Hollow ring
Andy York makes an all too common mistake when he equates rot with ill health in trees
(This Week, 17 October, p 21).
There is an increasing appreciation that heartwood decay is a normal process
in healthy trees. As the girth increases each year, so there is an increasing
volume of heartwood which has no function. The outer ring of the tree is where
everything happens.
Indeed, this dysfunctional heartwood locks up nutrients which the tree could
otherwise reuse and contributes much of the weight of the tree. It was mainly
solid trees which blew down in the hurricane of 1987. Hollowing of the heartwood
by non-pathogenic fungi releases these nutrients and reduces the weight of the
trunk without directly affecting the tree’s health or vitality.
Occasionally, things appear to go wrong and structural defects occur, and, of
course, there are true pathogens about as well. But York is presenting the
foresters’ view. They like their trees solid, but this has nothing to do with
tree health.
Who is brilliant?
Jim Penman’s desire for brilliant offspring
(Letters, 31 October, p 62
and 14 November, p 58)
is not as straightforward as he believes. “Intelligence”, as
defined in our culture, is actually a motley selection of cognitive skills which
happen to be marketable in this society in this era. Selecting for these skills
could be a big mistake.
It is by no means clear that any individual can express
all these skills to their fullest potential, without the psychological processes
interfering with each other, or with some other vital skill. Which subset of the
“intelligent” skills should therefore be selected for?
Stupidity (by our cultural standards) is far more prevalent than
schizophrenia, so by Penman’s own argument is quite likely to have been selected
for at some stage in our evolution. “Intelligence” certainly has its problems.
According to Robert McLaughlin’s essay in the same issue (Forum, p 58),
social isolation is one of the most obvious.
Previous cultures have valued other forms of intelligence: in medieval
Europe, those with the ability to depict spiritual metaphor in sculpture and
fresco were the most valued. Those with a supreme skill for computer programming
would have been useless to anybody half a millennium ago. We don’t know what
undeveloped cognitive skills “stupid” people may be hiding for the future.
What Penman would appear to want is actually progeny that will grow up with
marketable skills. Parents through the ages have wished for children who can
keep them in their old age, but let’s not forget that although Esau was favoured
over Jacob, it was Jacob who finally came home with the goods to look after
their father in his dotage.
Letter
Barry Fox implies that new CompuServe members are subject to large-scale
fraud due to its e-mail addressing format.
This is not the case, and I can assure your readers that CompuServe is
probably the safest and most secure Internet online service in Britain. We have
an unparalleled pedigree for high-quality and secure service developed over 30
years providing online and Internet services.
It is an unfortunate reality of the Internet, and a problem that all the
major service providers face continually, that there are a small number of
fraudsters who try to obtain passwords by claiming to represent a particular
service provider.
CompuServe takes the most stringent measures possible to prevent such mail
getting through to members and very few of these messages ever reach them.
However, such measures can never be 100 per cent effective. Hence, we warn all
members during registration, when they first log-on and thereafter on a regular
basis, never to disclose their password or full credit card details to anyone,
including CompuServe staff. In fact we encourage our members to treat their
password as they would their bank PIN number.
CompuServe’s primary concern has always been the protection of our members’
e-mail and data, and our members can be assured of our ongoing commitment to
a high level of security.
See Feedback, this issue鈥擡d
Internet fraud
Your article about new users of CompuServe being sent dubious requests for
their credit-card numbers was interesting
(This Week, 31 October, p 7),
but the problem of Internet fraud is much more widespread than it suggests.
Recently, after making a purchase over the Web with my credit card, I began
to receive monthly bills of $14.95 from a company I’d never heard of and
certainly never bought anything from. I rang my bank and had these charges
reversed, and after six months they stopped coming through. However, this month
I again have another unauthorised charge from another company I have never heard
of, this time for $19.95.
There are at least three sources of such unauthorised charges that I know of.
The first (and most straightforward) involves bogus companies getting hold of
your credit-card number by offering services they will charge you for but never
deliver.
The second involves bogus companies who somehow get hold of your credit card
number by being related to companies you’ve bought something from, and who then
send through a few unauthorised charges of their own. I presume that lists of
valid credit-card numbers, just like lists of valid e-mail addresses, are bought
and sold between disreputable companies on the Web so that they can profit by
sending through unauthorised charges of this sort.
The third way unauthorised charges can appear on your credit-card statement
is perhaps the most insidious and can happen even if you’ve never bought
anything over the Web. Software utilities exist which can fabricate valid credit
card numbers that can then be used for purchases or unauthorised charges by the
user of the utility.
All this means that it is becoming increasingly important to read your
credit- card statement carefully each month. When making purchases over the Web,
use a secure link if the company you are dealing with provides one, and stay
away from dodgy-sounding deals. Free offers are rarely free.
Let them eat veg
Debora MacKenzie states that “a simple redistribution of [the grain] we grow
now” would not feed the world, and that agriculture needs “a new technological saviour”
(“Food for all”, 31 October, p 50).
What the world needs is a decrease in meat consumption. Between 1965 and 1990
the percentage of Mexican grain consumed by cattle rose from 6 to 50 per cent.
Soviet livestock now eat three times as much grain as Soviet citizens, whose
grain imports went from near zero in 1970 to 24 million tonnes in 1990.
The richest people in developing lands are copying the animal-protein diets
of the affluent West, which lead to heart disease, osteoporosis and bowel
cancer, while the poorest go without, becoming ripe for exploitation by the
genetic engineering giants.
It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef that’s ready for
market, and only one pound to produce a pound of bread. The “saviour” that world
agriculture needs is not Monsanto charging in on a (runaway?) white horse, but a
huge decrease in the consumption of meat and dairy products worldwide,
encouraged by nutritional and medical research and education.
As Douglas Coupland says in Generation X: “The love of meat
precludes any real change”, and as Jeremy Hardy has written in his column in
The Guardian: “We can already feed the world. We just don’t want
to.”
Letter
What is science but a sense of wonder about the world? Why should the most
awesome view of the world be in the exclusive domain of well-funded fogies in
white lab coats who can afford to “patch one together from existing
satellites”?
For the price of a couple of fighter planes, generations to come may behold a
single, unified, beautiful pearl, illuminating, in the bleakness of outer space,
our common world and our common future. An inspiration to all of humanity.
Now that’s what I call an investment.
Sense of wonder
Commenting on so-called populist science projects, especially the Triana satellite
(Editorial, 7 November, p 3),
you imply that these projects are of limited scientific worth and that they are being
done just because they are popular with the public.
Surely, the Triana project and John Glenn’s return trip into space are likely
to increase public support and interest in science, so their absolute scientific
worth isn’t quite so important as the likelihood that they will set alight
public imagination, make science more popular and increase the chance that all
those other things on the scientific “wish list” will get funding in the years
to come.
I’m not suggesting we paint Disney characters on the side of the space
shuttle or make the people from the Meteorological Office wear tap shoes and
sing their forecasts, but in an age where science gets such a generally negative
press, perhaps it’s a bit disingenuous to attack projects for their very
popularity with non-scientists.
Japanese connection
In an intriguing article, Roger Lewin suggests that the discovery among some
Native Americans of a mitochondrial lineage X, which is present in European
populations, means that people from Europe may have migrated to and lived in
North America in pre-Columbian times
(“Young Americans”, 17 October, p 24).
In support of this theory, he also cites the “Caucasoid” features of a Native
American, Kennewick Man, whose skeleton was dated to 9 300 years ago.
However, Europe is not the only source of Caucasoid people: the original
inhabitants of Japan, the Ainu, are often described as Caucasoid, or
proto-Caucasoid. Could a migration of Ainu from East Asia across the Bering land
bridge account for the X lineage in America, and Kennewick Man’s “Caucasoid”
features?
Or, while Caucasoid Americans might not be directly descended from Ainu,
these two groups and Europeans may all be descended from a common X lineage
people who lived, most likely in Central Asia, tens of thousands of years ago.
At some point, these X people may have split up, with some of them heading west
to Europe, and others east to Japan and America.
Has anyone thought to test the Ainu for the presence of lineage X?
Roger Lewin writes: Yes, such tests are indeed being conducted, but as yet
they have provided insufficient data to provide a definite answer鈥擡d
Seafloor giant
In Newswire you report a claim to have found the largest single-celled organism in the world
(This Week, 24 October, p 23).
To my knowledge, this title is held by the genus Caulerpa, with
individual cells of this alga spreading across up to a metre of seafloor. It is
multinuclear though, and perhaps distinctions are to be made on the basis of the
number of nuclei a cell needs to get by.
Bearing up
Ian Lowe’s concerns regarding the decline in the number of people taking
science at school and in teacher training
(Forum, 24 October, p 52)
may well be justified, but his fears regarding a decline in the number of university
students starting science courses are not.
Over the past 15 years the number of new students in the sciences in
Australia has increased from 11 922 to 31 155. This represents an average rate
of growth of well over 6 per cent per annum. In the most recent year for which
data are available the rate of increase was 14 per cent.
It may well be that there has been a decline in enrolment in specific fields
such as physics, but if this has occurred it may have been counterbalanced by an
increase in such fields as computer science and biological sciences. However,
the belief that there has been a decline in university science enrolments as a
whole does not appear to be warranted.
So far as Europe and the “Asian tigers” are concerned, I can find only one
case of a decline in science graduates, and that is in Greece. In the US there
has been a substantial increase in the number of people graduating in the
natural sciences. In the case of computer science there has been a marked
decline. But overall, things have remained much the same in the US during the
past 10 years.
The number of Americans graduating in engineering and engineering technology
has, however, fallen. In Australia the number of people starting engineering
degrees has recently plateaued at a relatively low level. The same is not true
of the industrialised Asian countries nor of quite a few European countries. But
that is another story.
Big Ben's bong
A BBC spokesman claims that Big Ben can be several seconds slow because of
the delay as sound travels through air
(Feedback, 31 October).
Perhaps he doesn’t know that the BBC microphones which pick up Big Ben hang on the wall
about 3 metres from the bell itself. I know鈥擨’ve been up there to service
them.
We arrived about 11.45 am and departed around 1.15 pm. It was about 55 years
ago but I still tremble when I hear that cracked leviathan. The agony of waiting
for that hammer to fall!
The belfry walls still vibrate to the hand several minutes after the bell is
silent.
Longer trials needed
Your news item on France halting its immunisation programme against hepatitis
B reports that there is “no scientific evidence” against the vaccine
(This Week, 17 October, p 17).
However, the claim by the WHO’s chief medical officer for viral diseases that
the vaccine is “one of the safest” we’ve got is based on studies which followed
volunteers for only five days after injection.
I support the action of the French government. It will finally force the
manufacturers to start researching slow reactions and this can only be a good
thing.
Letter
The subject of the invention of canning and the subsequent invention of the
can opener was discussed recently in The Guardian’s Notes and Queries
column. The items are preserved on the paper’s website: http://nq.guardian.co.uk/
Letter
You ask how tin cans were opened before the invention of the can opener. The
boringly simple answer is “with a knife”. My mother reports seeing a work
colleague of hers in the early 1940s who still opened cans with a carving
knife.
Letter
According to The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry
Petroski, the process of preserving food in tin cannisters was invented in 1810
by a Londoner, Peter Durand. The firm of Donkin and Hall opened the first
“preservatory” in London to supply the army and navy. At the time, no functional
tools were available to open the tin cans and soldiers used knives, bayonets and
even rifle fire.
In 1858, Ezra Warnet of Connecticut obtained a landmark patent for a can
opener. The well-known wheel-style opener was patented in 1925.
In the can
In answer to Richard Turle’s question about how to open tin cans before the
invention of the can opener
(Feedback, 7 November),
I quote from the instructions printed on a can of veal taken by William Parry on his third
expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1824: “Roasted Veal: cut around on
the top near to outer edge with a chisel and hammer.”
I do, however, question the 1895 date for the invention of the can opener, if
for no other reason than not having brought one was the cause of so much
frustration for Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, published in
1889. Chapter 12 says: “There was no tin opener to be found. Then Harris tried
to open the tin with a pocketknife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly;
George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his
eye out. While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the
thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me
out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin
rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.”
Clearly, since getting into a can was (and still is) virtually impossible
without some sort of opener, I’m sure an enterprising Victorian engineer had
made one long before 1895.
Letter
I wish to submit my solution to the first of your Greek Problems of
Antiquity. However, my proof of how to “square” the circle or “construct a
circle whose area is the same as a given circle” (sic) takes only one line of
text and no fast computers. I thus fear it would be inadmissible.
Circular circle
Poking fun at the Science Museum catalogue is all well and good
(Feedback, 31 October),
but it seems as though New 杏吧原创 is not immune to errors.
May we draw your attention to “Life, the Universe & (Almost) Everything”
(same issue, p 61)? Having learned the “squaring the circle” problem in high
school, and having spent a few enjoyable hours at the time trying to solve it,
your version came as a bit of a let down.
By the way, the batteries for the solar-powered car in our catalogue are so
it will run when there isn’t enough sunlight to activate the cells, thereby
illustrating a very important aspect of solar energy.
Close encounter
“The fifth dimension鈥攊t’s closer than you think” proclaims the cover of
your 24 October issue. True, it’s on page 24, where the massive spillage of
toxic mine waste in Spain is quantified in cubic litres.