Mature mayonnaise
I read with interest the Feedback item
(24 April) on the KLM Airlines’ Royal
Wing requirement for 22 000 extra points “before 21 January 1900”.
My wife and I recently enjoyed a jar of mayonnaise which was marked: “Best
when purchased before March, 1900.” It tasted just fine to us, but we wondered
at how thoroughly delicious it would have been had we bought it a hundred years
ago.
No techno fixes
I am sceptical of any article that starts out: “It’s time we got all the cars off the roads”
(Forum, 24 April, p 51).
While I believe it is in our interest to
reduce the number of cars on our roads and make new cars safer and more
efficient, it would be neither practical nor desirable to eliminate cars
altogether.
Michael Le Page tells us that we can create a Utopian transportation system
using technology that is “just around the corner”. The fact is, we do not need
to reinvent the wheel in order to move passengers more quickly and efficiently
within and between cities. The technology exists in the form of subways, light
rail vehicles and high-speed trains.
Unfortunately, this technology is all too often misapplied or simply absent,
the result being that, while sitting for hours in traffic jams or on delayed
trains, we have a tendency to think up “revolutionary” new transportation
systems.
Looking back over the past few decades we have heard ideas such as tracked
air-cushion vehicles, linear induction monorails, jet-propelled vehicles and
maglevs, none of which has come to fruition. Personal rapid transit is destined
to join this list of failed pipe dreams.
Solutions to our transportation and environmental problems do not lie in
waiting hopefully for new technologies to emerge, but rather in using public and
private funds to make optimal use of existing technology.
Abandon neutrality
Helene Marsh writes about misrepresentation of her research on the dugong,
the threatened marine mammal
(Forum, 17 April, p 65).
Suggesting that environmental scientists broaden their advisory role by
providing a “menu of options” for action has merit. It will allow scientists to
participate in framing the nature of the political debate that occurs. It is a
major step from the current practice, which is to make no recommendations and to
take no advocacy position as to how the information contained in a scientific
study should be used.
Such an approach, however, will not prevent disagreements nor different
conclusions being drawn by those on opposing sides of the argument.
Environmental issues are not simply scientific but involve a whole gamut of
disciplines, perspectives and passions that will not go away no matter how
conclusive the science. Perhaps the PR training Marsh advocates should go beyond
media skills and include training in the nature and diversity of advocacy,
recognising that environmental science is necessarily a political and social
field as well as a scientific one.
The quality of the debate can only improve if scientists begin to assume some
responsibility for how their data are used.
Letter
Andrew Blucher suggests that the Melissa problem can be solved by simply
keeping Word’s Macro Virus Protection switched on (Website Letters, 1 May).
Unfortunately this does not work. Macro Virus Protection only warns you when a
document contains macros. You are then asked whether you want to run the macros
or open the document without running them.
One of the first things any macro virus does is to turn this protection off
(they usually also turn off “Confirm conversion” and “Prompt to save
normal.dot”). This means that you only need to lapse once, or have a situation
where running macros is necessary, and you’ll never get the warning again. Most
computer users do not realise that these options have been modified, nor do they
know how to turn them back on.
Macro Virus Protection is no protection at all.
Macromania
Helen MacDonald writes that Word macros are needed in the publishing industry
(Letters, 8 May, p 54).
This is partly right, but as regards the present debate
on viruses, mostly wrong. Yes, some form of automated document editing is very
helpful. No, this does not require macros in the form in which they are found in
MS Word, and which have spawned Melissa and other viruses.
There is a world of difference between allowing automated changes to be made
to open documents within an application, which primarily serves to eliminate
repetitive editing, and allowing a Word document to be a piece of executable
code which can operate on any file and in any way the operating system allows.
You need the first. The second is not only unnecessary, it is, as corporate IT
support departments and end users are finding to their cost, thoroughly
harmful.
What MacDonald and other users should be demanding from her WP supplier is
more editing power, and less programming power. There is no technical reason why
they cannot have it.
Sound and sense
I read with interest your article about children’s problems with learning to read and write
(“Lost for words”, 24 April, p 26).
An obvious question to ask is
whether the problems are as serious in languages which are more or less
phonetically written. German, Dutch and Afrikaans come to mind.
As a prospective teacher I did teaching practice in both English and
Afrikaans-speaking primary schools. In an English-speaking school I had to make
sense of some wildly inaccurate spelling, particularly by one child, whose
spelling was only rarely correct. I remember he had “mjun” for “motion”, which
made me think he was trying to spell phonetically according to the teacher’s
pronunciation and his own experience of the sound associated with individual
letters.
Darwin in debt
Following your recent account of the Wright brothers’ publication of their
discoveries in the unlikely medium of a beekeeping journal
(Feedback, 24 April),
I thought you might be amused by another bizarre example of this phenomenon.
In 1831, the Scottish orchardist and writer Patrick Matthew, who was living
in the Carse of Gowrie, summarised in a few sentences the essential principles
of natural selection in an appendix to his book Naval Timber and
Arboriculture.
When Darwin’s On The Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Matthew was
indignant that he had received no recognition for his earlier observations, and
wrote to Darwin to that effect. In his reply, Darwin freely acknowledged that
Matthew had anticipated by many years the explanation he had offered for the
origin of species and tendered his apologies for being unaware of his
publication.
It may be surmised that Matthew, as a grower of fruit trees, routinely
practised selection and assumed that a comparable process was at work in nature,
guaranteeing vigour and successful performance among all living beings.
Innocent farmers
Perhaps you would like to explain how exactly cattle farmers are to blame for
the BSE crisis, as you imply
(Editorial, 1 May, p 3).
It is possible that cattle farmers voted for a government that condoned the
inclusion of animal remains in cattle feed. Most farmers undoubtedly purchased
cattle food from animal food manufacturers assuming that, as it was designed as
cattle food, the product was safe to feed to cattle. Even if farmers were aware
that the food contained animal remains (and I am sure that most were
not鈥攃attle food does not come with an ingredients list) then they were
assured by government officials and scientists that this was safe.
I fail to see how this should burden them with responsibility for the BSE
crisis.
Repetitive brain injury
Robert Hardy writes that stress may be a cause of repetitive strain injury
(Letters, 1 May, p 59).
I would like to suggest another possible explanation for
at least some RSI effects, derived from personal experience.
Some years ago, after six months away from my wordprocessor, I sat down in
the old position and put out my hands ready to start typing.
Immediately the old ache started in my arms. How could this be, as surely any
injury would have been repaired after six months away from the keyboard?
The explanation? Good old classical aversive conditioning鈥攚ith my brain
saying, via my arms, “Not this again! Stop it!”
Letter
Being an expat, I received a letter from the US Department of Treasury (DOT)
asking me to register any foreign bank accounts on an enclosed form. The letter
went on to offer an apology if I had already registered using any earlier form,
but the DOT now required that this latest form should be used instead, since it
was Y2K compliant.
How can a piece of paper be Y2K compliant? Would the earlier form have
self-destructed on 1 January 2000?
Letter
Until it was hastily removed, a page on Hampshire County Council’s website
nonchalantly stated: “This page last updated on 2 December 2096.”
Letter
What a pity that hardly any attention is being paid to the question of what
kind of language education might give the best results for dyslectics.
Simply changing the way schools teach written languages would be of enormous
benefit to dyslectics. That is what Diane McGuinness of Florida (in her book
Why Children Can’t Read and What We Can Do About It) and Willem J. de
Haan of Amsterdam (several books in Dutch) argue.
Both believe that teachers should know more about the whys and hows of
language and should explain them in a step-by-step way.
Perfume overload
Perhaps the high level of synthesised perfumes in the atmosphere
(This Week, 17 April, p 23)
is the reason that so many of us, myself included, suffer from
“perfume allergies”. Our senses are overloaded by the air we breathe before we
even take into consideration the overwhelming amounts we ourselves are
wearing.
Sensitive computers
In my experience, computer equipment that can sense its user’s mood is
nothing new
(“I know how you feel”, 8 May, p 26).
The printer in my office works fine most of the time, but detects very
accurately when I am particularly stressed and/or rushed. This triggers a
“random colour toner out” warning, followed by 10 minutes of “warming up”,
followed by a different “random colour toner out” message. It usually then
deletes the print job, goes into a sulk and has to be rebooted. I don’t know how
this “mood sensing” technology is supposed to aid the user, but it certainly
seems very effective.
Looking-glass logic
“The idea of `the more you buy the less you pay’ is one that Feedback hasn’t
come across before,” says Feedback of Sainsbury’s tomato puree
(17 April).
As a member of the Lewis Carroll Society, I suggest you refer to chapter 5,
“Wool and Water”, in Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found
there.
“I should like to buy an egg, please,” she said timidly. “How do you sell
them?”
“Fivepence farthing for one鈥攖wopence for two,” the Sheep replied.
“Then two are cheaper than one?” Alice said in a surprised tone, taking out
her purse.
“Only you must eat them both, if you buy two,” said the Sheep.
“Then I’ll have one, please,” said Alice as she put the money down
on the counter. For she thought to herself, “They mightn’t be at all nice, you
know.”
Red rocks
The relationship between rocks in Cuba and the Chicxulub impact crater on the
Yucat谩n Peninsula
(In Brief, 27 March, p 29)
does not need confirmation
by itchy-footed embargo-restrained American geologists. Before Eastern bloc
foreign aid to Cuba dried up, a great deal of field work was carried out by
geologists and geophysicists from eastern Europe and their Cuban colleagues. At
a meeting in Havana in 1992, Polish and Cuban geologists described a 0.5-metre
layer close to or at the K/T boundary in northern Cuba.
Although northern Cuba is now some 500 kilometres from the Chicxulub crater,
at the end of the Cretaceous it lay along the east coast of the Yucat谩n
Peninsula.
Letter
I am not at all surprised at Tesco’s spring water being labelled “suitable
for vegetarians”. What does surprise me is that it was not also labelled
“virtually fat free”.
Vegetarian water
The label on Tesco’s still spring water stating “suitable for vegetarians” is
not as daft as it seems
(Feedback, 8 May)
鈥擸orkshire Water and North West
Water use carbonised cattle bones in the filtration processes at some of their
sites.
In focus
I was rather disappointed to see the bald statement that “People have 20/20
vision if they can clearly see objects 20 feet away”
(This Week, 24 April, p 15).
What sort of objects? Double-decker buses? Ants?
20/20 vision is the ability to resolve a simple high-contrast figure, the
smallest detail of which subtends an angle of 1 minute of arc at the eye, when
viewed at 20 feet. The first 20 of 20/20 refers to the viewing distance
(standardised at 20 feet), the second is a description of the physical size of
the target in terms of the distance from the eye (20 feet) at which it subtends
1 minute of arc.
Similarly 20/40 vision refers to resolving, at a distance of 20 feet, a
target which has an angular subtense of 1 minute of arc at a distance of 40
feet. This has the same effect on retinal image size as standing closer to the
target, but without bringing the eyes’ accommodation into play and complicating
things.
One further point. The 20/20 notation is not used in Britain, which went
metric years ago. The British equivalent is 6/6, six metres being more-or-less
20 feet, give or take a few barleycorns.
A way with nuts
Your patents column mentions the problem of stripped threads in nuts and bolts
(This Week, 1 May, p 11).
Henry Royce (the engineer of the short-lived but
famous partnership) knew that mechanics, with the best of intentions, put all
their effort into tightening nuts. The aero engines that he designed in the
1930s and 1940s had arrays of small studs and nuts to spread the load over the
whole of mating surfaces between light alloy castings. Most of these fastenings
were 2BA or 3BA.
Tired of expensive reworking of stripped threads in castings, Royce measured
the average force that a well-intentioned fitter exerted. He then used the
maximum torque allowed on the range of BA thread sizes to calculate the length
of lever that, when the average fitter force was applied, resulted in the
desired torque. The resulting set of spanners was made and issued to all
aircraft engine fitters. Compared with normal spanners they were extremely short
of shank and had only one set of jaws each.
When I was an apprentice with Rolls-Royce in 1968 there were a few fitters
who still had and prized their Royce BA spanner sets. I suppose a full set today
would be worth a small fortune.
Safety standards
Rob Edwards states that the report on nuclear safety in Eastern European
countries by the Western European Nuclear Regulators’ Association (WENRA)
declares reactors in Lithuania, Bulgaria and Slovakia to be “irredeemably unsafe”
(This Week, 17 April, p 20).
It also states that “some of the older plants cannot be made safe”.
The former phrase occurs nowhere in the report. Nor, in fact, does the report
state that the reactors cannot be made safe. What it does say, in the case of
the Ignalina reactors in Lithuania, is that they cannot “achieve standards of
safety comparable to those required for older reactors in Western Europe”.
WENRA has set itself the task of developing a common approach to nuclear
safety and regulation within the European Union. To the surprise of many, such
standards do not currently exist. I hope that this will lead in due course to
common standards for the whole of the European Union, Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union.
Right but rejected
We should not perhaps be surprised that Randolf Raff and his colleagues were
able to cross-fertilise two sea urchin species that diverged 10 million years ago
(This Week, 17 April, p 7).
Donald Williamson has reported the development of a hybrid larva from a sea
squirt egg (Ascidia mentula, phylum Chordata) fertilised with
sperm of the sea-urchin (Echinus esculentus, phylum
Echinodermata).
So unorthodox were Williamson’s observations that his paper “Incongruous
larvae and the origins of some invertebrate life histories” was rejected by
seven journals before finally being published in 1988 (Progress in
Oceanography, vol 19, p 87).
The paper also reports that embryonic and larval forms have occasionally been
transferred between distinct evolutionary lineages as a result of
cross-fertilisations.