Alien investment
Netropolitan is dismayed at the lack of US government funding for the Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
(This Week, 17 October, p 19).
However, I would suggest that the commercial implications of a successful SETI have been
overlooked.
Should the SETI League be successful with no government funding, then the
knowledge of the contact frequency and source becomes the intellectual property
of the SETI League. The market price of such knowledge should be of the order of
$100 billion, thus making the SETI amateurs rather rich.
Potential buyers could refuse to pay such a ridiculous price, in which case
the SETI League could continue with the contact and download all kinds of
technically advanced knowledge from the aliens, and thus become rich amateurs by
another route. Now, if I were Bill Gates鈥�
And it's free
Referring to the war over Java
(This Week, 14 November, p 17),
Kurt Kleiner writes: “Java promises to allow programmers to write a program
only once, rather than having to write separate versions for Windows, Macintosh,
Unix and other operating systems such as Linux.”
This is misleading, because Linux, properly called GNU/Linux, is a freely
available implementation of Unix. Much to the chagrin of the world’s computer
lawyers, Linux is Unix鈥攁nd it’s free source code too.
Watch out Microsoft鈥擫inux has arrived!
Talking tarmac
Your Last Word on how tyres generate noise by contact with the road
(31 October)
reminded me of an idea that I had several years ago.
By cutting parallel grooves in the road surface at intervals proportional to
audio frequencies, the road would “talk” to the vehicle through its tyres. Pitch
would vary with speed, so an instruction to slow down on approaching a junction
would be delivered with greater shrillness and urgency the faster the vehicle
approached.
Motorways could murmur “tiredness kills, take a break” at suitable intervals.
By making the “voice” most melodious just below the legal speed limit, this
might also provide an audio carrot and stick that rewards the legal drivers and
irritates the speeders.
Me and my Mac
Justin Mullins is excited by the prospect of creating a short film,
animations and soundtracks as easily as sending an e-mail
(Review, 7 November, p 61).
He could have been doing all that two years ago in the comfort of his own
home if he had bought a Macintosh Creative Studio.
No, I’m not a Macintosh spokesman, I just love my Mac.
Seconds out
Is not the problem with the Millennium Watch from the Science Museum catalogue
(Feedback, 31 October)
not that it might break down out of guarantee before the millennium, but rather that
it will never actually tell you when the millennium has arrived?
In the first place, no wristwatch I know of keeps time accurately enough to
be correct to within a second for over a year. But the other problem is: when is
the millennium when you take leap seconds into account?
One is to be added on 31 December this year, which I doubt the watch takes
account of. Others may be added next year for all I know; so how does anyone yet
know now when the millennium is to be?
Lost again
I recently bought a copy of the new book by Simon Singh, Fermat’s
Enigma, containing a layman’s outline of the recent proof of Fermat’s last
theorem.
If you recall Fermat’s note, his “truly marvellous proof” unfortunately
couldn’t fit in the margin. Something similar occurred with this book. As I
moved through the book, eagerly assimilating each part of the edifice that
Andrew Wiles created, I found that a whole chunk of the book was missing;
replaced by a duplicate of the last (though not crucial) chapter.
I found it rather ironic that again the “marvellous proof” did not appear in
print. Luckily, a quick phone call to the publishers resulted in a new (and
complete) copy. If only it had been that easy 350 years ago.
Select few
May I suggest an entirely contrary view to that of Ella Clark
(Letters, 31 October, p 62)?
If everyone could choose the sex of their baby and if most
people in the world chose boys, two entirely beneficial results should
follow.
First, this is the most effective and humane way of reducing population, or
at least slowing growth, which depends primarily on the number of females
reaching reproductive age.
Secondly, when females become extremely rare in boy-selecting populations,
their value must soar. Far from being an oppressed economic burden, they should
become treasures, and potentially mistresses of their fate.
The key is that sex selection should occur as early as possible, even before
conception.
Letter
Dinah Ashman seems to imply that the ordinary Chinese accept the practice of eugenics,
striving to have the most perfect baby they can because it contributes to the common good
(Letters, 14 November, p 58).
However, because perfection is seen to imply male, the preponderance of baby
boys has led to a situation where it is estimated that 70 million males will be
without mates by the year 2005.
Try telling those males it’s for the common good.
Letter
I am surprised that Dinah Ashman appears to believe that prenatal screening
in China would result in a society where “so many” will be “perfect”.
I understand that 80 per cent of impairments occur after birth (and not all
other impairments can be screened for in any case).
Tricky tritium
The surprise expressed by David Walland over high levels of tritium in fish in the Severn Estuary
(Letters, 14 November, p 58)
is misplaced. It is rooted in the misguided beliefs that allow nuclear and other industries to routinely
discharge massive quantities of tritium into the natural environment.
The reasoning runs like this. Tritium (T) is a naturally occurring, albeit
radioactive, form of hydrogen that occurs mainly in seawater, and nature has
evolved with it. Most tritium releases are in the form of tritiated water (that
is, HTO instead of H2O) and this dissolves “to infinity”. Therefore,
tritium cannot be concentrated in living organisms, so there is nothing unusual
about industrial tritium releases being permitted at such a high level.
However, as well as being a component of water, hydrogen is also found in
just about every biologically active molecule in nature. It is precisely the
fact that tritiated water can convert into organically bound forms that makes
tritium such a cause for concern.
Numerous studies have shown that during ecological and metabolic processes,
the tritium atoms that originally occur in HTO become spread through the body’s
biochemical processes and can concentrate in, for example, cell DNA and bone
marrow. At the intermediate level there is also evidence for dispersion
concentration: across the blood-brain and placental barriers, for instance.
Back to the Severn. Nycomed Amersham makes tritiated (and other radioactive)
isotopes for use in the pharmaceuticals industry. Many of these isotopes are
designed precisely for use in biochemical research, so it is no surprise that
natural organisms should “fractionate” them in this way through the
ecosystem.
Letter
Tritium monitoring programmes around British nuclear plants and Cardiff’s
Nycomed Amersham works have been running for nearly a decade. Seaweeds
containing up to 20 000 becquerels per kilogram and flatfish with even higher
levels have been regularly measured near Cardiff since the early 1990s. But only
when Friends of the Earth Cymru published sample numbers last year, presented
them at meetings and sent them to specialists did the Environment Agency check
the data and set off alarm bells.
So what? Should we just express fascination at tritium being concentrated by
seaweeds and via animal metabolism, and observe that science now has the task of
probing this process and its consequences in enzymes and DNA? And then sit back
while the regulators push through extremely high “exemption values” for tritium
wastes under the Euratom directive, which derives from nuclear science’s limited
assessment of tritium’s radiological hazard?
Heroin ban
In your editorial on the medical use of cannabis
(14 November, p 3)
you wrote “Doctors in Britain have been allowed to prescribe heroin for people in chronic
pain, yet there is no evidence that this heroin ends up on the black market.”
“Have been” may be the nub of the statement. Back in the 1960s, I was able to
prescribe Guinness for my elderly chronic bronchitics in Britain, but at about
that time heroin was withdrawn from the pharmacopoeia for the very reasons you
say there is no evidence for. There was also concern for the safety of the staff
on wards where the drug was kept because intruders were apt to be violent in
seeking out heroin.
The medical profession generally resented this change as heroin is a far more
effective analgesic than morphine and doesn’t produce intolerable nausea.
Slightly soiled
It’s good to see soil, the Cinderella of Earth systems, getting the recognition it deserves
(Inside Science 115, 14 November),
especially following Tam Dalyell’s recent comments on the necessity of legislating to protect it
(Thistle Diary, 24 October, p 54).
But the penultimate paragraph of the Inside Science article propagates a
myth. Soil erosion by water does not require high-intensity rainfall. If soil is
wet enough, even low-intensity rainfall will run off: where this runoff attains
sufficient velocity the resultant shear stress results in detachment of soil
particles where soil is unprotected. It’s for this reason that we get erosion
problems even in areas of predominantly low-intensity rainfall, such as
northwestern Europe.
The myth of the need for high-intensity rainfalls results in part from early
work on erosion in the US which emphasised rainfall energy rather than runoff
energy. It also led to a misplaced sense of security that “it can’t ever happen
here”, as epitomised in a famously titled 1967 British paper “Why don’t we have
soil erosion in Britain?.
The adoption of farming techniques which leave soil bare at the wettest times
of the year showed that, sadly, we can and do have serious soil erosion in
Britain.
Human loop
The phenomenon of the tendency for humans to operate on a 25-hour cycle while
living in a cave should not be a mystery to any electronics engineer, being
simply an example of a biological phase-locked loop (PLL) with its input gone
missing.
A PLL has a number of useful functions in analogue electronics, such as
cleaning up a noisy FM signal. In principle, it is a very simple example of
negative feedback, consisting of a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) and a
frequency comparator. One input to the comparator is the output of the VCO, and
the other an external signal. The output of the comparator is used to control
the VCO.
If the external signal is of a higher frequency than the output of the VCO,
the voltage of the comparator will go up, increasing the frequency of the VCO.
If the external frequency is lower, the opposite will take place. Thus the phase
and frequency of the VCO will lock on the external signal, though how long it
takes to lock on and how quickly it drifts away from the external frequency when
the input is removed will depend on the particulars of the circuit design.
Once the input is removed, the VCO will revert to its natural frequency, say
15 per cent below that of the normal input signal. Obviously, nature has once
again anticipated human technology by evolving cascades of biological PLL’s to
synchronise life processes with the hours and the seasons鈥攅ven though we
don’t know the details yet.
The key point is that trying to link sleep patterns in caves directly to
lunar or Martian motions isn’t necessary. The discrepancy between the solar day
and the troglodyte day is about the what you would expect of a free-running PLL.
Latinum sillium
As Susan Taylor pointed out
(Letters, 28 November, p 58),
names like “aqua” for water come from European Union labelling regulations.
You can find out a little more from the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance
Association website at http://www.ctfa.org/.
So why does a botanist know about this? I was asked once to proofread the
labels of some toiletries that were to be sold in our shop at Kew. My suspicions
were aroused when I found some misspelt and even wrong Latin names for the plant
extracts they contained.
The daft bit is that under the labelling regulations Kew has to use the wrong
names on its products because the people who created the standard got many of
the names wrong. So you get things like Betula alba (meaning Betula
pendula) and even Aloe barbadensis, though the trade have correctly always
used Aloe vera without even realising that this was a scientific
term.
Moving away from botany it seems to get even crazier. They have tried to give
apparently Latin binomials to the most mundane mineral ingredients. Acidum
boricum is one example, but my favourite is Paraffinum liquidum.
Feedback's blue eyes
Feedback (21 November)
may have learnt elementary genetics not wisely but too well.
The advertisement for The Economist is referring to phenotype, not
genotype. “Blue eyes from mother” means one blue-eye gene from the mother, who
is apparently also blue-eyed, and one blue-eye gene from the father, whom we
must presume to be brown-eyed (or green-eyed) but heterozygous鈥攃arrying
one (recessive) blue-eye gene.