Letter
A friend of mine often has to spellcheck politicians’ names. According to his
computer, we are now being governed by Tony Blare or Blear and his deputy John
Presto, who have in their ministerial team Michael Meatier or Meathook, Paul
Booting, Dawn Primarily, Lord Irvine of Lairs, Margaret Bequeath, Donald Dewier,
Frank Doubloon and Tease Jowl. Also Lord Simian of Highborn, who may be a monkey
but is at least a noble one.
For the previous government there was generally no alternative, but
exceptions include Virginia Bottomless, Michael Portico and Galleon
Shepherd.
Letter
The acronym for the New Zealand Income Support Service is NZISS. This is
returned by my spellchecker as NAZIS. I usually accept this correction.
Marine education
Chris Collister is puzzled about the appearance of the “University of Whales”
in a journal (Letters, 8 May, p 55). But if one can have a school of porpoises,
then why not a university of whales?
Evolutionary tourism
Geoff McNamara writes about how frequently books on pseudoscience appear on
the popular science shelves of bookshops (Letters, 8 May, p 54). By way of
contrast, when browsing the travel books in my local branch of Waterstones
recently, I came across Richard Dawkins’s River Out Of Eden among the
Middle East travel guides.
Prime Minister Blare
I enjoyed your article on the incompetence of spellcheckers (Feedback, 8
May). However, I feel you have missed out on the interesting suggestions of the
Microsoft Word 97 Thesaurus.
When set in the English (US) language mode, it reports that “Love her and
leave her” should become “Make pregnant”, “Unable to get a date” becomes “Unable
to have an erection” and the phrase “I’d like to bash Bill Gates” is replaced
with “I’ll drink to that”.
Who says computers don’t have a sense of humour?
Letter
You may be interested to note that Private Eye, 30 April, carries a
reprint from a Balti Tandoori Menu: “Baigan Bhajee (Aborigines)”. Presumably
Baigan and Bhajee are perfectly acceptable to the spellchecker, unlike
aubergines.
Reibadailty
You report that reversing 50-millisecond segments of recorded sound does not
greatly affect listeners’ ability to understand speech (In Brief, 1 May, p
27).
This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), which showed that
randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the
ability of skilled readers to understand the text. Indeed one rapid reader
noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text.
This is easy to denmtrasote. In a puiltacibon of New Scnieitst you
could ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same,
and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come to much
beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce retigcionon. Saberi’s
work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael prsooscers at work.
The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel prseocsing
speeds up regnicoiton. We only need the first and last two letetrs to spot
chganes in meniang.
This was not easy to type!
Beating the bends
As an ex-commercial diver, your article on bacteria beating the bends (This
Week, 1 May, p 23) left me more than a little confused.
To my knowledge, heliox (helium/oxygen) is far and away the most commonly
used gas for commercial diving beyond the air range. I know of only one
commercial diving company that even carried out trials of hydrox
(hydrogen/oxygen), at least in Europe.
It therefore seems extremely unlikely that a hydrogen-metabolising bacterium
would be very beneficial. And anyway, the bends can be caused by any gas, so
converting hydrogen into methane may just be substituting one bend-producing gas
for another.
***
Susan Kayar, who carried out the research, writes: Heliox is indeed the gas
mix of choice for deep diving, and only Comex, a French diving company, is
testing hydrox at the moment. However, hydrox has the advantage of being less
dense and therefore easier to breathe at high pressures.
While it is true that any gas can cause the bends, only one molecule of
methane is produced for every four molecules of hydrogen eliminated by
biochemical decompression. What’s more, methane produced by bacteria in the
intestine does not have to diffuse out of the body like other gases鈥攊t has
an outlet of its own.
Toxic spiral
You report that shellfish numbers have risen in the North Sea since small
boats were banned from using antifouling paints containing tributyltin (TBT),
and Sian Pullen of the WorldWide Fund for Nature (WWF) is quoted as saying that
the ban should be extended to large boats (This Week, 8 May, p 23).
However, the need for effective antifouling of boats has not disappeared, and
the banning of one toxic compound is likely to spawn a new generation of
pollutants. Pullen correctly states that modern copper-based paints are less of
a threat to marine organisms than TBT, but copper has proved to be less
effective at restricting the growth of algae on ships’ hulls. To compensate, the
herbicide Irgarol 1051 has been added to paints to boost the toxicity of some
paints.
The manufacturer, Ciba, claims that Irgarol 1051 doesn’t persist in the
environment, but this is contradicted by independent research. A recent study by
myself and others (Aquatic Toxicology, vol 45, p 159) into the effect
of Irgarol 1051 upon eelgrass (Zostera marina) found that it was
present throughout the year in the tissues of plants growing in a “clean”
estuary in southwest Britain. Also, long-term exposure to concentrations
reported in some British estuaries is sufficient to affect the plants.
The effects of TBT, such as imposex in dogwhelks鈥攖he condition in which
females grow a rudimentary penis鈥攁re clearly more alarming, and therefore
attracts more publicity, than damage to phytoplankton, seaweed and seagrasses.
However, plants are an essential component of marine ecosystems, and habitats
such as seagrass beds are protected by international and European
directives.
If a worldwide ban on TBT is imposed, will the WWF then call for restrictions
on the use of Irgarol 1051, and then its replacement, ad infinitum? Or is it
possible to protect ships’ hulls from fouling without affecting marine
habitats?
They're for turning
The debate about whether feathered flight developed from the ground up rather
than from the trees down rolls on with the hypothesis that wings initially
evolved as a means of increasing speed while running (This Week, 8 May, p
10).
While I have no expertise in this area, I do recall a TV clip on farmed
ostriches showing a running group of these birds all sticking out a single
stubby wing and turning in that direction. Assuming this is not an avian Highway
Code, it presumably works by increasing drag on that side.
As bipedal dinosaurs evolved greater speeds, a mechanism that helped them
turn or brake sharply would have had significant survival potential. Being
obsolete as running appendages, the development of forelimbs as steering
appendages seems an obvious option. Feathered limbs could create greater drag,
and flapping them could increase drag further still.
If so, it would seem that improved directional braking, rather than increased
ground speed, initially drove the evolution of wings. The refinement of these
fledgling wings into fully functional flying appendages would then seem almost
inevitable.
Pollution parasites
The article on “flukey frogs”, about a study suggesting that parasites rather than pollution are to blame for the many deformed frogs found in North America, caught my attention (This Week, 8 May, p 15).
I am reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, a book that some would consider to be a seminal text for the environmental movement. In the book, which was written in the 1950s when DDT, dieldrin and aldrin were widely used in North America, she mentions the unusual tolerance of snails to such pesticides. In one instance, this resulted in their numbers vastly increasing.
The snails themselves were not a problem, but they provided a vector for a parasitic fluke which infected more “valuable” creatures. Perhaps, then, the question with regard to flukey frogs should not be one of parasites or pollution, but whether pollution has increased parasite numbers.
Seeing and learning
John Stein’s theory that some children’s reading difficulties are caused by a
perceptual problem, rather than a language problem, is fascinating for those of
us who work in the field of vision and learning (“Lost for words”, 24 April, p
26).
Two distinct professional disciplines need to be involved in the diagnosis of
a learning problem鈥攅ducation and optometrics. I wonder how many parents
know that their child has been labelled as “dyslexic or dyspraxic” when only the
education side has been assessed?
Few parents or educational psychologists realise that an eyesight test does
not test the binocular vision system that is used when doing close work such as
reading and writing. John Stein is right in suggesting that a binocular vision
assessment is needed for children given any label that involves difficulty with
literacy.
If only the two professions would talk to each other instead of denying that
vision problems may be a part of dyslexia.
Rained out
You recently reported on a study of pesticide concentrations in rain and also
on a study by Swedish researchers that found associations between the reported
use of specific pesticides and the risks of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) (This
Week, 3 April, p 23).
Mentioning these separate studies in a single report might suggest to some
that exposure to rainwater could lead to an increased risk of NHL. We know of no
evidence to support this view.
Your report on the second study correctly stated that the NHL patients,
compared with controls, were 2.7 times as likely to have reported exposure to
MCPA, 3.7 times as likely to have reported exposure to fungicides and 2.3 times
as likely to have reported exposure to glyphosate. However, you did not report
that the figures for glyphosate were based on an exposure reported by only 4 out
of 404 cases and, in contrast to those for exposure to MCPA and “fungicides”,
were far from being significant by any accepted statistical criteria.
Your report noted that the researchers hypothesised that these chemicals may
have suppressed the patients’ immune systems, leading to NHL. However, the
articles cited by the authors concerning immune suppression related to
phenoxyacetic acids and chlorophenols, not to glyphosate. There is no evidence
from this or other studies that glyphosate can cause immune suppression. It
seems to us that the Swedish authors’ main conclusion about glyphosate was that
further study is warranted, mainly because its use “has increased dramatically,
especially during the 1990s”.
Clearly, there has to be concern about the safety of all widely used
chemicals. However, the evidence relating to glyphosate does not point to any
hazard akin to the induction of NHL. Regulatory agencies have concluded that
glyphosate is neither mutagenic nor carcinogenic to humans.
Epidemiological studies based on a few exposed cases and numerous
uncontrolled exposures can produce associations for reasons that don’t involve a
true exposure-disease relationship. The toxicological information for
glyphosate, along with its very low bioavailability, would suggest that
uncontrolled factors, bias and chance are the most likely explanations for the
non-significant association reported by the Swedish researchers.
Fire versus ice
Geologist Gifford Miller and zoologist Tim Flannery argue that fires started
by the first humans in Australia led to the extinction of the continent’s large
animals, such as the giant kangaroo Procoptodon (“Death by fire”, 1
May, p 38). However, their hypothesis still lacks evidence from other fields of
science.
Most of the palaeobotanical and plant ecology literature in Australia does
not support the notion that frequent Aboriginal fires affected the entire
landscape. The impact of Aboriginal burning on vegetation is hard to distinguish
from the impact of the last ice age.
At the height of the last ice age 20 000 years ago, sand dunes formed near
present day Canberra, Australia’s now verdant capital city, such was the
severity of the ice age. We know from pollen cores that grasses became a lot
more abundant during the cold dry conditions in southern Australia. Climate, not
Aboriginal burning, was the main influence on vegetation.
Of great concern is that the hypotheses of Flannery and Miller are being used
by land developers in Australia to clear more vegetation and inappropriately
burn some areas so that they can be “restored” to their original vegetation
structure. This is threatening a number of species and ecological communities
with extinction.
Letter
Sharon Levy has fallen for the old explorer’s trap of exaggerating the size
of large snakes. I daren’t guess what source provided the claim that in
Australia during the Pleistocene there was “a snake nearly a metre in diameter
and seven metres long”, but the novel spelling of the animal’s name as “
Wanabe” (for Wonambi naracoortensis) implies that this estimate
had not been made in writing.
Wonambi belongs to the extinct Gondwanan family Madtsoiidae, and
only partial skeletons are available from which to infer its proportions. John
Barrie estimated in 1990 that W. naracoortensis reached a length of
approximately 6 metres, and such a snake “with a diameter of about 250
millimetres and a girth of about 800 millimetres could have weighed 250
kilograms”.
In my PhD on Australian fossil snakes (1996) I used a different calculation
that also implied a maximum length close to 6 metres, but this may be an
overestimate as both methods assume a similar shape to living pythons, which are
long-bodied snakes. Several species of living pythons reach lengths between 8
and 10 metres.
Levy is not the first to make Wonambi more impressive in the
retelling. Tim Flannery, in The Future Eaters (1994), described it as
having a “head the size of a shovel”, but Barrie illustrated the skull of the
“6-metre” individual, and clearly shows a skull barely 130 millimetres in
length鈥攁bout the size of a spade you’d take to the beach along with a
little plastic bucket.
Strictly private
In your discussion of privacy on the Internet, you compare surveillance of
the Internet to closed-circuit TV, which helped police to arrest and charge a
man with the London nail bombings (Editorial, 8 May, p 3).
However, CCTVs were not much use in the investigation into the murder of
British TV presenter Jill Dando. The utility and effectiveness of such intrusive
systems should be carefully assessed before moving forward with implementing
them.
The Internet is not a world apart, but individual rights such as privacy and
freedom of expression are also important. Every single government proposal for
accessing personal data and communications should be justified and should be
compatible with Britain’s Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporated the European
Convention on Human Rights. Existing proposals are more compatible with an
Orwellian nightmare state, and they are neither acceptable nor justifiable
within a democratic society.
Call me a romantic, but I am not a terrorist and I still care about my
privacy.