Correction
In “Money for old rock” (This Week, 8 August, p 20), the
quotation “It’s a smouldering, angry spot in scientists’ minds” was
misattributed to John Bradley of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
The speaker was actually Ralph Harvey of Case Western Reserve University in
Cleveland, Ohio.
Letter
Reading your editorial reminded me that my first New 杏吧原创 was a
free copy of the first issue handed out when I was in the sixth form. I have
been a regular reader ever since. Throughout university I clipped articles as a
welcome supplement to, and usually an improvement on, my lecture notes.
As geology students in the early 1960s, we were in no doubt that continental
drift was a proven fact. Not so our tutors, who believed that the world had once
been linked by land bridges. I remember one going from Africa to Australia via
Madagascar.
Any mention of continental drift was banned, and we were politely informed
that if we included it in an examination answer this would lead to immediate
failure. I wonder, what are today’s heresies that will be tomorrow’s
orthodoxies?
Unthinkable
Your editorial illustrates the difficulties facing the scientist who thinks
the unthinkable (Editorial, 1 August, p 3). Alfred Wegener’s hypothesis of
continental drift was, as you say, a prime example.
A similar fate befell the British geologist Arthur Holmes. Wegener proclaimed
the hypothesis of continental drift, but Holmes provided the mechanism. As early
as 1928, he suggested that convection currents within the Earth’s mantle, caused
by heat from radioactive decay, could provide the driving force for continental
drift. He also conceived of spreading centres, where new crust formed, and
regions of compression, where crust returned to the mantle.
It was many years before it was grudgingly accepted that Holmes’s concept was
in all essentials the seafloor spreading theory. He still does not receive the
credit due to him for his unthinkable thought.
Currency clash
Cedric Smith asserts that three letter acronyms (TLAs), being unique and
unambiguous, are superior to special symbols for representing currencies
(Letters, 1 August, p 48).
If only. It would work if everyone agreed on the standard to use鈥攋ust
as it would if everyone agreed on a standard for the special symbols. But what
is the TLA for pounds sterling? STG, UKL and GBP are all in common use. How
about Dutch guilders? DUT, HFL, DFL, DGL, GLD, NGD, NGL and NFL all compete.
As for ambiguity, does AUS mean Australian dollars or Austrian schillings?
Strangely, when I worked in a foreign exchange dealing room in the mid-1970s,
the commonest cause of expensive errors was the confusion between US dollars and
Swiss francs, both of which were abbreviated CHF (for clearing house
funds鈥攖he normal form of US dollars, as distinct from federal
funds鈥攐r confederation helvetica francs).
Happily the mid-1980s abolition of the distinction between clearing house and
federal funds means that CHF now means only Swiss francs (as do SWF and
SFR).
The inability of computers to represent national currency symbols is largely
due to the rest of the world playing dead in the face of US cultural hegemony,
ASCII having achieved an even greater penetration than Coke and McDonald’s.
Letter
It has been suggested by other investigators and ourselves in various
scientific publications that the endogenous opioid system (EOS) is involved in
the placebo responses seen in pain, addictive withdrawal states and the
treatment of depression.
The findings covered by New 杏吧原创 seem to indicate that 75 per
cent of the benefit obtained in the treatment of depression by antidepressants
is related to their nonspecific placebo effects. A possible explanation for this
surprising finding is that expectation and other positive reinforcements that
the patient experiences during treatment could well activate the EOS, producing
the desired mood elevation.
If this is indeed the case, it would seem that other drugs which activate the
EOS may also have antidepressant actions. Indeed, morphine, which is the
prototype opioid, has well-known antidepressant actions which were used in the
19th century. Analgesic nitrous oxide (N2O), the first gaseous opioid,
has already been shown to have antidepressant properties in clinical practice.
And, since its introduction over a century ago, N2O has been shown to
cause no clinically significant addiction in the millions of cases in which it
has been used at both analgesic and anaesthetic concentrations.
In view of these findings it would seem that a major advance in the treatment
of depression would be the development of an oral preparation that activates the
EOS in a similar fashion to analgesic nitrous oxide.
Life-saving pills
I am monitoring your correspondence on the placebo effects of antidepressants
with dismay (This Week, 11 July, p 13,) (Letters, 1 August, p 47, and)
(8 August, p 51). Once again, as with so many areas in medicine, the patient’s
views are not even solicited, let alone considered. There is no doubt in my mind
about the effects of antidepressants.
My 36-year history of repeated episodes of depression and manic depression
began in early adolescence. Some 13 years of various psychotherapy treatments
made little impact on the disorder, though they helped me cope with it somewhat
better.
I tried most of the antidepressants currently available, which either had no
effect or actually made me more anxious and jittery. Placebo effects?
However, amitriptyline has given me, belatedly at 45, a more or less normal
life. I do not think that this treatment, which turned me from a suicidal
depressive, unable to eat or sleep, into a happy woman, enjoying husband, family
and the general day-to-day business of getting on with life, can be judged a
placebo. All this happened within one week of starting amitriptyline, where
Prozac and the rest had failed.
I recently asked to change my medication, as an effect of amitriptyline is to
allow me to enjoy my food rather too much and I wanted to lose weight. The new
drug precipitated an intense mania within two weeks. I am back on what I call my
“life-savers”.
I advise correspondents like Warren Mansell to ask patients’ views. Or is
this yet another area where, as in so many others, patients’ opinions are
irrelevant?
Controlling the sky
You referred in your article on air-traffic control to a recent announcement
about the Swanwick air-traffic control centre which was said to be “the fifth
successive delay to the project” (This Week, 1 August, p 18). Yet there has been
no such announcement.
The fact is that for the past 12 months, National Air Traffic Services (NATS)
has consistently said that it is not working to a specific date for Swanwick but
to a programme in which the winter of 1999/2000 represents the earliest possible
window of opportunity for it to become operational. Our intention is to bring
the centre into operational service at the earliest opportunity, consistent with
maintaining the safety of the systems and meeting the service provision
requirements of our customers, the airlines.
As recognised experts in this field, Nigel Horne of GEC and Martyn Thomas of
Praxis Critical Systems have concluded after detailed investigation that the
project is well advanced and under control. They are, however, also agreed that
our major mistake was to set an overly ambitious timescale with insufficient
allowance for remedying the snags inevitable in so complex a project. We have
publicly acknowledged that mistake.
It seems curiously negative for a scientific journal to suggest that because
something is untried it is unlikely to work. The fact that no other country has
proposed a public/private partnership for its air-traffic control system (the
British government intends to offer 51 per cent of NATS to the private sector)
is not a sufficient reason to condemn the idea, particularly when air-traffic
control infrastructure requires a continuous stream of investment to enable it
to meet the needs of air travellers.
Sue the bug bosses
Why is there a commercial problem with the millennium bug? There are British
Standards dating back to 1971 specifying that the date in computer programs
should be in a format with 4 digits for the year (BS EN 28601, 1992; BS 5249,
part 1, 1976; BS 4760, 1971).
There can be very few software or embedded microprocessor applications in use
today which predate these standards. Indeed, I would imagine most postdate the
1992 standard. With the profusion of firms working to quality management
standards, won’t there be a common requirement to adhere to any British
Standards applicable?
If any information technology products or services have been purchased on the
understanding that they adhere to all relevant British Standards, isn’t the onus
firmly on the computer industry to deal with the problem itself? Indeed, why
can’t consumers sue them under breach of contract for the time we have had to
spend dealing with their failure to conform to British Standards?
Letter
I wholeheartedly agree with Smith. I have read that computer companies are
developing a new on-screen character for the euro currency. Have they not
realised that over 99 per cent of computers these days use the ASCII character
set, which is not some kind of basket into which you can throw new characters,
but a fixed set of exactly 256 characters?
To introduce the euro character, one of the existing ones would have to be
changed. While I agree that not all of the existing characters are needed, the
whole idea of a change in the established standard is absurd. That would mean
making loads of updates in computer software (and possibly hardware as well),
amounting to almost as much fuss as the millennium bug problem.
So I suggest everyone take heed of Smith’s solution, to use the three-letter
acronym for the currency (which I believe is XEU).
Wading in
Fred Pearce’s article highlighted some important issues that must be faced if
internationally important waterfowl populations (principally waders and ducks)
that winter around the coasts of Britain are to be maintained
(“Washed up”, 25 July, p 32).
Over 25 per cent of the East Atlantic Flyway populations of 10 species of
overwintering wader are concentrated in estuaries and along the coasts of the
British Isles. I believe that these waterfowl populations are threatened by two
major changes to their maritime habitats.
First, the predicted rise in sea level and temperature is very likely to
affect their distribution and especially the quality of their habitat. Second,
stopping the input of organic matter into estuaries and along the coasts of
Britain may have a negative impact on the capacity of these habitats to continue
supporting the presently high densities of waterfowl.
Unfortunately, I am misquoted in the article. Although some species which
winter on non-estuarine coasts may be decreasing, all the species of wader that
commonly winter on British estuaries are either stable or increasing.
Furthermore, I never suggested that 20 000 waders disappeared after a sewage
outfall was closed on the Mersey Estuary. The best example of the effect of
closing off a sewage outfall on birds was recorded in the Firth of Forth, where
the British population of scaup, a species of diving duck, crashed as the birds
redistributed themselves to areas where they were no longer counted or left
Britain. Presumably with the closure of the outfall the prey of this carnivorous
duck declined and the birds could no longer forage effectively.
Letter
Further to your Monopolies Commission thread: why isn’t “phonetic” spelt
phonetically?
"Joke" joke
A reader quoted the joke “Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?” and
asked whether the joke “Why is there only one Monopolies Commission joke?” was
paradoxical, insofar as it created a second Monopolies Commission joke and
thereby invalidated itself.
The answer is, of course, that it doesn’t. The second joke is not a joke
about the Monopolies Commission but about Monopolies Commission jokes, and
therefore is not itself a Monopolies Commission joke. There is scope for a
further Monopolies Commission joke which would invalidate the Monopolies
Commission joke joke, but naturally not the Monopolies Commission joke.
Incidentally, if magnetic monopoles are ever isolated and prove to have
commercial value, would there be a risk of a monopoles monopoly and would we
need a specific Monopoles Monopolies Commission?
Team effort
Your article about the Linn Sondek CD12 has caused great interest and a
stream of phone calls and e-mails (This Week, 1 August, p 17). Thank you for
writing about this extraordinary product.
I would like to make one correction. Although I am flattered to be named as
the designer of the product, this is not true. My job as design group manager is
to support our design teams to make products like this.
The CD12 is the result of the work of many people from all over the company.
It is not possible for one person to create a product like this. We applied our
experience from making hi-fi systems for 25 years and the project team devoted a
year of solid effort.
Switched by Dr Who
Like many people I have replaced my steam-driven tape-mangling answerphone
with computer software that separates incoming calls into faxes, voice messages
and data, and sends each to an appropriate “mailbox”.
A problem with this emerged recently, however. When callers attempted to
leave voice messages for my teenage daughter the system decided to switch to fax
mode, and after hearing a few seconds of eardrum-withering “negotiation” they
tended to abandon the attempt and send a postcard instead.
Despite the twin benefits of a saving on hard disc space and the probable
reduction in my telephone bill (due to the reduced need on my daughter’s part to
reply to incoming calls), I decided to try to put things right. I eventually
found the source of the problem. She had replaced her (verbal) mailbox greeting
message with a few seconds of what sounded like leftover sound effects from an
early episode of Dr Who, but according to her was music. The system was
fooled into believing that it was talking to a fax machine.
At my suggestion she changed the record and the problem went away. Is this
what is meant by “techno music”?
BT's squeeze
Further to Chris James’s complaint about BT (Letters, 1 August, p 48). The
method of squeezing two lines down one pair of wires is properly known as
DACS鈥擠igital to Analogue Conversion System.
It will actually support modem operations at 28.8 kilobits per second quite
happily, (not limited to 14.4 kbps, as in James’s letter), but it will not allow
56 kbps operation.
BT often put a DACS system in even if there are spare circuits available, as
the spare circuits are then preserved for use where a DACS is not
suitable鈥攆or example, a customer specifying Internet operation.
If you do not specify anything other than voice operation, then BT will often
fit DACS without informing you. However, if you tell them you want high-speed
Internet access and do not want a DACS line, they will, in my experience,
usually oblige happily.
How to get jobs
I was interested to read A. R. Ireland’s complaint about failing to get a
teaching job and attributing this to age (Letters, 1 August, p 47). I am in my
mid-40s and since March 1996 I have applied for four teaching jobs, been
interviewed for all four jobs and been offered two of them. So it is not
necessarily true to say that age is a barrier.
In a previous post I was responsible for short-listing candidates for
mathematics jobs, and the crucial factor was the quality of the
application鈥攏ot the qualifications or experience. I have seen many
apparently well-qualified people who simply cannot put together a decent
application.
Usually they don’t understand that the letter of application has to be
related to the job and person specifications, and that writing, “I have over 100
applications to fill out, I haven’t the time to write a letter of
application鈥攎y CV should speak for itself” (as did one memorable
candidate) is a guarantee of a one-way trip to the bin for the whole
application.
The worst offenders, interestingly, were physicists, engineers and men who
had taught abroad for several years.
1950s spacecraft
The “new” spacecraft (“Rocket revolutionary”, 1 August, p 24) appears to be a
full-size development of a design from the 1950s for a model powered by Jetex
motors, published by Aeromodeller magazine.
It has the main features in common: propulsion and lift by means of multiple
engines set at an angle around a disc, descent controlled by rotating blades and
a cheap, reusable structure.
In this earlier design there were only two motors mounted on the rim of the
rotor blades鈥攎aking a de facto disc鈥攁nd, as it was not designed to
exit and reenter the atmosphere, this worked satisfactorily for the model.
It is interesting that the principle has been developed to a point where it
might be used for a full-size craft.