Bits in tandem
Your short on the PlayStation 2
(This Week, 27 March, p 17) says: “A 128-bit
processor, with 32 megabytes of memory, will run at 300 megahertz and outstrip a
Pentium PC or workstation by generating 75 million graphics polygons per
second.”
This is misleading. There is no such thing as 128-bit processing in 3D
graphics, so describing any console or system as 128-bit is meaningless. Such
processors may have 128-bit cores, but what they are doing is merely multiple
parallel 8, 16, 32 or 64-bit operations.
Other systems, such as the Nintendo 64, use vector processors. The N64’s RCP
ASIC uses vectors of eight 64-bit registers. Should the N64 then be described
as a 512-bit console? Obviously not.
Road monsters
After each article I read about the development of smaller, more
fuel-efficient lower-emission vehicles, I become depressed. It seems that other
nations are trying so hard to develop clean, lean driving machines in order to
conserve our suffering environment and near-exhausted natural resources. Why is
it then that the US keeps coming out with bigger, less environmentally sound
vehicles?
The race is on between Lincoln, Cadillac, Dodge and Ford to build the
biggest, most powerful sports utility vehicle, and they just can’t seem to build
them fast enough for the American consumer. SUVs use more resources, create more
pollution and make parking even more of a nightmare. They also terrify drivers
of compact cars who would most likely be the losers in a collision with an
SUV.
As if that wasn’t enough, SUVs even get an emissions break. They are allowed
to expel more emissions than the average car because they are designed for
multiple passengers and to be driven in a rugged, mountainous environment. This
seems odd considering that nearly every SUV I see is occupied by one person,
namely the driver, and is being driven on non-demanding, flat, city streets.
Should be dead?
Roger Lewin’s article “Ruling passions”
(3 April, p 34) is one of the most
memorable I have read. To discover that simple, mathematically beautiful
relationships exist between such seemingly disparate factors as the lives of
mice and men was a revelation.
It got me thinking (and calculating). Lewin states that the hearts of mammals
of whatever size beat about 1.5 billion times during their lifetime. Assume a
typical human 72 beats per minute (resting); this is about 20.8 million
minutes鈥攔oughly 347 000 hours, nearly 14 500 days or just less than 40
years. At 42, I for one had hoped to hang around a little longer.
Modern humans must therefore somehow evade this “law”, regularly living twice
this long. Presumably this is by a combination of good diet, proper sanitation,
and so on.
It makes an interesting counter-argument to claims about our “unhealthy”
modern lifestyles, doesn’t it?
Letter
I sometimes wonder whether there is much difference between virus and
antivirus software.
In response to the Melissa scare, a well-known antivirus program was
installed on our new Exchange mailserver, which should protect users from e-mail
viruses. Its first action was to send a big file (a “driver update”) to all 600
users鈥攂y e-mail. This totally blocked the e-mail system for about a day,
with incoming mail lost for part of this period. The antivirus program was
removed, and the system works fine again. A clear case of shepherds turning
against their sheep?
Letter
My main reservation about IBM’s solution to the macro virus menace is that it
appears to involve sending code to IBM. This has obvious security
implications.
One of the problems with virus scares is that antivirus vendors want people
to buy expensive solutions and avoid thinking about simpler preventative
measures. A virus can only propagate if it can run something鈥� hence the
common advice not to run programs from untrusted sources.
Melissa relied on being able to execute a Word macro when a document was
opened, and on the user running one of a limited set of standard e-mail
programs. The former can and probably should be disabled (select
Tools-Options-General-Macro Virus Protection) and the latter avoided.
Melissa madness
You don’t mention the real source of the problem of macro viruses
(This Week, 10 April, p 4).
It started with MS Word 6, which introduced a new feature that
no one needed, the ability to turn a word processing document into an unlimited
program which executes automatically when opened. Macro viruses have
proliferated since then.
The right solution is not introducing virus checkers, it is to eliminate
macros from word processing programs. No customers will miss them. They were
only ever useful to the antivirus industry and to computer company product
management departments, as an additional feature to persuade people to upgrade,
thus generating revenue.
Those of us who are still using Word 5.1鈥攖he last decent version of
this program鈥攈ave more word-processing features than we will ever need, no
idiotic “wizards” and “auto-corrections” to infuriate us, and complete immunity
to all Word macro viruses. The only problem is the one faced by Microsoft
product management鈥攚e have spent no money on Word for several years.
Serious advice to Melissa victims and the worried: downgrade now.
Minor pang
I was fascinated by your article on Denis Noble’s work on the virtual heart
(“The heart that just won’t die”, 20 March, p 24).
Being a sufferer from
ventricular arrhythmia, I have a vested interest in any advances in this field,
as do the members of our association, all of whom have implanted cardioverter
defibrillators.
However, I would like to dispute Noble’s statement that “because of the
terrible pain, patients won’t tolerate built-in defibrillators very well”. We
find that, in general, firing of our defibrillators is painless or at worst
“like getting a shock from a Mini spark plug”鈥攁s one of us described
it.
The major problem is fear that fibrillation will occur and the machine will
be called upon to work and fear that it won’t work properly. This is rather
illogical, but that is human nature. It is this dread that led to the
establishment of our self-help group.
Clearly, we would welcome any reduction in the power needed to correct our
rhythms but, unless an implant could function without the user’ s knowledge,
most of the problems will still remain.
Sitting comfortably?
Further to your article on the evils of chairs (“The only good chair . . .”,
19 December 1998, p 76), in Galen Cranz’s book The Chair: Rethinking
Culture, Body and Design, she calls for the formation of groups to demand
better seating. The Campaign for Better Seating has been set up to do just
that.
Our aim is to prevent back trouble by publicising the link between bad
seating and bad backs, and by calling for an improvement in the design of
seating. Our leaflet can be obtained by sending a stamped addressed envelope to
22 Leys Avenue, Cambridge, CB4 2AW.
Tubes are booked
Birger Johansson continues a thread about using lava tubes as shelters for a Martian colony
(Letters, 3 April, p 55). This is certainly an attractive idea,
and I note that the author Kim Stanley Robinson used it for the community of
Dorsa Brevia in the 1994 book Green Mars.
Bits aplenty
Mike Orton need not worry so much about the Royal Mail’s public key encryption system
(Letters, 10 April, p 55). A peek at its website
(http://www.royalmail.co.uk/atwork/viacode/news/tech_brief. htm) shows that the
public keys are 1024 bits long rather than 128. 128-bit keys are used with a
symmetric cypher rather than the asymmetric RSA. The site informs us: “The
software is independent of encryption algorithms, but comes as standard with a
choice of symmetric and asymmetric cyphers including IDEA-128 and RSA1024″.
There may be other reasons to worry about cryptography but RSA with 128-bit
keys from Royal Mail isn’t one of them.
Stirling Pizza
Recently, we attempted to cook pizza at home. We placed our freshly prepared
pizza on a round metal tray in a nice hot oven. But after a while it became
clear that, although the top of the pizza was browning nicely, the underside
just wasn’t cooking properly. So we put the pizza on the stove hotplate to help
the underside along a bit.
Immediately, both tray and pizza began to rock from side to side. We waited
for the motion to die away, but instead its amplitude increased until our dinner
was rocking furiously, the tray moving up and down by about 1 centimetre at its
edge.
We watched it perform for 5 minutes, baffled. Peering under the tray, we
could see that it was not completely flat, but had two raised points in contact
with the hotplate which were acting as the fulcrum. Also, the pizza itself
appeared to have two trapped air bubbles, each about 8 centimetres in diameter,
which were lifting the pizza off the tray slightly.
It finally became clear to us that we were witnessing a two-chamber Stirling
engine in action. The bubbles in the two halves of the undercooked pizza were
acting like interconnected chambers.
On the hotter side, expanding air would leak to the opposite bubble, causing
the pizza on that side to rise and, as a reaction, the tray to fall. This placed
the opposite pizza half in closer contact with the hotplate, causing the motion
to reverse.
At length, a wisp of smoke from the pizza base forced us to halt the
experiment and eat our somewhat charred “engine”. We have sent this letter in
the fervent hope that our pizza engine might inspire the development of our
ultimate gastronomic dream鈥攖he fully edible vehicle.
Trashing teachers
Jonathan Osborne missed an opportunity to praise science teachers for their
evident success
(Forum, 3 April, p 52). Instead, he restated a number of
well-established points about poor science teaching.
At the moment many teachers invest evenings and weekends developing their own
“current issues” activities because of a dearth of centrally produced material.
It would have been helpful if, instead of whingeing about the quality of science
teaching, Osborne had helped us out by writing an interesting and accessible
resource.
Many articles from last week’s issue of New 杏吧原创 alone screamed
to be included in an exciting science lesson. If he had developed just one of
these into something which could be used in class, I’d have been grateful.
Virtual thuggery
In his review of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace
(3 April, p 47),
Simon Ings disputes the claim that cyberspace is a real “space”. He asks: “If I
enter an interactive 3D world . . . and I kick the living daylights out of
everything鈥攚ho cares? Neither physical nor divine harm will come to
me.”
Cyberspace is above all else a social space. If you “kick the living
daylights” out of a newsgroup or mailing list by spamming it, flaming people and
posting off-topic, then social harm will come to you. You will be shunned,
ignored and, if you overstep the mark sufficiently, reported to your ISP and
have your connection cut off.
This is the “harm” you can come to in cyberspace, and it’s sufficient harm
for the vast majority of people to behave themselves.
Keep it yourselves
I was greatly interested by your article about the disposal of nuclear waste
(This Week, 27 March, p 22).
Why should the waste be dumped in countries that
have nothing to do with it? The nuclear waste problem is caused by the developed
world and should be handled by the developed world.
We do not want your problems鈥攚e have enough of our own.
Letter
I found it difficult to grasp that some languages have only five words to
describe colours, until I realised that we ourselves have no words at all to
represent different smells.
For us, smells are said to be “like” something. So that when the man from the
council comes round, we tell him that the smell is like rotten eggs. He
understands this and does not wander around searching for long-forgotten eggs.
In fact, I bet that most of us have never actually smelt a rotten egg, yet we still
use it as a description.
Shades of meaning
I was struck by the article about Jules Davidoff’s work on the naming of colours
(This Week, 20 March, p 7), in particular by the description of the
colours nol and wor used by the Burinmo people of New Guinea.
According to the article, English subjects see nol and wor
each as sets of several quite different colours, and have difficulty
distinguishing between what the Burinmo call noland wor.
My son, who is partially colour blind due to an insensitivity to the red
portion of the spectrum, might perform well in distinguishing between
nol and wor. The sets of different colours that English speakers
see bear a close resemblance to sets of colours within which my son has problems
in perceiving differences.
The similarity between my son’s problem and the tribe’s colour perception may
stem from the terminology used in the article. If not, however, it raises
interesting questions about the ways in which culture may influence the
processing of sensory input. It also suggests parallels with the linguistic
phenomenon of non-native speakers of a language being insensitive to differences
of pronunciation obvious to someone raised in that tongue.
Letter
SUVs are highly fuel-inefficient and prone to roll over on tight turns. Worst
of all, occupants of ordinary cars unlucky enough to crash into an SUV are
likely to suffer serious injury or be killed outright. The high clearance which
contributes to the turn instability also means that the larger and much heavier
SUVs all too often ride right over the engine compartment of the other vehicle
and smash into the passenger area.
It is also becoming clear that being “in command” (as the US advertisements
like to say) of such a large piece of machinery engenders carelessness in
driving habits and fosters a false belief that one can truly go anywhere (and
without getting stuck). Some who buy such vehicles claim to do so out of
self-defence: who knows where such an idea might lead in terms of additional
“defence equipment”?
Naked truth
I, too, have fallen victim to motion-sensing lighting
(Feedback, 3 April).
After an enjoyable day out in Snowdonia, my unit returned to the Army’s
adventure training camp at Capel Curig. Being a bit more tired than the younger
members, I was the last in the ablutions block. You guessed it鈥攐nce I was
in the showers, the lights went out. With my eyes full of soapy water, I
stumbled about naked trying to break the sensor beams and turn on the lights.
Having noticed the sensors were high on the wall, I started jumping and waving
my arms.
Then I realised what sort of picture would greet anyone entering the
block鈥攁nd decided I would rather shower in the dark…
Mobile revenge
While I agree with everything in your editorial
(10 March, p 3) about the
(perceived) dangers of mobile phones, I wanted to add one factor. Many of us do
not have (or want) a mobile phone, and regard them as annoying status
symbols.
Whenever a mobile phone rings in a theatre or classroom, or I see someone
driving with one hand on the wheel while having an animated conversation on a
mobile phone, there is a certain satisfaction in thinking that the person’s
phone may be killing them.