgotten.
Premature exhaustion
“The researchers think imagined exercise initiates the same motor programme
in the brain as real exercise,” according to your report
(This Week, 4 April, p 11).
“That explains why men are always so tired,” exclaimed one of my
colleagues, when I told him about it. “They think about sex all the time.”
Weighty matter
You write that Tesco was giving a discount of 25 per cent per kilo of meat to
Jim Howes
(Feedback, 18 April). My local Sainsbury’s labels some of its
pre-packed meats with “weight per kilo”.
As far as I can tell, this gives the local value of the acceleration due to
gravity. I’m not sure why I need to know this when I’m buying diced pork
steak.
Letter
This apparently timeless question was responded to some years ago by Clive
Anderson, who asked: “Why is there only one Monopolies Commission joke?”
Letter
In a similar vein, one might ask: “What is another word for thesaurus?”
Letter
The simplest answer is that it takes one to know one.
Letter
Are they implying that “any damage whatsoever including direct, indirect,
incidental, consequential, loss of business profits or special damages” can’t be
attributed to an act of God?
I’ve got to tell my insurance company this one.
As to why there is only one Monopolies Commission (Feedback, same issue), the
answer is that there used to be the Monopolies Commission and the Mergers
Commission鈥攗ntil they merged.
Divine law
After reading about Divine solicitor-hiring (Feedback, 18 April), I feel that
I can contribute something to the question of God’s legal representation. I was
immediately drawn to my CD collection (I use them for listening to鈥攕ee
“uses of CDs”, same issue), where I found the answer.
Last year, a band called Eels released a single called Novocaine for the
soul, which had in it the following lines: “Life is white and I am black;
Jesus and his Lawyer are coming back.”
Letter
In my cupboard, I have a packet of spaghetti labelled “19.11.2001, 12:14”. It
seems I have to use the spaghetti before 14 minutes past noon on 19 November
2001.
I’m surprised the people who made it did not include the exact second the
spaghetti becomes unusable.
Letter
At one of our shops in North Walsham, the height restriction shown at the
entrance to the car park is 2300 millimetres.
Letter
If you look at Charles Darwin’s notebooks, you find meticulously recorded
measurements such as 3 32/64 inch.
As a schoolboy I would have been taught to simplify this to 3 1/2 inch, one
half inch being preferred to the cumbersome thirty-two sixty-fourths of an inch.
However, Darwin recorded the length in sixty-fourths to indicate the level of
precision of his measurements.
Playing by numbers
Talking of excessive precision
(Letters, 28 March, p 64), when I was a child,
my father had an English translation of a manual on violin playing by the great
Hungarian-German teacher Carl Flesch.
It told budding violinists to lift their fingers 0.3937 inches from the
fingerboard. I still have occasional visions of music students trying to measure
this with micrometers.
Letter
I have a copy of my grandfather’s Great Eastern Railway pension fund
certificate. It is a beautifully printed, coloured document, with his personal
details completed in an elegant cursive hand. But when you look at the date,
1904, you can see that “18” has been carefully altered, by hand, to “19”.
A time to die
The problem of putting “19” on things too early isn’t limited to tombstones
(Feedback, 4 April).
It also affects those with no plans to die yet.
A friend was in a doctor’s waiting room with the cardboard envelope
containing his medical records when he noticed that the personal details on the
outside included “Date of death”鈥攚ith the “19” pre-printed. He wonders
whether the doctor knows something he is not telling him.
Letter
Is this the answer to the cheap disposal of industrial waste, and a way of
increasing biodiversity? The logical follow-up to your article on the ecological
importance of old industrial sites would be to create such sites deliberately.
Find an area that lacks biodiversity or rare species, and dump waste
chemicals on it鈥攖he weirder the chemicals, the better. Then just wait and
see what develops.
Tea and smoko
Many of the words in Lesley McConnell’s Antarctic dictionary have simply
accreted in Antarctica
(Feedback, 4 April).
“Jobbie” is one such word, and so is “smoko bucket”. In Australia, “smoko” is
slang for tea break, much as Brits might once have called it elevenses. This,
despite the fact that most workers no longer have a cigarette during their
break, just as I often have elevenses at 10.30 or 12.00. Smoko bucket (tea cup)
is an obvious extension, though I am thankful none of the ones I came across on
a recent visit had any trace of “gumbley” in them.
Knotty problem
Charles Seife reports that researchers in Norway have found that conifers had
more branches and pine needles on the southern side, adding “this is no
surprise, since biologists suspect that plants grow more leaves and branches in
the direction of the sun”
(This Week, 21 March, p 10).
This would, I imagine, be equally unsurprising to those timber yards that
know and understand trees. Tim Severin records (The Brendan Voyage,
published in 1978) that when building a replica of a 6th-century
curragh in Ireland, a timber merchant located an ash tree suitable for the
mast:
“We’ll fell this one, and I’ll see to it personally that the mast timber is
taken from the north-facing side of the tree where the white wood is best.
You’ll find no ash that is stronger for your purpose.” Like Severin, I would be
glad of a mast that was not weakened by the knots of too many branches.
Tales of the unexpected
I enjoyed your tale of the person who was named and shamed by “nanny”
software while looking for sites on X-ray crystallography
(Feedback, 28 March).
The Web is full of such traps.
While working at the University of Sydney last year, I was looking for
information on mathematical software called LaTex (pronounced LaaTek). The
search engine found quite a lot about it, but it also turned up a few sites
dedicated to fans of rubber garments.
The time it took me to understand what was going on is a good example of
expectations determining what one sees. So I understand how easy it is to call
up an “adult-only” site in a perfectly innocent, if somewhat naive, fashion.
Total proposal
Marcus Chown’s eclipse report from Aruba
(“Total eclipse”, 4 April, p 26)
includes an anecdote about a diamond engagement ring offered and accepted
between the two “diamond rings” of the total eclipse.
Concern for the historic record and respect for precedence prompts me to
share information published in the November 1997 issue of the Griffith
Observer. During the total solar eclipse of 9 March 1997 at the Berh
Mountain eclipse camp in Mongolia, totality was blanketed in clouds. After the
eclipse, however, one member of my expedition, Angie Sheldon, confided that she
was the only one in the camp who had seen a diamond ring during the eclipse.
That night at dinner, she revealed that her fianc茅, Tom Thornbury, had
proposed to her during totality and had given her a diamond ring. She accepted
and in doing so became the first person on record to become engaged to be
married during a total solar eclipse.
Hot and wet
In response to your feature about why there are more species in the tropics
(“Hot spots”, 4 April, p 32),
it is worth noting that annual precipitation is
greatest in the tropics and decreases towards the poles. In the tropics it seems
that far more of the energy from sunlight is actually utilised. Is it possible
that the large amount of water available enables tropical areas to utilise more
fully the incoming energy and produce far more biomass? And that this enables
more species to be supported by the ecosystem?
Fog hogs
Your item on driving in fog
(This Week, 4 April, p 5) took me back to my
teens. During a driving lesson, my instructor told me that when driving in foggy
conditions, particularly on motorways, I should frequently glance at the
speedometer to check that I was driving at a safe speed. He explained that as
the visibility decreases, so does the input to the visual cortex, so we
subconsciously increase our speed to compensate.
Perhaps motorway displays should flash “Look at your speedo” instead of
simply showing the speed limit.
Free in France
While British Telecom charges over 拢200 for its CD-ROM phone directory
(Feedback, 7 March
and Letters, 4 April, p 57),
France T茅l茅com has
long provided free online directory enquiries as part of its Minitel service.
Even the terminals were free.
Which came first?
Steve Self recently suggested
(Letters, 7 March, p 54) that my preliminary
findings of a link between El Ni帽o (ENSO) events and volcanic and
earthquake activity are “misleading”, citing his own 1997 study.
In fact, this study is about the wholly different issue of whether the dust
and ash spewed into the atmosphere by violent volcanic eruptions generates ENSO
events. To test this hypothesis, Self and his colleagues concentrated on
eruptions that preceded ENSOs by up to three years and generated large volumes
of ash or sulphate. They found that only four out of the 11 eruptions in the
past 150 years that satisfied these criteria could possibly have a causal link,
about what would be expected by chance alone.
None of this is relevant to the issue of whether the converse is
true鈥攖hat ENSOs influence the timing of eruptions through sea level
changes. Closer examination of the data, albeit selected for a very different
purpose, appears to support my original point. Seven of the 11 eruptions
examined occurred shortly after the beginning of a strong ENSO event.
What’s more, the existence of a relationship between rapid deglaciation or
glaciation, major sea level changes and eruptions leading to global cooling in
past geological periods is supported by Self’s own renowned work. In the less
distant past, the eruptions of many coastal volcanoes have shown an
extraordinary sensitivity to small, short-term changes in sea level.
While I would be the first to say that further analysis is vital to determine
whether there really is a link, there is little reason to suppose that El
Ni帽o is “innocent” just yet, and still less reason to rule out ENSOs as a
factor in earthquake timing in the Pacific region, an aspect not covered by Self
in his study.
Arts plus
If Ben Rudder’s daughter was at the school where I have the pleasure to
teach, she wouldn’t be forced to abandon science for the arts after her GCSEs.
Instead, she could take AS level “Science for Public Understanding” alongside
arts A levels
(Forum, 4 April, p 52).
I’m sure I will not be the only one offering the pilot of this new AS format,
which is offered through the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance. I hope that
this course, and others like it, will become more common for precisely the
reasons Rudder outlines.
For the record
Patents for genetically engineered organisms do have one great advantage
(Letters, 28 March, p 62).
Future generations will know who to sue.
Yesterday's killers
Myriam Lefebvre’s refusal to have her children vaccinated against the killer
diseases of childhood reveals her ignorance
(Letters, 4 April, p 56). But it is
not her fault. Western society has rid itself of these killers, so she will
never have seen their victims.
Anyone who has heard a child with whooping cough, seen a baby blinded by its
mother’s rubella infection or given a few pennies to a beggar handicapped by
polio will be very clear about what we have got rid of. Even if eczema and
asthma are the price that must be paid鈥攁nd there are many other possible
causes besides vaccination鈥攖hey are lesser evils than dead, deaf-blind or
crippled children.
Accepted practice should be challenged by new research, especially when
lesser evils are involved. But new truth will not emerge from unquestioning
acceptance of either side of the argument.
Low-tar trick
Your tobacco editorial trivialised the controversies surrounding passive
smoking and low-tar cigarettes
(11 April, p 3).
First, in deriding the debate surrounding passive smoking as a “flap”, you
overlook the cause of the fuss鈥攁 deliberate misrepresentation of
scientific research by the tobacco industry. Outside the tobacco industry, there
is a reasonable consensus about the cancer risks of passive smoking. However,
the results of a WHO study that showed there was a small risk of getting lung
cancer from passive smoking were distorted by tobacco industry scientists, whose
version was reported by one national newspaper under the headline: “Passive
smoking doesn’t cause cancer鈥攐fficial.” Once dignified by the British
press, the bogus story was relayed around the world by newswires and industrious
tobacco PR people.
Secondly, as a coauthor of the report on the negligible health benefits of
low-tar cigarettes, I must reject your charge of “amnesia”. New
杏吧原创 may have reported on this in 1983, but very few of the 12 million
smokers in Britain are likely to know of it. Our purpose was not to highlight
new science, but to respond to an expensive advertising campaign for a brand of
low-tar cigarettes.
What was new in our report was a series of documents just released during US
litigation showing that the tobacco industry deliberately designed cigarettes to
give low tar readings on smoking machines while allowing human smokers to take
in high levels of tar and enough nicotine to sustain addiction. The documents
reveal that their strategy was to create brands offering “health reassurance”
without offering any health benefits.
Finally, you are entirely justified in criticising successive governments for
their inaction, and their cosiness with the tobacco industry. Our further
purpose in highlighting the great low-tar confidence trick was to put pressure
on the British government and European Commission to revise the European
directives on tar and nicotine content, measurement and labelling.
There are encouraging moves on this front, for which the new British
government can take some credit: in December, European health ministers voted to
revise these directives and the Department of Health says it will consider the
issue in its White Paper on tobacco, due in July. Your editorial will
undoubtedly remind ministers that change is necessary, expected and long
overdue.
Wasting wasteland
As a planner working in Greater Manchester, I was dismayed by Fred Pearce’s
article on conserving sites in urban areas
(This Week, 11 April, p 20). Let’s
put things into perspective. Regardless of whether or not 4.4 million homes will
really be needed by the year 2016, it is essential that cities build up
population so that jobs and services can be created for the people that live
there.
To achieve this, derelict sites must be developed. After years of urban
change, there is plenty of open land and the settlement pattern is low-density
and dispersed. Some residents live in areas that are just as isolated as rural
areas when it comes to access, while cities have seen their populations leaching
away into areas of sprawl that encroach on the countryside.
To suggest conserving what many view as eyesores is bogus in the extreme,
especially since the rare fauna and flora seen on some sites appeared as if from
nowhere. The implication is that any site left fallow could spontaneously
acquire interesting wildlife and should therefore be conserved.
Urban ecologists want to preserve sites of little importance to urban
communities, and their campaign will ultimately prove damaging to both cities
and the open land beyond.