Once in a . . .
I was gratified to see that blue moons appear in your excellent column
(Feedback, 30 January).
You cite Keith Dawson’s “Tasty Bits from the Technology
Front” website as the source of your information. In fact, Keith got much of his
information from a website run by my wife and myself, which can be found at
www.obliquity.com/astro/bluemoon.html. We have a Blue Moon calculator to
enable anyone to explore this fascinating subject.
I should point out that the “19 years = 228 calendar months = 235 lunar
months = 236 full moons” argument actually underestimates the frequency of blue
moons, which is in fact 4.1 per cent.
Alien revolutionaries
Kenneth Buckmaster’s concerns about hostile aliens can’t go unchallenged
(Letters, 30 January, p 49).
There was, and may still be, a small Trotskyite faction based in Argentina
which argued that UFOs are piloted by emissaries of an advanced and peaceful
civilisation.
Observe the logic of this. First, only a cooperatively organised world would
have the resources necessary to develop and carry out interstellar travel. Brute
capitalism will always be looking for a short-term profit and could never invest
in the sufficiently long term. Moreover, in a competitive economy, any
organisation which attempted to do so would quickly go bust.
Secondly, a world organised anything like ours is at present would blow
itself up long before it had time to acquire the necessary technology. It is
therefore the revolutionary duty of all good socialists to work to make contact
with the extraterrestrials, so that they can come and help usher in an era of
universal peace and prosperity, and bestow upon us their unimaginable
knowledge.
I don’t say I buy this argument. I merely point out that the reasoning is no
more flimsy than that which says aliens are likely to be hostile.
Genetics and eugenics
In your article on Chinese attitudes to genetic screening
(This Week, 24 October, p 18),
figures that I supplied were incorrectly presented in the
accompanying table. The incorrect data had the effect of weakening the main
thrust of the story, which highlights the extent to which Chinese geneticists
support preventive goals that many would consider “eugenic”.
The table presents figures purporting to demonstrate the divergent views of
Western and Chinese geneticists. But the figures given understate the
differences. As correctly stated in the first line of the table, 92 per cent of
Chinese geneticists agree that people who knowingly carry a recessive genetic
disorder should not have children with other carriers, primarily because their
descendants would face a one in four chance of having the “disease”. The
comparative figures for geneticists in Britain and the US should have read 6 per
cent and 7 per cent respectively, not the much larger figures of 34 and 44 per
cent given.
Also, the table unfairly suggests that there is considerable support among
geneticists in Britain and the US for job applicants in general to have genetic
tests (46 and 59 per cent respectively), a figure that compares with 86 per cent
in China. What the table fails to state is that the question was much less
general, limiting tests to circumstances when genetic conditions might
predispose job applicants to occupational health hazards. Without that modifier,
it is likely that far fewer in Britain and the US would have agreed.
Shopping list
An enlightened view of user interfaces for computers identifies two components. Your article
(“The human touch”, 23 January, p 34)
mentions just one鈥攖he “language” used for communication, in this case various sorts of
pictures and pointing. But the more important part of the interface is the “user
model”鈥攖he ideas you or I have in our heads about what the computer is
doing and can do.
An online supermarket with hierarchical menus, however prettily presented, is
obliged to divide up groceries using some hierarchical classification scheme. Of
course, they already do this in the shops themselves to decide what to put next
to what on the shelves. It’s better than chaos, but I still always seem to end
up having to go back for things I went past the first time.
In its online version, it means you have to fight through “fresh produce” to
“vegetables” and then to “salads” before you find a screen of tomato choices.
It’s not a bad idea to have such a system on hand, for when you want some sort
of exotic fruit but can’t remember what it’s called. But most of us make
shopping lists. Why can’t I order from a supermarket by just typing in my list,
and then refining it with an electronic conversation which tells me what’s out
of stock and occasionally steers me towards promotions and bargains?
Oh, and you credit Lotus with the introduction of “commercial spreadsheets”.
Visicalc was first, of course.
At your convenience
You correctly report that most digital TV receivers contain devices made by
Macrovision that can make video recordings of TV programmes unwatchable, should
broadcasters choose to activate them
(This Week, 23 January, p 7).
However, this should not create quite the sinking feeling that Barry Fox implies.
Rather than incommoding the movie-watching public, copy protection gives
consumers more choice. Such protection is a contractual requirement of the film
studios that allows broadcasters such as BSkyB to offer a wide choice of films
in pay-per-view that viewers would not normally be able to see until they are
released in the cinemas.
Furthermore, the multiple screening times available in pay-per-view make home
recording unnecessary. No longer do we have to bother setting our VCRs to record
our chosen movie. We simply watch it at the time most convenient to us. And
should you have to leave before a film ends, BSkyB has introduced the All Day
Movie Ticket, which offers repeat viewings all day at no extra cost.
Copyright protection, both legal and technical, is becoming increasingly
important as we move further into the digital information age.
Efficiency gets harder
Fred Pearce argues that the progress the Chinese have made in improving their
energy efficiency by a factor of 50 per cent suggests that the industrialised
West should have little difficulty in making more modest 7 per cent improvement
(Forum, 9 January, p 44).
But I fear he is ignoring the problem of diminishing returns. As efficiencies
increase, getting these last few per cent out becomes increasingly
difficult.
Letter
I tried to persuade a city friend to buy the 1.2 gigawatt “never been run”
nuclear power plant. Naturally, he asked how much it was. When I told him it
cost $250 million, he wondered if that included postage.
Nukes for sale
Even more worrying than Foster Steam Turbine Consultants advertising a nuclear power plant
(Feedback, 23 January)
is the fact that they are no longer doing so. I think we have a right to know who bought it.
Model T scanners
I think I am quite pleased that the power of functional magnetic resonance
imagining is “not being squandered on helping stroke patients or people with epilepsy”
(Feedback, 30 January).
In these budget-limited times, MRI machines
are indeed too expensive to be squandered that way. Few institutions can afford
them, so they are made more or less by hand in small production runs. Rolls
Royces every one.
What we want is a Model T version, so cheap that go-ahead beauticians can set
up scanning businesses next door to the chip shop. In which case, the more
scanners L’Oreal use, the better for everybody鈥攊ncluding, of course, me,
as I enter my old age and the stroking years.
Pile `em high, sell `em cheap, I say.
Letter
Do the dates for full moons vary depending on where you are in the world?
The reason I ask is that according to the calendar published by the
Australian Bureau of Meteorology (who should know about these things), May is
the only month with a blue moon. Maybe this is because of the time difference
here鈥攐r is there some other reason?
We put Anne Askew’s query to David Harper, who writes: It is indeed a matter
of which time zone the dates and times of the Moon’s phases are expressed in.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology will have obtained the times in Universal
Time (which is effectively the same as Greenwich Mean Time) from The
Astronomical Almanac, and then added 10 hours to convert to one of the standard
time zones in Australia.
Any full moon that occurred after 1400 GMT will have been “shifted” to the
next day by this process, and this is why there appears to be only one blue
moon, in May, in Australia during 1999.
Letter
The significance of the new data is not that credits for emission reductions
can be given for landfill sites. The results simply provide additional
justification for the credits given to managed forestry鈥攖he point of
production rather than disposal鈥攁s a long-term carbon sink.
But growing forests is an effective response to the global warming problem
only if trees are harvested and replaced at the appropriate time, and if the
resulting products have a long lifetime so that the carbon they contain is
returned to the atmosphere only after a significant delay.
Star robots
Francis Slakey is right to take NASA to task for using human-interest PR
stunts, such as John Glenn’s “heroic” return to space, to sell space exploration
(Forum, 16 January, p 48).
In terms of payoff and cost, robot probes beat humans hands down. But how can
NASA wrangle dollars without a “human face”?
Maybe they should call Hollywood. Star Trek’s Data and Star
Wars’ R2D2 and C3P0 are all big money-spinners. If the Mars Sojourner had
made cute whistles and clicks, NASA’s robot budget would by now have reached the
stars.
Letter
Your use of the phrase “blue moon” to describe a second full moon in a given
calendar month is current in the US, but much less so in Britain. A discussion
about its origin appears on my World Wide Words website, which can be found at
www.quinion.com/words/.
Leaky sinks
You recently reported the claim that “landfills could soon become
environmental assets” by locking away carbon that would otherwise contribute to
global warming
(This Week, 23 January, p 22).
The article cites research by US
government scientists suggesting that at most 30 per cent of the carbon in waste
paper and 3 per cent of the carbon in waste wood are released as landfill gases,
and hence that landfills containing such materials are significant “carbon
sinks”.
This conclusion overlooks one critical factor. Methane, a major product of
the breakdown of paper in landfills, is a far more potent greenhouse gas than
carbon dioxide鈥攎ass for mass, 21 times as potent over 100 years, according
to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In other words, 1
kilogram of methane traps heat in the atmosphere as effectively as 21 kilograms
of CO2.
The government scientists, Jessie Micales and Ken Skog, estimate that nearly
16 per cent of the carbon in paper in landfills is released as methane, about 10
per cent as CO2 and that 74 per cent remains locked away (they assume
forever). But factoring methane’s greater potency as a greenhouse gas into their
estimates, for every 100 kilograms of carbon in landfilled paper products, the
74 kilograms of carbon sequestered are more than offset by the release of
methane equivalent to nearly 320 kilograms of CO2. Hence, there is a
net release of about 240 kilograms of CO2 equivalents for every 100
kilograms of carbon present in landfilled paper.
These calculations indicate that far from being carbon sinks, landfills
containing paper are a significant net source of greenhouse gas emissions, a
finding that is consistent with several other recent studies.
Looking ahead
“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 happens?” asks Stan Hayward
(Letters, 23 January, p 49).
The Foresight programme, managed by the Office of Science and Technology, is
working hard to ensure that Britain is not taken by surprise by developments in
IT. If Hayward points his Web browser at www.foresight.gov.uk/itec/, he
can download dozens of reports written by experts in industry and academia
covering future trends and developments in IT, their effects on industry and
society, and the IT skills shortage鈥攁ll of which are helping nudge
government, industry and academia in the right directions.
And if he has some good ideas about what the IT future might hold, then I’m
sure Foresight would be very interested to hear from him.
The numbers game
Chris Huxley is quoted as attacking the “myth of a catastrophic decline in
elephant numbers across Africa”
(This Week, 9 January, p 16).
He claims that the decision to outlaw the ivory trade under the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 1989 was based on the supposed decline in
elephants’ numbers from 1.3 million to 650 000, and that this figure of 1.3
million included 300 000 elephants in Zaire that never existed.
Perhaps his memory is shorter than an elephant’s, or more selective. The
African Elephant Specialist Group’s conclusion that elephants were in decline
was not based on continental totals. There were three main lines of evidence in
most (but not of the African Elephant Range States.
First, population trend data from numerous censuses in the 1970s and 1980s
showed widespread falls in elephant numbers across Africa, accompanied by high
carcass ratios. Second, African ivory export curves increased and then rapidly
collapsed in what could most plausibly be explained as an “overfishing”
scenario. Finally, tusk statistics showed a major drop in mean tusk weight,
which reflected destruction of the mature bulls and older females. In forested
areas, surveys based on dung count analyses found depressed densities suggesting
a decline there too.
Of course, extrapolations were also made. This is what sample surveys are
for. The Ivory Trade Review Group presented this data to the parties who voted
at the CITES convention in 1989.
Letter
Blackwell claims the software is effectively beta software that needs
patches. There has never been a patch for a Playstation game and the reasons for
patches for PC software are usually to update a game for hardware not available
at the time it was written or to correct problems which are discovered only when
the game is already “in the field”.
Perhaps Blackwell could explain where the 拢1 million or more invested
in an average game is to be obtained from? In fact, 拢30 is an artificially
low price to pay, not an unreasonably high one.
The real “baddie” is the retailer, which takes 34 per cent, or 拢10 per
game. This is why Blackwell should purchase by mail order.
The British National Consumer Council has called on the Office of Fair
Trading to conduct an official inquiry into the pricing of computer
驳补尘别蝉鈥抬诲
Letter
If you believe a product to be flawed, you do not have to purchase it.
Copying it because you don’t believe it to be “worth” the money is
theft鈥攑lain and simple. Would your correspondent C. Blackwell feel
comfortable shoplifting expensive books that get poor reviews?
As to whether games are overpriced鈥攕ome may be, others are not. A good
computer game can give more than 40 hours of enjoyment. I’d say that was pretty
good value for 拢35. Since game demos are available with various magazines,
consumers can make informed decisions about which to buy. If a game is
particularly buggy, the majority of reviews will reflect this.
Blackwell says that some releases are so buggy that game developers would go
out of business if they were writing “industrial software”. During development,
the average computer game these days occupies the time of 10 or more people for
approximately two years, with some games having far larger teams. I do not think
Blackwell understands the time and effort that goes into the software he so
blithely advocates stealing.
Play fair
I do not agree that high pricing is a justification for copyright theft
(Letters, 23 January, p 49).
However, as a retailer of computer software, I can confirm that there is
price collusion between distributors, especially in the games sector.
We are forced to buy our computer games through authorised, exclusive
distributors. This means that there is no price competition between
distributors.
As a small, independent retailer, we do not benefit from this system. We make
around 10 per cent gross margin on PC games after matching the prices of the
large multiple stores, which receive far higher discounts when they buy the
games. We are also in the strange situation of paying more for some console
games than other stores sell them for.
If the software publishers were fair, we would get bigger discounts and be
able to sell software more cheaply. This would upset the happy cartel of large
stores, which are hugely inefficient and therefore need larger
margins鈥攄espite providing a poorer service.