Will this wash?
In reference to the Electrotextiles wearable computers
(13 May, p 11),
I suggest that this new technology be called “wearware”.
Spoilt brats
Like Sandra Scott, I feel that pumping powerful psychoactive drugs into
children is intrinsically a bad idea
(20 May, p 44).
But placing large numbers of our youngsters on the couches (metaphorically
speaking) of psychiatrists is also a dangerous route.
Psychiatry and its cousin psychology are notoriously faddy disciplines, and
subjecting our future citizens to the “latest thing” seems at best misguided.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is just another social symptom
of our increasing refusal to discipline (I emphatically do not mean physical
chastisement) our children effectively. ADHD should perhaps be more aptly
renamed spoilt brat syndrome.
Concentration and consideration for the activities of others require the
self-discipline to understand that reward often means putting in effort and
waiting for things. Such self-discipline is something that needs to be taught
with love and patience.
Today our children learn from an early age that their material desires should
be met instantly, and they are encouraged in this pursuit by well-placed
“pester” advertising. As parents, we seem to be unwilling or unable to challenge
the new child-centred orthodoxy, perhaps for fear of being branded child
abusers.
Rather than dragging little Jane or Johnny off for psychotherapy, let’s have
the courage to examine our own potentially negligent behaviour as parents and
the influence that it might be having on our children.
Give `em an inch
The lament from Robert Cailliau about the creeping re-emergence of American
measurement has ignored several points
(27 May, p 52).
Metrication does make computation easy, but feet and inches and pounds and
ounces grew up over a long period around dimensions which people鈥攖hat is
to say, the ordinary users鈥攆ound easy to visualise and to replicate. The
change to metric measurement in Britain was one that the public neither needed
nor requested nor for the most part wanted. It was adopted following the
decisions of a committee which took no account of the views of the public who
would be obliged to use it.
Did not an old man in 1984 complain to Winston Smith that he used to
like his pint鈥攈alf a litre wasn’t enough, and a litre was too much?
The US tried to introduce metric measurements some years ago, but vociferous
complaints from voters to their elected representatives successfully aborted
this change. Any similar complaints from British voters at the time of British
metrication were ignored in the usual way.
There is nothing magical about the ratio 1:2. It can be applied to any system
of measurement. Certainly the ability to convert A4 paper into A5 paper with a
pair of scissors is convenient, but an equivalent change could be achieved as
easily with paper sizes measured in inches.
The tone of Cailliau’s objection suggests that it may be the Americans as
much as the unit of measurement to which he is objecting. Remember that it was
not merely their language which the Americans acquired from Britain. The US is
still using imperial measures (except for the US gallon, of course) and New
杏吧原创 has really reverted to British sizes.
Letter
Cailliau is incorrect in believing that the metric system will die out. The
British units of length and mass are now officially defined in terms of SI
units鈥攕o, for example, 1 inch is defined as exactly 2.54 centimetres.
SI units are now used in all countries of the world, except the US, and even
there all new physics textbooks are in SI units. When this is the case the
general populace cannot be far behind.
Letter
The inch is still dominant in the motoring world. European manufacturers of
cars, motorcycles and trucks still sell wheels and tyres for new vehicles with
the diameter labelled in inches.
African agriculture
As someone concerned about farming in Africa, Florence Wambugu should know
that low yields, malnutrition and declining incomes will not be significantly
improved through genetic modification
(27 May, p 40).
Her evangelising of GM technology as the cure-all for problems of hunger,
malnutrition and poverty neglects the underlying economic, historical and
geographical factors behind Africa’s underdevelopment and the exigencies
of global capitalism.
Even if GM crops were introduced to Africa, appropriate capital inputs such
as pesticides, fertilisers, machinery and adequate storage would still be needed
to plant, grow and harvest crops. Subsidies for these inputs have diminished
through the imposition of structural adjustment by the World Bank and the
subsequent abolition of marketing boards in Africa. Consequently, crop yields
have plummeted, rural communities have migrated towards the informal urban
sector, and land has lost its productive value.
In addition, without adequate infrastructure to access markets and with the
continued presence of unscrupulous middlemen, those small farmers who do remain
will receive little benefit from a higher-yield crop.
Biotechnology will represent a further incentive to move production towards
capital-intensive agro-exports for private profit and away from labour-intensive
food agriculture that traditionally provides nutrition and income for the rural
poor.
Whatever one might surmise about the environmental risks of GM technology,
investment in GM crops fails to tackle the underlying causes of poverty in rural
Africa and merely provides rich pickings for multinational agribiotech
corporations.
Letter
Wambugu has presented a robust and comprehensive defence of GM science, not
least in the context of the potential scale and significance of GM agriculture
in Africa and the rest of the so-called Third World.
If, as she argues most persuasively, the choice is between sustaining a
massive increase in population at an acceptable standard of life on the one
hand, or starvation on the other, the West has no right either to deny vast
areas of the globe access to GM technology or to damage their agricultural
economies by restricting imports on the grounds of so-called “GM
contamination”.
Letter
Christian Aid believes that genetically engineered crops are irrelevant to
ending world hunger, will concentrate power in too few hands, and will strip
small farmers of their independence.
Christian Aid’s Indian research shows that land reform and simple irrigation
can boost crops by 50 per cent. This should be tried in Africa instead of
subjecting this famine-ridden continent to dubious genetically engineered foods
that have not even been sufficiently tested for human safety.
See the recent article The safety of genetically engineered foods鈥擱easons
to expect hazards and the risk for their appearance at www.psrast.org/defknfood.htm.
Playing Prometheus
Following the feature on Homo erectus and fire (20 May, p 30), I
wonder whether an experiment could be tried in which chimpanzees are introduced
to fire and taught not to fear it but to use it. Over a few generations,
monitoring whether they evolved as a result could be interesting.
杏吧原创s in this case would be playing god, but to further the evolution of
our closest animal kin surely this can be justified.
Putting it bluntly
I am confused by the implication of Jeff Hecht’s article on sharp and blunt
lightning conductors
(May 27, p 10).
Surely the main reason for having a lightning conductor is not to attract
lightning strikes but rather to prevent them happening by permitting a
continuous non-violent discharge to earth through a low-resistance conductor. So
the “competition” referred to would seem to confirm that sharp rods work better
than blunt ones, since they were not hit.
I can confirm from my experiences with a school van de Graaff generator that
I can readily attract sparks to my rounded fingertip, but not to a pin held in
the hand, if I point them in turn at the dome of the generator.
Jeff Hecht writes: After 250 years, there remain some broad disagreements
over the function and theory of lightning rods, even among developers. One
theory is that lightning rods should drain charges gradually so that lightning
does not strike in the vicinity. However, a second is that lightning rods should
provide a channel for current to travel to ground or earth, diverting the
lightning strike from something that could be damaged, such as a building.
Lightning rods designed to meet the criteria of the second theory are supposed
to attract strikes.
That’s what the article described. As I understand it, the basis for diverting
rather than discharging is the assumption that the charge accumulating in the
clouds is too large to simply drain away, so the inevitable lightning strike
should be diverted to somewhere harmless.
Big genome
I’ve just been reading about how big the human genome would be if printed in
books
(20 May, p 17).
This kind of statistic on large amounts of data was very popular around the
time I was in school in the 1970s. Here are some statistics which are perhaps
more appropriate to the personal computer age.
The human genome consists of about 3.2 billion base pairs. Each base pair
conveys two bits of information, without discounting for repeats, “junk” DNA and
so on. This amounts to a total of 6.4 gigabits, or 800 megabytes.
The typical sizes of hard discs on personal computers passed that point about
five years ago. It would take about 1录 CD-ROMs to hold one human genome, while
six of them would fit on a single-sided DVD-ROM.
If you were downloading a human genome from a website over a 56k modem, it
would take at least 32 hours.
Features such as repeats indicate that the actual information content of a
genome is lower than this. Has anyone done any investigation of the amount of
information present, by looking at the reduction in size when putting the data
through compression algorithms such as GZip, StuffIt, and so on? Happy
sequencing.
Theory goes pop
Your correspondent Chris Eccles is concerned that a bubble in space will
continue to expand until it “pops”
(20 May, p 50).
As he effectively explains, any bubble in equilibrium shows balance between
the stress in its membrane and the pressure differential across it.
So take a bubble on Earth and reduce pressures inside and out by 1
atmosphere. The membrane feels no difference. Or simply put less gas inside as
you form the bubble in space.
Incidentally, a bubble in space would lack buoyancy, but it could orbit in
dynamic equilibrium like any other satellite.
Fire drill
Following up Caroline Blowers’s account of the fire instructions in her
hotel in Athens
(Feedback, 3 June),
I can’t remember the precise French of the fire instructions of the hotel in
Dreux in northern France where we stayed in the 1970s, but the crucial
instruction was: “Manifest your presence at the window.”
I’m not quite certain what you were meant to do if the pompiers
didn’t show up.
Inactivity grants
There is a similar story to Feedback’s item about grants for not raising pigs
(27 May)
in Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
In the version there, I think it was Major Major’s father who grew rich
through the US Farm Administration policy of paying farmers not to grow alfalfa.
He eventually bought all the surrounding farms so he could not grow more alfalfa
than any other farmer in the area.
He was well known and respected for his ability to not grow alfalfa. As I
recall, he unfortunately went bankrupt eventually through trying to branch into
not growing tobacco.
Not in my backyard
Dan Falk asks whether anyone will put up the money to realise a defence
system against asteroids heading in the direction of Earth
(20 May, p 36).
People usually care more about dangers that manifest themselves close to
their homes. It is a little-known fact that one of the world’s greatest asteroid
impact structures lies right on the doorstep of the US nation’s policy makers
in Washington DC.
The impact 35 million years ago that created the crater buried underneath
Chesapeake Bay was one of the biggest since the one that killed the dinosaurs.
Its age coincides with a minor mass extinction.
Unfortunately, it is buried under sediments, and can only be traced by
drilling and gravimetric maps. However, with computer graphics, the impact and
its consequences could be recreated for a wide audience. Remember that
spending on palaeontology increased after Jurassic Park hit
the cinemas.
Astronomers could set up a museum or a Disney-style crater theme park,
displaying ejecta fragments and animated films of the crash, preferably as close
to Capitol Hill as possible.
If a surviving asteroid fragment could be found, it should be prominently
displayed. Alternatively, it could be dropped on the head of the next politician
who says “asteroids are no danger”.