Road versus rail
While I agree in principle with your correspondent Bill Measure
(30 October, p 56)
that road travel is statistically less safe than rail travel, surely the
point is that we commuters pay our fares expecting a certain amount to be
reinvested in safety. This, quite obviously, has not happened sufficiently in
Britain.
I readily admit that tragedies occur on roads and on pavements, but on
neither of these, as yet, do we pay substantial amounts to put our lives in
other people’s hands.
Woods and sinks
Fred Pearce is critical of plans to create forests to soak up carbon dioxide
as a partial alternative to cutting emissions of the gas
(23 October, p 20).
Few researchers and policy makers have ever suggested that forestry alone
could solve the global warming problem. However, actions such as reducing
deforestation and increasing the planting of trees must be part of the
solution鈥攂earing in mind that emissions from deforestation account for
around 20 per cent of total CO2 emissions from human sources and equal
more than twice the total greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.
Many researchers think that the terrestrial carbon sink is likely to
“saturate” within the next 150 years, but others disagree. The uncertainty
regarding sink saturation arises because we simply don’t know enough about the
long-term effects of changes in temperature and moisture on the decomposition of
organic matter in soil.
The important point, however, is the inescapable fact that even if sink
saturation does occur on the global scale, young growing trees will still
accumulate carbon, and eventually store more carbon than other types of land
use. We should also remember that forests provide other environmental services,
ranging from watershed protection to biodiversity preservation.
Finally, most of the important decisions relating to how land use and
forestry are dealt with under the Kyoto Protocol will not be decided in Bonn, as
your article suggested, but next year in Buenos Aires. This will follow
publication in May 2000 of the Special Report on Land Use, Land Use Change and
Forestry by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Razors in apples
Feedback was dismayed at the warnings to parents regarding
children’s trick-or-treat Halloween candy
(30 October).
Sadly, this is not a case of one institution being paranoid.
I grew up in Canada, and even 20 years ago鈥攚hen I was still young
enough to be trick-or-treating (I am now 27)鈥攚e were always told in school
to let our parents check the treats first鈥攆or example, examining apples
for signs of razor blade insertion and making sure wrappers had not been
tampered with. A trip to the local hospital for an X-ray was a little beyond the
normal precautions, but not by far.
How much this fear stems from urban legends and how much is based on fact, I
don’t know. But checking apples for razor blades is one of my childhood memories
of Halloween. If this was in a quiet city in Canada, I can only imagine how much
worse it could be in San Diego, 20 years later.
Ah, what a world we live in…
Letter
If people’s jobs reflecting their names is nominative determinism, surely
people taking their names from their jobs must have been determinative
nominatism.
And, no, I don’t sew for a living.
Name games
Your correspondent Symon Thomas is wrong to say that names like “Thatcher”,
“Fletcher” and so on are early examples of nominative determinism
(16 October, p 59).
Clearly they are examples of “occupational nominativism”, which would allow
me to sign myself Jim Systems-Designer, rather than . . .
Letter
On the Acorn keyboard, the Control key and the letter A are next to each
other. I quite often put my finger on both at the same time by mistake. This
causes the computer to select all the text鈥攁nd the next key press deletes
it all. Tragic if you don’t know that the deleted text is still in the clipboard
and can be recovered by typing Ctrl-V.
Likewise with PCs, if you want to type a capital A and press Control instead
of Shift. The same remedy applies.
Comet crank?
Some 35 years ago, I found myself sitting in the Reading Room of the British
Museum next to a man who was compiling a list of the coordinates of the aphelia
of long-period comets (the points in their orbits when they are farthest from
the Sun).
I never saw a report of his work in any astronomical journal, but it is now
obvious that he must have found the cluster of preferred directions that your
article suggests is so significant in regard to the possible existence of a
tenth planet
(16 October, p 5).
Do the editors of science journals keep any records of the letters they throw
into bins believing them to come from cranks?
Out of control
Feedback’s list of problems encountered when computer users confuse the
Control and Shift keys
(23 October) doesn’t mention the worst case鈥擟trl-N
instead of Shift-N. This causes one’s entire document to disappear completely,
leaving a blank page.
What has actually happened is that you have created a new document (Ctrl-N
being a shortcut for this), which sits on top of the old one. “Undo” (Ctrl-Z)
just produces an irritating sound because it only works in the current
document.
The way out is to close the new blank document, making the original
reappear.
Good old Microsoft.
Useless if not used
The caption on the picture accompanying your article about detecting explosives
(23 October, p 7)
asks if the optical detector described could have
prevented the destruction of Flight 103 over Lockerbie. The answer to this
question must surely be no.
The bomb which destroyed Flight 103 did not elude conventional detection
techniques. They were simply not used. The suitcase in which the bomb was placed
was not checked. Nor was it matched against the passenger manifest, which simple
procedure might have uncovered the fact that the supposed owner of the suitcase
was not on the flight.
It does not matter how sophisticated the techniques available to detect
explosives are if those techniques are not used. Sadly, the human failures which
helped human malice to destroy Flight 103 meant that no detector, however
efficient, could have saved a single life.
English English
Perhaps the reason that Microsoft has focused on “US English”
(Feedback, 16 October)
is that 72 per cent of the people that have English as their first
language speak “American English”. Some 16 per cent use British English, 6 per
cent Canadian English, 5 per cent Australian English and 1 per cent New Zealand
English.
As Susan Butler, the publisher of Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary,
said recently: “It looks like the centre of gravity for the English language
has shifted.”
Patent hit for six?
Jeff Hecht complains that a patent has been taken out on an idea he used in a
science fiction story, which in turn had been suggested by a caller who told him
about the sixes hidden in bar codes
(23 October, p 59).
Perhaps his strange caller had read Robert Rankin’s book East of
Ealing, first published by Pan in 1984.
The book, which is certainly not to be taken seriously, has the barcode
tattoos, the hidden 666 and one very prominent 666 tattoo as central
themes鈥攁nd predates Hecht’s story by 10 years.
Wonderful oil
Apart from milk, please note that there are other, nontoxic, nonpolluting
sprays available to control and eliminate powdery mildew
(16 October, p 10), and
a host of other plant pests and diseases. Readers may be surprised to learn the
identity of this wonderful product鈥攈ighly refined mineral oil.
“Petroleum spray oils” (PSOs) have a 100-year history in agriculture. But
with commercial refining techniques now able to yield fractions only two or
three molecular weights wide, the latest generation of PSOs act with proven and
surgical precision. As a result, they are now used by fruit, flower and
vegetable growers in Australia, China, Thailand, Vietnam and even the Middle
East.
Since nearly all PSO residues in the soil are broken down to carbon dioxide
and water within two weeks, the arbiters of organic farming may see the sense in
classifying light mineral oils as environmentally friendly alternatives to toxic
pesticides.