Letter
D’Oliveiro suggests using very slightly salty water as a hangover preventive.
I have been doing this for years with great success. The salty water offers the
added advantages of being easier than plain water to drink in bulk, and, because
it is absorbed better, of reducing the number of subsequent trips to the
toilet.
Shyness circle
Your article on unremarkable conclusions of research
(25 December 1999, p 51)
missed my favourite. Many years ago, the author Fred Orr, a close friend and
colleague, had his extensive doctoral research at the University of New South
Wales correctly summarised in the local press by the conclusion that shyness can
be cured but sufferers are too shy to ask for help.
It'll never work
I had to smile at your record of the first issue of New 杏吧原创 in
which you prophesied that household colour TV was a long way off
(25 December 1999, p 18).
It reminded me of the half-hour I spent with pencil and paper explaining to
my Father why he would never realise his dream of home tape equipment that would
enable him to record or play films, let alone do so in colour. All a matter of
bandwidth and dynamic range, I told him. Three years later I was handed the job
of writing the BBC’s training manual on video tape-recording.
Junior boffins
Following Ben Calascione’s letter stating that New 杏吧原创 can be
found in the “Hobbies” section of WH Smith in Hastings
(25 December 1999, p 86),
I found it in the teenage magazine section in the Stratford branch of WH Smith.
When are you all going to grow up?
Correction
In our technofile story “Bright Spot”
(25 December 1999, p 13) we
said that adding formate to photographic film reduced the average number of
photons required to make a dark spot to 15. The decimal point slipped: that
should have read an average of 1.5 photons.
Happy as we are
Your article on multiple personality
(18 December 1999, p 26) is worthy of
some comment. It is true that many multiples do experience dreadful
disorganisation and emotional difficulty in connection with their other
personalities, or their “household”, as we multiples refer to our other
selves.
However, not all multiples endure this, and being a multiple is certainly not
always “escaping into a nightmare”, nor is it a competition for control of one’s
life. Some multiple households, such as my own, work in harmony. We communicate,
share, and help each other. In fact, we have enabled each other to survive.
We are happy the way we are, and have no desire to become singular. We rather
wish that your magazine had presented the positive aspects of multiplicity along
with the negative.
ID implants
I hope that the majority of your readers were as horrified as I was to read
of the development of a GPS tracking device which could be implanted under the skin
(8 January, p 7). How long before someone suggests fitting every human
being with the equivalent of a personal tachograph?
I have a better idea. Permanently mark vertical stripes on every person’s
forehead. Then bar code readers on every lamp post would relay our location to a
central computer at all times from cradle to grave. An implanted mobile
telephone could give us our next instruction. Only the guilty would have
anything to fear.
Prolonged stress
In Gail Vines’s otherwise balanced article on mass extinctions
(Inside Science 126, 11 December 1999),
some comments regarding the extinctions at the
end of the Cretaceous warrant a response.
There have been recent claims that the impact in the Yucatan peninsula sent
shock waves well into North America. There is, however, no geological evidence
for a tsunami reaching South Dakota at this time, as the author claims, because
there are no known end-Cretaceous marine deposits from this state.
Throughout the western interior of North America only terrestrial deposits
are known at the end of the Cretaceous. This is exactly why the western interior
preserves the best terrestrial record of biotic events during the
Cretaceous/Tertiary transition. From this record we know that only 50 per cent
of vertebrate species became extinct. This percentage is based on actual
fossils, unlike the conjectural 75 to 80 per cent extinction cited in the
article.
As to the likely role of volcanism in these extinctions, both fossils and
radiometric dates show that the eruption of the Deccan Traps on the Indian
subcontinent began well before the end of the Cretaceous and would have had
long-term effects on the extinctions.
Coupled with the greatest increase in land mass known for at least 250
million years and the accompanying loss of coastal environments, this was
already a time of increased environmental stress. The asteroid impact may well
have been the coup de gr芒ce, but had the environment been intact its
effects would have been far less severe and may have left the dinosaurs as the
largest terrestrial vertebrates.
Biodanger
We are supposed to be taking measures to reduce greenhouse gases. Should we
not therefore abandon the development and introduction of biodegradable
materials?
Artificial gravity
Douglas McInnis suggests that interstellar voyages at sub-light speeds may
cause the space travellers, over successive generations, to evolve traits suited
to microgravity
(25 December 1999, p 42).
The fears expressed by McInnis are ill-founded. Exploration spacecrafts will
probably have some sort of artificial gravity. Even if they do not, the entire
starship will move away from whichever portion of its structure vents the
propellant that is used as starship fuel. The starship’s passengers will
experience physical forces comparable to gravity, in which the ship’s propulsion
drive is “downward” relative to its passengers, and the ship is travelling
“upward”. The strength of the gravitational field will depend on various
factors, such as rate of fuel consumption and the starship’s acceleration.
Over the span of many human generations, the effect would probably be similar
to living on a low-gravity world鈥攕uch as Mars or the Moon鈥攔ather
than living in microgravity.
Mind the sand
Peter Ayton states that during the Second World War, various branches of the
US military strongly encouraged their men to be circumcised. During the North
African campaign this operation was commonly performed on Commonwealth
troops.
Surgeons found a high incidence of acute balanitis requiring urgent
circumcision and some realised at the time that many of these cases were the
result of sand getting under the foreskin while urinating in sandstorms. The
mechanical irritation led to secondary infection.
In Biblical times such balanitis would have been life threatening and it is
probably for this reason that ritual circumcision was written into the religions
of many peoples living near deserts鈥擩ews and Arabs in the Middle East,
Negroid tribes near the Sahara and Bushmen in the Kalahari.
Perhaps it was for the same reason that the Aboriginal Warramunga tribe
performed circumcision. They are recorded as subsequently putting the ablated
prepuce in a hole made in a tree by the witchetty grub to increase the number of
these edible delicacies.
Right priority
Patrick Moore suggests that environmentalists should attack tobacco and leave GM foods alone
(25 December 1999, p 74). But tobacco is a public health issue.
It isn’t going to bring any civilisations down, merely reduce life expectancy by
a few years.
The worry over GM crops is that they might affect the everyday evolution of
the biosphere, and leave gaps where food plants should be. That sort of thing
does bring civilisations down.
The place for genetic engineering is in medicine.
Surgeon's slip
Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s article about organ transplantation was disturbing
(18 December 1999, p 48).
However, in the opening paragraph, she describes a woman
who found a kidney missing after removal of an ovarian cyst.
I find it difficult to imagine how anyone could remove a kidney (from behind
the rib cage, and not in the abdomen) while operating on an ovary, which lies
inside the lower part of the abdominal cavity.
In the stars
Your article on astrology
(25 December 1999, p 56) should have mentioned my
paper “Nonuniform distribution of the ecliptical longitudes of Sun and Moon at
the birthdays of top scientists” in Psychological Reports (vol 85, p
35). In this paper it is shown that twice as many scientists who have won Nobel,
Fields and Wolf awards are born with the Sun and Moon in Aries, as compared to
Capricorn.
Note also that the finding of a conventional seasonal effect in the birth
distribution of soccer players, ascribed in your article to Ad Dudink, was first
reported in my paper “Seasonal birth distribution of West European soccer
players: a possible explanation” (Medical Hypotheses, vol 38, p
346).
Pinch of salt
I agree that drinking water before bedtime doesn’t help much with hangovers,
but I am baffled by Lawrence D’Oliveiro’s statement that this is because we are
“not very efficient at absorbing pure water”
(8 January, p 42). The cholera
sufferers that he refers to are a special case: they lose water without
absorbing it, as liquid faeces. Surely a person in good health absorbs all the
water they drink, pure or otherwise.