Letter
A similar report was run on the back page of New 杏吧原创 in
pre-Feedback days. American college students were given a drink of either warm
milk or strong black coffee before going to bed. The milk drinkers slept well,
and the coffee drinkers had restless nights. They did not know that the coffee
was decaffeinated, and caffeine had been added to the milk.
Correction:
The story “There’s no ER in orbit”
(29 April, p 4)
wrongly stated that monkeys flew aboard the space shuttle.
They flew aboard the Bion 11 spacecraft as part of a mission run
jointly by the US, Russian and French space agencies鈥擡d
Observer observed
Your correspondent J. W. Lambourne suggests using quantum experiments to test
a computer for consciousness, on the basis that a conscious observer is required
to collapse a wave function
(29 April, p 52).
Presumably, however, a human observer would have to check the computer’s
output to determine the outcome of such an experiment. So how does one determine
which is the consciousness which collapses the wave function: that of the
computer or that of the human observer?
Extinct in the wild
The interview with Michael Archer
(29 April, p 40)
claims that “There is no animal that human beings have ever turned into a
domestic pet that has died out.”
This is a rather debatable claim, as in fact most mammals that humans have
domesticated have become rare or extinct in the wild. The wild ancestor of the
horse became extinct in the wild, as did the aurochs (the ancestor of cattle).
The chinchilla is endangered, and wolves were exterminated over much of their
range. The ancestors of camels are on the brink of extinction (the one-humped
camel is not known in the wild).
When humans domesticate animals, the wild ancestors are generally eliminated,
since they do not have the desirable traits of tameness, as well as other
characteristics such as unusual colouring.
True position
Your paragraph about the Global Positioning System is incorrect
(6 May, p 5).
The gist of the presidential statement was that use of selective availability
(SA) was being discontinued as of midnight on 1 May this year (not 2006 as
stated in the article).
Previously, the US had been committed to discontinuing the use of SA by 2006
at the latest, which is where the confusion no doubt arose.
True or false
Regarding the Feedback item about Microsoft Word’s refusal to recognise the
word “falsifiable”
(22 April),
I’m pleased to report that the otherwise
excellent spellchecker incorporated in Yahoo’s free e-mail service, at long last
now recognises the word “Internet”, but not unfortunately, “internet”.
As for “falsifiable”, it highlights the word as though it thinks something is
wrong, but it doesn’t give you the opportunity to do anything about it. Perhaps
it’s still making up its mind.
Drunk on nothing
Your “In Brief” article
for 29 April (p 19)
reports that the effects of
decaffeinated or regular coffee depend a great deal on whether those drinking it
know what they’re drinking.
A similar situation arose many years ago in Maine. In We Took to the
Woods, a book I read more than 45 years ago, author Louise Dickinson Rich
states that cookshacks in logging camps didn’t stock vanilla extract. When the
camps had stocked true vanilla extract, which contains alcohol, some loggers
would break into the cookshack and drink the stuff.
But switching to alcohol-free artificial vanilla did no good: the loggers,
many of whom were illiterate and all of whom were too rushed to read labels
under the circumstances, continued to break in, drink the vanilla, and get drunk
regardless.
Kids and computers
I have followed with interest the debate on children and mobile phones
(13 May, p 5).
There is an even greater danger which the government has not thought out
properly, and that is making a computer available for every child in school. The
problems that business and industry are having with repetitive strain injury
(RSI) will be greatly multiplied with children becoming involved at such an
early age. Who knows what amount of damage may be done in the early years?
Sad sows
In your article on sows and nest building, the statistic quoted for the
incidence of piglet savaging in the domestic herd was exaggerated
(6 May, p 22).
One in eight piglets is not fatally mauled by its mother鈥攖he incidence of
savaging is nearer 5 per cent. Your article picked up on the statistic that on
average 17 per cent of sow litters are responsible for 50 per cent of all
pre-weaning deaths, indicating the role of maternal quality in explaining piglet
mortality.
There are many different causes of piglet mortality, with crushing and
starvation being much more common than savaging, and so this statistic refers to
the combination of all these causes.
Letter
I was dismayed to see that that the proposed solution to sows savaging their
piglets was merely to monitor the sows and remove piglets at risk. The
researchers recognised that nearly 20 per cent of sows may be highly frustrated
due to the impossibility of building a nest before giving birth, yet there was
no suggestion that these sows should simply be given a little more space and
some materials with which they could build a nest. Surely this would be more
humane. And allowing sows to build their nests could have other benefits, such
as a reduction in complications during pregnancy and birth.
Nonviolent aggro
The study on “virtual violence”
(6 May, p 25) does nothing to prove that
violent games lead to violent people. Wolfenstein is a fast-paced action game
which requires quick reflexes and puts the player on edge. True, it has
violence, but a sports game has the same effect on people. Myst, on the other
hand, is slow-paced and thought-based, requiring the player to contemplate
actions before taking them.
Clearly, the person playing the action game will have a more competitive
spirit after finishing and would push a button longer. This is more to do with
competition than violence. I would be interested to see the results of a
violence-based game pitted against a sports game.
Letter
What affects the users is not the violence in the game but the difficulty in
controlling the game. Compare that with the murderous rage you feel when Word or
Excell or any other computer software is playing up on you.
The team of researchers should include a control group trying to manipulate a
document with a word processor software. I am pretty sure the blasts given by
these people would be unmatched in their intensity and duration.
Pasta a-plenty
Although Douglas Fox went to great pains to make sure his facts were correct,
I’m afraid that errors crept into the final article on eating carbohydrates
(18 March, p 26).
The most important mistake is the statement that pasta has a high glycaemic
index. Nothing could be further from the truth. Virtually all types and shapes
of pasta have a low glycaemic index (in the 40s and 50s on a scale where glucose
equals 100).
Furthermore, I did not say that we should stop pushing pasta. In fact, I
advise people to substitute potato and bread with pasta as much as possible.
Although it might seem paradoxical that a processed product like pasta has a low
GI, it’s because pasta is made from semolina (large particles of cracked wheat
endosperm), rather than fine flour. The rate of digestion of starch in grain
products is correlated with particle size: larger particles are less gelatinised
during cooking and therefore less accessible to attack by enzymes.
In addition, the “rubbery” consistency of pasta may provide another barrier
to making starch soluble in the gut. Thus most noodle products, including
instant noodles and rice noodles (rice vermicelli), have a relatively low GI.
That's about the size of it
With the US’s total dominance of global economic activities, we may soon see
a beautiful system disappear in favour of an archaic one: the metric system of
standards, in use in all countries except the US (and a few microscopic
islands), is under threat.
The metric system was devised to make computations easy, and it has been
highly successful. In the European Union, producers must offer their wares in
metric measures, preferably in round numbers. So I was astonished when I
recently found that adverts for monitors in a French computer magazine gave
their sizes in inches only.
The same regrettable trend may be noticed in paper sizes. The European
standard is based on divisions of a sheet that has sides in a ratio of square
root of 2 and a surface area of 1 square metre: 1:鈭�2 is the only ratio that
allows you to cut a sheet into two and end up with pieces that have the same
aspect ratio as the original鈥攓uite handy when you reduce or enlarge. Cut
an A0 sheet in two and you get two pieces of A1. Cut one of these, and you get
two sheets of A2 and so on. A4 is the size we all know from writing pads.
Most magazines, including this one, were printed on A4. But now New
杏吧原创 is back to US sizes. Nature changed recently, too. So
did the CERN Courier. And, horror of horrors, EuroScience, the club
which endeavours to rival the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, publishes EuroScience News on American format paper. Very
annoying when you want to file these things together with standard A4
papers.
Needless to say, not a single computer or printer allows you to use metric,
because all hardware pitches are in fractions of an inch, not in whole numbers
of millimetres. Truly, the Americans are coming.