Letter
I find the piece on cherry hamburgers disturbing, and not just for reasons of
taste. Unknown additives in food can be very dangerous to people with
allergies.
My wife has become violently allergic to two anthocyanin dyestuffs found in
food: the dark-red and purple-red colours found in “black” grapes, “black”
cherries, blackcurrants, red cabbage, red onion and beetroot. She can eat pink
cherries, raspberries, loganberries and redcurrants, although she has been
caught out by manufacturers putting red grape juice into a raspberry
yoghurt.
Yet again, you have to watch what you eat, and you have to know what you are
eating.
Letter
Has Feedback not heard of turkey with cranberries, pork with apple, ham with
pineapple, or lamb with apple?
It's criminal
I believe the reason why so many pirate copies of PC and PlayStation games are sold
(This Week, 19 December 1998, p 16)
is the obscenely high price that we, the public, are forced to pay for our software.
At present, virtually all games for the PC are priced at 拢35 on
release, even though they may come from a large number of different publishers
and are sold in different high-street shops. “Lowest price guaranteed,” they
claim, safe in the knowledge that the supposedly competing shop down the road
will be charging identical prices. To me this sounds like price fixing, either
by the retailers or the publishers.
Even if the price of newly released software could be reduced, the public is
still being cynically exploited by the vast majority of games publishers as
paying beta-testers. The quality of several major releases during the past year
or so has been abysmal, with the developers having to put a never-ending series
of bug-fixing patches on their websites to repair code that should never have
been released in such a poor state and that would never be accepted in industry.
If games developers were writing industrial software, most would quickly go out
of business.
The reason that a lot of people sell illegal copies of games is that they
want to recover some of the money that most publishers do not deserve, given the
quality of their finished products.
Guys and dolls
I appreciate the scepticism with which John Warren’s students treat his view
that there is a significant influence of genes on gender-related behaviour
(Forum, 19 December 1998, p 101).
His article ignores the fact that the
environment can inflate and exaggerate small genetic differences to create large
differences in characteristics. The effect of genes on behaviour can be very
indirect.
The article addressed the question of how to explain the association between
genes, in the form of different sex chromosomes, and gender-specific behaviours,
such as playing with baby dolls versus toy soldiers. The simplest way to explain
the gene-environment interaction is as follows. The genetic information merely
determines the nature of the sexual organs of the individual. This clearly gives
away the sex of the child to the parents, who name and dress the child in a
sex-specific way. Consequently, other people treat the child in a sex-specific
way and the child comes to like those toys which are linked to its sex.
The above account is an example of a gene-environment interaction, yet it
would also fit with the students’ insistence that there is a pivotal role of
culture in shaping sex-specific behaviour. I believe there are, in addition,
more subtle effects of genes which are less obviously affected by culture, but
we don’t need these to account for the simple fact that, on average, boys and
girls behave differently.
Shpeech shoftware
Sidney Perkowitz has pointed to a new field of study: the strange ability of
speech recognition software to corrupt a message into an oblique interpretation
of the thought behind the message鈥�”enema” for “enigma”, and so on
(“In salmon do did mobile bond”, 19 December 1998, p 62).
However, he is almost certainly using his package wrongly if it only responds
to Dalekspeak: mine actually works better if you run on at normal speed, because
it uses context as well as sound. But you do need to spend quite a bit of effort
training it initially. You also need to get yourself trained: understanding how
to get the software to adapt to a particular user’s speech is crucial to success
(some specialist software suppliers now refuse to sell software without
training).
The best packages are reasonably tolerant of the effects of tiredness or, for
example, a cold, but are surprisingly intolerant of the effects of even a small
quantity of alcohol. One local solicitor is rumoured to have his system trained
for two users: himself pre-lunch, and a postprandial version.
Genetic markers
Mechanical tags are currently applied to farm livestock to provide an audit
trail for their meat, but lost labels at the abattoir present serious problems.
An internal tag method (Patent GB 2 320 960) proposes feeding a unique
combination of 40 safe isotopes of 16 elements, to be read using nuclear
magnetic resonance spectroscopy
(This Week, 17 October, p 7).
Tam Dalyell discussed the possible limitations of this method
(Thistle Diary, 12 December, p 62).
An alternative approach, using genetic markers, was not mentioned. All
animals have individual and readable genotypes. Each unique genotype is
permanent and indelible鈥攏ot altered by its nutrition, environment or
husbandry. A genetic tag, composed of a few selected polymorphic markers, is
capable of indicating an animal’s identity and ancestry.
A mammal’s genotype can be read from a minute particle of tissue, such as a
plucked hair root. Its DNA fractions can be amplified by the polymerase chain
reaction (PCR). Doubts arising from missing or mixed tags may be resolved by
typing and matching hair samples taken at any time from birth to slaughter, and
from packages after butchering.
Genetic tag science is tried and tested. The International Society for Animal
Genetics coordinates the necessary technical standards where genotyping is
obligatory for the pedigree registration of domesticated species.
Genetic marking techniques should be encouraged in the best interests of
resource management in general. In particular, scientific animal breeding can
use gene markers to guide the future selection of desirable production
characteristics.
Clay's clean slate
I disagree with Brenda Howard about how particles of caesium, or any other
cation for that matter, are trapped by clay minerals
(This Week, 21 November 1998, p 12).
And, indeed, whether or not clay minerals play a significant part at all.
In 1979 I was joint author of a paper arguing that anomalous quantities of
cations cannot be held by clay minerals for the simple reason that there are a
limited number of exchange sites, all of which are competed for fiercely by
macro-elements, such as potassium (as Howard rightly points out), as well as
magnesium, iron and the like.
Larger ions will displace smaller ones, highly charged ones will displace the
lesser charged. One cannot successively plate more ions onto a site鈥攐ne
site, one ion, that is the rule, depending on relative charges.
I also suggested that coprecipitation with iron and manganese was the
mechanism by which one gets anomalous concentrations in stream sediments and
soils, not adsorption on or in clay minerals. Much of the subsequent 20 years of
research supports this conclusion.
Hear it for Tex
One correction to your article “The wild bunch”
(12 December 1998, p 42).
As far as open source software is concerned, there is an excellent word processor
for Linux systems. It is called Tex (a modified version is called LaTex). It
comes free with most Linux distributions, is easy to use (my 14-year-old began
writing his school reports in Tex after 10 minutes’ instruction) and produces
book-quality output. For the more ambitious, it is also very powerful.
Those nostalgic for Microsoft-style office software can buy, for about
$50, a commercial product called Applixware which runs on Linux. Most
users think Tex is better.
Mars streetfinder
Today, more than a century after H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds
first appeared, I received a postal offer of a new book on Mars, packed with
photos, bound in leather, which I am going to buy as a late Christmas present.
The punch line, to my mind, is that the work is published by the National
Geographic Society.
It is worth reflecting that for the past four centuries, Mars, as a subject,
has never been out of print in one guise or another鈥攂ut entirely as the
province of astronomers, fantasists, space enthusiasts or science-fiction
writers.
Here is a first-rate production published by an organisation whose chief
interest is geography. In its own way, this is a sea change in human ideas of
Mars鈥攊t is now a place that humans consider as an arena for human activity
and, in time, development.
Bowl of burgers
Feedback
(9 January)
discusses a new fad in the US involving hamburgers
containing cherries. My first thought, also, was “Yuk”.
Almost immediately, however, I remembered that I had just spent Christmas
eating various animals (or joints of animals) stuffed with all manner of things,
including apricots, plums, walnuts and raisins. None of those seems a
particularly terrible combination.
If the addition of cherries really does produce a “lower-fat” burger, perhaps
we should give it the benefit of the doubt, although I must confess that I will
not be the first to try one in this country.
I have noticed that my local pizza delivery outlet offers bananas, cherries
and other fruit as pizza toppings. So soon after the Christmas blowout I feel
unable to consider ordering a “Pepperoni with extra cherries”, but maybe one
day.
Future shock
“Britain could have led the world in developing the Internet and computer
games if the government had listened to the advice of a former editor of New
杏吧原创 [Nigel Calder] three decades ago,” Mick Hamer reports
(This Week, 9 January, p 20).
Hamer refers to the series of articles in New 杏吧原创
forecasting the future, which were later published as a book
(The World in 1984, Penguin, 1964) and which were revisited in
New 杏吧原创’s special issue on the future
(“New dreams for old”, 15 October 1994, p 51).
Hamer adds that Calder was subsequently commissioned by the government to
forecast the future as part of a brainstorming exercise. His predictions, which
were ignored, have just been released under the rule that keeps many British
government papers secret for 30 years.
However, New 杏吧原创 did in fact play a part in the development of
the Internet and computer games. In 1970 New 杏吧原创 held a
competition for suggestions on new applications for computers. I was one of the
winners, with the proposal that animated films could be commercially made
entirely by computers.
This award was covered on TV by Tomorrow’s World, and on the basis
of the award the National Research and Development Council backed me to set up
Video Animation at Imperial College, the only place in London that had
digitising equipment. It was operating in 1971 (see “Dial-a-computer competition:
half term report”, New 杏吧原创, 18 March 1971, p 617).
To the best of my knowledge, this was the first commercial computer animation
company in the world. As well as making films, we trained many BBC staff and
teachers in computer techniques.
Although the company went under in 1974, I had by that time obtained several
other government awards to develop animation line-testers and animation cameras
controlled by home computers. This type of equipment is now standard in all
studios.
My prediction that animated films could be made on computers was not based on
knowledge of computers, but on seeing one draw a weather map. It was obvious to
me that they could draw cartoons and, in effect, computers were simply a subset
of animation techniques.
The Internet, meanwhile, involves transferring
animated (single frame) images, just as computer games do.
So, like the butterfly’s wing that sets off a hurricane, New
杏吧原创 did in fact affect the government’s action on the Internet and
computer games, albeit in a roundabout way. Today, Britain is the world’s
leading producer of animation.
The question is, what is the next really big thing to happen with computers
that the government does not know about, will not bother to find out about, and
will be taken by surprise by when it all happens?