Letter
Elliot Manley points out that many different鈥攁nd sometimes
contradictory鈥攖hree-letter abbreviations exist for currencies. However,
the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) does specify which
should be used (see ISO-4217).
Letter
Dalyell is a little late in his wish to harmonise practice in the US and
Europe. The last round of GATT talks partly achieved this aim, with the result
that the US now follows the European rule of 20 years coverage from date of
filing, rather than its old rule of 17 years from date of invention.
Dalyell may be comforted to know that as many and probably more US companies
have fallen over by failing to file first in Europe, as have Europeans in the US
on the date of invention rule. There are many tales of inventions being owned by
different companies on both sides of the Atlantic as a result.
File first
Tam Dalyell writes that the “first to invent” system of the US, as opposed to
the “first to file” system almost universally accepted elsewhere, puts Europeans
at a disadvantage when applying for patents
(Thistle Diary, 15 August, p 50).
However, a British applicant can now claim the right to a US patent based on
the date of invention. An American applicant can only claim rights on a British
patent to the date of his first-filed “Paris Convention” patent. So an American
applicant has no legal advantage over a British applicant.
In the US, disputes over first to invent are called “interference”. They are
usually very costly, complex, uncertain and protracted. Often the only people to
benefit from “interference” are the patent lawyers. Disputes over the first to
invent are an inevitable consequence of this form of right to patent.
The benefits of the first-to-file system include cheapness, simplicity and,
most important, certainty on which to base commercial decisions. For any British
applicant, the best approach is to file without delay鈥攖he British filing
fee is probably the lowest in the world.
Spamwatch
If you’re bothered by junk e-mail, or spam
(Letters, 29 August, p 50), a
database at the University of Illinois offers another chance to fight back (
http://cello.cs.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/slamm/ip2name). It will tell you who the
spammer’s service provider is, so you can complain.
Internet service providers have said they are willing to disconnect spammers.
The problem is catching them, as they often use false or shifting addresses. But
the header of an e-mail message always contains the service provider’s numeric
address. It’s the four groups of up to three numbers each, separated by full
stops (such as 123.456.78.90). Type it in and the Illinois site will give you
the “host name” of the spammer’s service provider (for example,
computer.services.net).
Then you can e-mail the service provider by adding “info@” to the first
phrase (info@computer.services.com, say) to make an e-mail address. Give
dates and times in your e-mail, and include a complete spam with its full
address header. If enough complaints are received, the spammer will be traced
and could be disconnected.
Letter
I would like to propose an alternative hypothesis鈥攏amely, that for
families with large numbers of children, the cumulative stress resulting from
repeated exposure to midnight feeds, the terrible twos and sulking teenagers
drives the poor parents to an early grave.
Kids are bad for you
Ivan Dixon implies that long lives lead to people having fewer children
(Letters, 15 August, p 51 and
29 August, p 49). He should consider the opposite
possibility鈥攖hat women’s lives are shortened by multiple pregnancies.
The old adage “for every child a tooth” is supported by recently published
Danish work (see The Lancet, vol 352, p 294) and it is probable that
this also applies to women’s general health.
However, any connection may be an association rather than being causal, as
increased prosperity is usually followed both by a fall in birth rate and by an
increase in life expectancy.
Letter
Bracknell Forest Borough Council has been collecting my wheelie bin with a
one-man robot arm dustcart for the past two years. It can easily reach past
parked cars and undoubtedly speeds up refuse collection.
It is, however, very noisy and regularly wakes me up at 7.15 am on Wednesday
mornings when it is two streets away, despite double glazing. The noise comes
from the hydraulic arm mechanism, the sound of dense rubbish being tipped into
the back of the vehicle and repeated acceleration and deceleration of the
vehicle between bins.
Letter
In Brisbane, we have had for some years one-person garbage trucks that pick
up “wheelie bins” from the footpath, empty them into the truck and then return
them neatly.
The bins fit the gripping arms of the truck exactly and are designed to open
completely at the top of the arc, so nothing remains inside. There are also
yellow-topped recycling bins, emptied by different trucks every second week.
The “garbos”, or rubbish collectors, I should add, were not wholly delighted
by the innovation, since half of them immediately became redundant.
Robot refuse removal
Your article on the refuse vehicle with a robotic arm on trial in Emmen
implies that the Dutch city is leading the way
(This Week, 15 August, p 16).
This is not so.
Four years ago, a pilot project was carried out in Fareham, Hampshire, with a
similar vehicle. It had an automatic arm, controlled by the driver, that reached
out and picked up a wheeled bin, brought it to the vehicle, emptied it and then
put it back. The driver never left the cab.
Five thousand homes were visited weekly for a year. The project was a
success.
Sadly, the makers of the vehicle, Boughton International, have had financial
difficulties. That, combined with a the slow adoption of the technology by other
local authorities, has held back this step forward in refuse collection
methods.
Unknown viruses
As a physician and veterinarian, we cannot emphasise strongly enough how
concerned we are about xenozoonoses鈥攗nknown diseases鈥攆rom
xenotransplants
(Editorial and
This Week, 8 August, p 3 and p 4).
The reassuring words from researchers who have a vested interest in the
outcome of the debate, or who represent institutions with such an interest, do
little to allay our fears. It is impossible to detect a virus not yet
discovered.
Not long ago, British researchers dismissed the possibility of contracting a
disease by eating beef. Then came the discovery of the prions that cause mad cow
disease. Did we learn nothing from this?
Viruses, prions or other organisms that have yet to be discovered could be
lurking in pigs and other animals. To proceed with xenotransplants is to risk an
epidemic of Biblical proportions. It is hubris to think it could not happen.
Deep light
Recent research shows that increased ultraviolet radiation beneath ozone
holes could stunt the growth of marine plankton, the base of the ocean’s food chain
(This Week, 8 August, p 24). This issue should be of concern to oceanic
biologists, as UV radiation may have other, more subtle, but equally serious
effects.
Many oceanic crustaceans are sensitive to two colour bands: UV/violet and
green light. Because light is spectrally attenuated as it descends through
water, these crustaceans probably use the spectral content of light to judge
their depth. To remain camouflaged against the light at their level, some
mesopelagic (mid-water) crustaceans and fish emit bioluminescent light that
closely matches the intensity and spectral content of this light.
However, if ozone depletion changes this light (increasing its violet
component, for example), mid-water species may move to depths to which they are
not quite so well adapted and may emit bioluminescence that reveals rather than
conceals their presence.
The effects of small changes in the spectral content of the light entering
the oceans could be subtle but since the pelagic realm is the largest ecosystem
on Earth, they may have long-term significance.
Clever colic
Dennis McBride suggests that parents struggling with a colicky first child
are less likely to have subsequent children and this may “weed out” impatient parents
(This Week, 22 August, p 11). But perhaps he should consider that this
may work to the colicky first child’s advantage by minimising the number of
subsequent siblings who would compete for parental resources.
Therefore, rather than weeding out impatient parents, colic might act to
increase the survival probability and reproductive success of the afflicted
child. This effect could help account for colic’s persistence in the gene pool.
Yet another example of the selfish gene.
Been there, filed it
Your Patents column describes the loudspeakers (WO 98/20706) being developed
by Thomson Brandt of Villingham, Germany, which behave like “acoustic windows”
(This Week, 8 August, p 11).
Barry Fox should also check out US patent 5 748 758 (filed 25 January 1996,
issued 5 May 1998), which describes an “aerogel” speaker that also achieves an
“acoustic window”-type effect using exactly the same process.
By the way, your magazine was the source of inspiration for the above
patent.
Letter
A few years ago the European currency unit was referred to as the Ecu, so
there is already a suitable three-letter abbreviation for the euro.
Ecu also happens to be an acronym. Contrary to the belief of some, “acronym”
is not synonymous with “abbreviation”. An acronym is a type of abbreviation that
makes a pronounceable word.
Beyond ASCII
I was surprised to read Joona Palaste’s letter suggesting that three-letter
abbreviations should be used to represent currencies on computers rather than
changing the ASCII character set
(22 August, p 49).
In ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, seven binary
digits or bits are used to encode each character. There are thus 128 (27)
possible characters, not 256 as Palaste said. Of these, only 97 are “printable”
(the rest are control-codes).
The ASCII character set does not include any symbols for currencies other
than the dollar, let alone European punctuation characters, accented characters
or non-Latin characters. To overcome this, the eighth bit in each byte is often
used to extend ASCII to 256 characters. However, there are dozens of different
versions of this extended character set.
This means that textual information cannot necessarily be passed from one
computer to another without corruption. The whole thing is a mess.
Fortunately, modern platforms, including Java and Windows NT, are beginning
to use a 16-bit character set called Unicode, which has 65 536 possible
encodings, and although not perfect, does at least allow us to represent
characters from all over the world in a uniform and standard manner. Unicode has
a symbol for the euro.
Bemused by a bean
Everyone knows that climbing beans spiral clockwise up their support, but
what happens when a bean tries to grow up a spiral support?
We grow climbing French beans in our garden on a wigwam support made of
bamboo canes 1.8 centimetres in diameter. The beans complete a twist around the
canes about once every 15 centimetres.
We have also have beans supported by garden twine 0.3 centimetres in
diameter. The beans spiral tightly up these strings, also in a clockwork
direction, this time twisting every 5 centimetres. This seems to be the tightest
twist that the beans can manage.
This year we also had a spiral plastic-covered iron rod. The spiral rod has a
right-hand twist, like the bean. Each spiral is 5 centimetres wide and repeats
every 15 centimetres.
We expected a growing bean shoot to spiral up this rod. But, to our great
surprise, it grew straight up the centre of the rod and did not spiral at all.
This stalk still produced its flower/leaf nodes every 25 centimetres.
It seems that the genetic tendency of the bean to spiral clockwise is
satisfied by the contact between the bean and the spiral rod, resulting in no
spiralling at all. Two right-hand spirals seem to interact to produce a straight
result, unlike the confused offspring of the left-handed bindweed and the
right-handed honeysuckle sung of by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann: “Poor
little sucker, how will it learn when it is climbing, which way to turn?
Right鈥攍eft鈥攚hat a disgrace! Or it may go straight up and fall flat
on its face!”
Does anyone have any experience of the interactions between plant stem
morphology and strictly repeating patterns that could explain the curious
behaviour of the nonspiralling climbing bean?
Too busy
Neil Harris appears to justify low academic salaries because “many academics
are able to increase their income through external consultancies”
(Appointments, 22 August, p 52).
Really? What is the evidence? Of course some can and do, but over the
profession as a whole they will form a minority. Being an academic is a
full-time occupation. Most of us have neither the time nor the inclination to
seek to supplement our incomes from outside sources.
And why should we have to? What other fully employed professionals are
expected to do this?
This discredited argument was used by a Conservative education minister a few
years ago to justify salary increases well below inflation. I am sorry to see it
re-emerging in New 杏吧原创.
Clarification
The diagram with the article on improving the energy efficiency of public transport
(This Week, 15 August, p 22) should have made
clear that the energy savings shown were per public transport passenger.
How many legs?
I don’t wish to add to the problems of naming “creepy-crawlies”
(Letters, 15 August, p 53),
but shouldn’t the millipede be renamed the kilopede? After all,
it has around a thousand legs, not a thousandth of a leg.
Round we go
Regarding the Monopolies Commission joke
(Letters, 22 August, p 51): Why is
“dyslexic” so difficult to spell? What is the speed of dark? What is another
word for “thesaurus”? If nothing sticks to Teflon, how does Teflon stick to the
pan? If a stealth fighter crashed in a forest, would it make a sound?
Function unknown
You might be interested in the questions raised at the tail end of an
introduction to the film Carry On At Your Convenience, part of a season
of Carry On films on ABC TV in Australia:
” . . . And, talking about what we so oddly call `toilet’ bowls, not far back
a New 杏吧原创 story was pondering the things that humanity will leave
behind when we’re gone”
(“Buried treasure”, 27 June, p 26).
“It puzzled me that it never pondered on those strange, big, trumpet-shaped,
indestructible ceramic bowls that we’ll have to leave behind in billions. Will
the visiting aliens coax strange tunes out of them while they puzzle over why we
needed so many and where we met to play on them?”
Clapham complex
Graham Hart recommends using the German railways website for planning train
journeys in Britain rather than its British counterpart Railtrack, on the
grounds that it weeds out rogue bus services run by train companies
(Letters, 15 August, p 52).
But, for readers in south London at least, the German website cannot be
recommended. It has an unaccountable difficulty in understanding that trains
stop both at Clapham Junction, Britain’s busiest railway station, and my local
station. Today it recommended that I catch a train from there for Basingstoke 20
minutes earlier than necessary, in order to change at Woking to catch a later
train, which also stops at Clapham Junction.
In the past, it has suggested I travel to central London to catch a train
that then stops at, yes, Clapham Junction.
Quickest crackers
In his letter about distributed processing projects on the Internet, Richard
Marsden says that the fastest British RC5-cracking team is “Prof James Challis’
Most Excellent RC5-64 Team”
(15 August, p 52). In fact, the fastest is the Egham
Hill team鈥攕ee http://www.eh.org/rc5.
It was originally started by former Royal Holloway, University of London
students. Royal Holloway is located on Egham Hill, and many of the team members
are too, though no longer part of the university. The team has grown to include
a lot of friends of the original members.
Plenty of horn
The main purpose of the poaching that threatens to wipe out animals such as
rhinos and tigers seems to be to sell parts of the animals for herbal
medicines鈥攑articularly those to do with sexual potency.
If the wonder drug Viagra is as effective as some say, then it might be the
saviour not only of male pride but also of the rhino and tiger. Perhaps
conservationist groups should be purchasing this drug and promoting it in Asia
to capitalise on this unexpected spin-off?