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Watch in bed

So IBM talked to Swiss watchmakers who said that 60 per cent of the
population of Switzerland wear watches in bed, thus ruling out nocturnal battery
charging
(Feedback, 29 January).

But did the watchmakers talk to the people? I’m one of that 60 per cent, but
I would certainly recharge my watch at night if I could have a GPS navigation
system, a phone and a voice recorder on my wrist during the day.

New technologies produce new behaviours.

Open secret

I was interested in the piece about the Wood Norton secret nuclear bunker
(Feedback, 12 February).

I was a trainee there when the bunker was being built, and remember that no
one would tell us what it was, so we had to guess. The answer quickly became
obvious from watching the construction get deeper day by day, from the amount of
concrete that was poured into the hole, and the secrecy.

Shaped by the sea

I was interested to read in William Mitchell’s review that architects are
experimenting with curved forms
(19 February, p 52).

I am a naval architect, and my profession has been doing this for a thousand
years. The form of a ship is governed by hydrodynamic considerations—the
reduction of resistance though the water and of unwanted motions. The vessel is
supported in most unsteady fashion by the sea, and its partitions or “bulkheads”
are fixed in number and position by the need to limit flooding and fire, not the
convenience of the inhabitants.

Sub title

Shouldn’t the crew of the submarine in Mark Schrope’s article
(12 February, p 36)
be called Waviators?

Bard's medicine

Elie Dahan recalls his granny attempting to apply a spider’s web to his
bleeding knee
(5 February, p 55).
There is an even earlier reference to this
practice in Shakespeare. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the following
conversation takes place when Bottom the weaver is being introduced to Titania’s
fairies:

Bottom: . . . I beseech your worship’s name.

Cobweb: Cobweb.

Bottom: I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb. If I cut
my finger I shall make bold with you.

Probably the remedy was known long before Shakespeare’s time.

Laughing matter

So the female spotted hyena has a pseudopenis and pseudoscrotum that are
superficially indistinguishable from the genitals of males
(19 February, p 30).

Does this by any chance account for this animal’s well-known propensity for
hysterical laughter?

Correction:

In the Newswire piece
“Murky depths” on 12 February, we listed
boron among the elements left behind in drilling waste on the North Sea floor.
That should have read barium—specifically, the compound barium
sulphate.

Eco-cottages

In Douglas Palmer’s review of Landscape: Pattern, Perception and
Process he quotes the author, Simon Bell, as advising people to “stick to
the local traditional housing in the countryside”
(5 February, p 52).

What Bell and other prognosticators in this field tend to mean by this and
similar statements is to follow the housing traditions of our great or
great-great grandparents. They do not mean the housing of the 15th, 10th or 5th
centuries AD.

Britain and other countries will never move forward to energy-efficient,
health-promoting, well-constructed buildings while planners, building
regulations and pundits such as Bell support the continuation of “local
traditional housing”. It is time for us all to take a wider view, move on and
develop our own traditional rural housing—using modern materials,
techniques and energy-saving features to make an individual contribution to the
global energy balance.

You do not have to build an energy-inefficient sandstone or granite cottage
before you can grow roses around it.

Space turn-off

You report yet another idea for placing adverts in space
(5 February, p 7).

If I receive spam from a company, it only serves to guarantee that I will
never do business with that company. I sincerely hope that any company seriously
considering defacing the skies with its advertising concludes that it will have
a similar effect on the majority of people.

No photos, please

While Barry Fox’s concerns about automated digital speed traps gave a good
background on the legal and patent issues
(5 February, p 17),
you might be interested to hear about some more mundane human factors that
have affected developments in the US.

Usually, when a police officer sees someone they think is speeding and pulls
them over, they have a number of options at their disposal: they can issue a
warning or a ticket, or even seize the vehicle and arrest the driver. As you can
well imagine, if the driver is an off-duty police officer, a good friend of the
local police department, or, for that matter, a politician who has voting
control over police budgets and salaries, there’s a tendency for the patrol
officer to be more lenient.

Alas, with an automated photo system, these groups are no longer eligible for
special consideration. One result is that we’ve actually seen legislation in
parts of the US outlawing the use of photo speed traps.

Spoilt by choice

Peter Ayton’s dilemma about excessive choice
(12 February, p 47)
reminded me of my cycling trip from Munich, Germany, to Split, in what was
then part of Yugoslavia.

Having crossed the Alps via Austria and a corner of Italy, our first stop to
stock up on provisions was Slovenia. The experience was somewhat disconcerting.
The supermarket had all the essentials—one brand of butter, soap,
toothpaste or washing powder, perhaps three kinds of biscuits, all in plain
brown packaging, and at the counter, bread, tomatoes, two kinds of salami and a
few sorts of cheese. But where were the variety, the colours, the appetising
claims of manufacturers?

We quickly got used to accepting the local kinds of bread, cheese and of
course beer and schnapps (always based on plums or cherries). In Zadar, still
under its historical Italian influence, there were at least five differently
coloured ice cream flavours to choose from in the cafés—but funnily
enough, they all tasted pretty much the same.

No, the real shock came on our return, when I tried to go shopping in a
fairly small German supermarket. I was overwhelmed—no, paralysed—by
choice. The bulging shelves of bright packages promising improved, new, less
this or more that, and the complicated range of prices or quality was too much.
It took weeks to get used to this, and become a “shopper” again—and how
time consuming it is.

Marine flatlands

It would seem that Nakibae Teuatabo has been a little hasty to blame
Kiribati’s woes on global warming
(12 February, p 44).

He claims that he noticed the effects of global warming in the 1970s. Yet
there was a slight cooling trend in the global climate between 1940 and 1975.
(Does anyone remember the global cooling scare of the 1970s?)

Teuatabo also says his ancestral graves have had to be moved to avoid
flooding, apparently due to climate change. According to the 1995 report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the monitoring station closest to
Kiribati—in Sydney, Australia—shows a tiny rise in sea level of only
7.85 centimetres (3.14 inches) in the last 100 years—and almost all of
that took place before 1950. Thus, the rise in sea level claimed to have flooded
their burial grounds has been about a centimetre.

Letter

Teuatabo says: “Many of our atolls are no more than 2 metres above sea level
at the highest point, and cyclones already raise the water higher than that
sometimes.” But surely the reason they are only 2 metres above sea level is
precisely because they are sea-level features: they owe their existence, and
their form, to the interaction between the sea and the reef, and could not, by
this origin, be any higher.

Undoubtedly, they will change in size and position as sea levels change, as
they have changed for many thousands of years under the influence of tides,
currents, and storms. Even the more alarming projections of the rate of
sea-level change would not seem to be swampingly large compared with much
shorter-term changes such as tidal range and storm surges, which these atolls
currently experience, and always have.

Crunch time

It is true that if there is a big crunch with high order (low entropy), then
time will run backwards as we approach it
(5 February, p 26). But there is no
strong reason to assume that a big crunch would be highly ordered. Hawking
discusses this in A Brief History of Time— he once assumed that a
big crunch would be well ordered, like the big bang, but eventually realised
that physics does not require this.

And could there be future boundary conditions even in the real Universe,
which is apparently not headed for a big crunch? This could explain such things
as premonitions and even the origin of life.

Branch lightning

John Abrahamson’s theory on the origin of ball lightning
(5 February, p 12)
cannot be the whole story.

I have seen ball lightning at the very moment of formation, and the ball I
saw definitely did not form after any strikes to the soil, which Abrahamson says
is necessary. It formed at, and was flung off from, the end of a branch in a
fork of lightning that was discharging between clouds.