Metric youth
Richard Downs speaks only for the older generation when he says: “The change
to metric measurement in Britain was one that the public neither needed nor
requested nor for the most part wanted”
(17 June, p 56).
I am 25, and at school I was only taught metric units. At the time they
seemed very sensible and logical, and I clearly remember thinking that the
imperial system was just plain crazy.
I certainly don’t find imperial units “easy to visualise and to replicate”.
In fact, I still struggle to remember how many inches there are in a yard,
ounces in a pound, and what the hell a gallon is. Metres, kilos and litres are
much easier.
I am glad that common sense has finally prevailed and we’re slowly getting
rid of imperial measurements, and I’m willing to bet that most people my age and
younger think the same. People who weren’t taught imperial at school have no
love of this ludicrously inconsistent system, and no desire to use it.
No gods here
Raj Persaud may not realise that one of the reasons patients ask questions
about the medication he prescribes is that they are anxious about possible
harmful reactions and side effects
(10 June, p 43).
Increasing numbers of people are no longer willing to regard the doctor as God,
and know that many modern drugs are potentially toxic.
Modern medicine has had massive successes over the past hundred years, but
many people turn to alternative medicine because orthodox treatments have not
helped and may even have harmed them.
Surely, if patients wish to ask questions about their treatment this should
be seen as part of a positive shift towards taking more responsibility for their
health. As such, doctors and alternative practitioners alike should encourage
it.
As a medical herbalist, I would like to point out that 80 per cent of the
world’s population still use herbal medicine, and it is used alongside modern
medicine in many countries, such as India, China and Zaire.
Persaud implies that any form of medicine that is not modern “scientific”
medicine is irrational. Double-blind trials and laboratory research into the
properties of herbs have confirmed the benefits that have been known for
centuries throughout the world. And now major pharmaceuticals companies are
discovering the useful properties of plants such as St John’s wort and
echinacea, which have long been recognised by herbalists.
It wasn't like that
I read about the work of Daniel Offer with great interest
(10 June, p 21).
He found that few people accurately recall in later life how they felt as
adolescents.
I have long suspected this. I am convinced that Freud was wrong about
repression: it is not painful memories that are repressed, but those
inconsistent with our current self-image.
This would explain not only the poor treatment of youngsters by most adults,
but also why bosses treat their employees in ways they must have disliked when
they were subordinates themselves. It may also explain British Conservative-voting
yuppies who cannot understand why as impoverished students they were ardent
socialists.
Letter
The clinical trials of conventional medicine are notoriously unrepresentative
of the population as a whole. The fact that a drug works well on a healthy, male
medical student in his mid-twenties鈥攖he typical subject鈥攄oes not
prove that it will be equally advantageous to, say, a post-menopausal woman or a
very young child. Such people may indeed be better served by referring to cases
similar to their own鈥攅ven if this means considering first-person
accounts.
I wouldn’t leave my car to be repaired and then unquestioningly pay the bill
without showing the slightest interest in how it was fixed, so why should I
subject my body to powerful drugs without wondering how I might expect them to
affect me?
Letter
I accept the point raised by Fred Pearce that damming a river and flooding a
landscape will produce extra greenhouse gases as the vegetation rots, but it is
responsible for “only a fraction” of the total.
Organic matter washed into the lake from upstream, he reports, produces the
rest. But wouldn’t that have been oxidised to carbon dioxide further downstream
or in the sea if the dam weren’t there?
Tomorrow's oil?
Your article suggested that rotting vegetation in hydroelectric dams is
exacerbating the greenhouse effect
(3 June, p 4).
Isn’t there a strong case for burying organic matter offshore on the
continental shelf, in basins of sediment 3 to 5 kilometres deep? The aim would
be to create the conditions in which oil and gas form, complete with a layer of
cap material.
Or why not pump organic slurry into deep, exhausted coal mines here in
Britain, having drained them of water first? Recreating the conditions for the
production of oil or gas a century or more in the future could provide a supply
of fuel for our descendants.
The slurry might include waste paper, human effluent and food wastes. To
apply enough pressure, the mine supports could be collapsed, or the entrances
sealed to allow the methane gas to build up.
Rich or plain?
I endorse Feedback’s preference for plain ASCII text for e-mail attachments
rather than Word files
(10 June),
but aren’t there alternatives, for example
rich text format? I don’t use macros, and RTF seems to have all the formatting
requirements I need, whether for e-mail or for ordinary documents, and all major
word-processing software can read RTF files.
Also, I’ve tried saving documents as both RTF files and Word files, and the
RTF file has always been substantially smaller. Are any of your readers aware of
any downside to RTF files?
See also Feedback in this issue 鈥擡d
Letter
I have had chronic fatigue syndrome and at one point had a completely
reversed sleep pattern (which was stable). Bright light corrected my sleep
pattern but made me more ill. Melatonin simply gave me headaches. Eventually, my
sleep pattern righted itself after a week-long chaotic phase.
You mention cognitive behavioural therapy. The tragedy is that CBT is a
chimera: half behavioural, half brainwashing. No one wants to touch it. I was
treated by a neurologist whose technique is similar to CBT, minus the
psychobabble.
Of course, my recovery also required a five-year wait for my immune system to
stop malfunctioning.
Unnatural rhythms
I read with horror the article on chronic fatigue and the body’s natural rhythms
(3 June, p 28).
Chronic fatigue syndrome or ME鈥攎yalgic encephalomyelitis, a less
insulting name preferred by sufferers鈥攊s far more serious than tiredness,
unrefreshing sleep and other symptoms associated with jet lag. Yet this
life-shattering illness has been variously portrayed as a malaise affecting high
achievers who want an excuse to drop out of their pressured lives, as a form of
depression in which low achievers blame their failure on fatigue, and now, it
seems, as a product of careless bedtime management.
In fact, ME is an immunological illness affecting the neurological,
endocrinological and digestive systems. Specialists in these areas have produced
many studies showing the very real physical abnormalities present in sufferers.
There is now an RNase L blood test further proving the physical nature of the
immunological dysfunction that is ME.
Letter
I have been amused by the various contributions from readers giving examples
of what I call “metric imperialism”鈥攊n other words mixing metric and
imperial units of measurement. Personally, though, I think rating a telephone
cable in “decibels per 5.28 kilofeet” (that is, 5280 feet, or a mile to the rest
of us) as one telecoms manufacturer did, takes some beating.
Recently I had an emergency engineering job on a weekend, and I desperately
needed some “M3” (3 millimetre) machine screws. I tried a variety of hardware
stores, but they only seemed to stock blister packs containing smallish
quantities of imperial thread screws. The intriguing thing, though, was that the
threads and diameters were all imperial but the lengths were all metric. So we
had ⅛ inch 脳 20 millimetres, and so on.
Do I need to tell you about the helpful young assistant at one of the stores
who assured me that these screws were a “universal” range?
Name that dance
I am an enthusiastic ice dancer. My coach is always telling me that I should
be more “tangoey” when I dance the tango.
I think I know what she means, but I’m not sure that I can increase my
tangoeyness to her satisfaction. It’s not helped by the rink supervisor who
keeps muttering “tango” over the PA system before he plays the music.
Are there others who suffer from this terpsichorean variant of nominative
determinism?
Superfluous
Netropolitan remarks that three-dimensional crosswords have proven difficult
to construct
(10 June, p 17).
Half a century ago, Claude Shannon commented on
this very fact in his classic papers on information theory.
He pointed out that English words have a redundancy of approximately 50 per
cent鈥攎eaning that about half of the letters are unnecessary to guess each
word. This is ideal for 2D crosswords as it allows the setter a reasonable
choice of words, even when the grid starts to fill.
Too much redundancy鈥攖oo many unnecessary letters鈥攁nd the choice
is limited, leaving large gaps in the grid. Too little redundancy and solving
one clue does not help solve the words it crosses. To make 3D crosswords easy to
set you require a language with 33 per cent redundancy.
Dirty dialling
I see that researchers have discovered that deadly bacteria can be
transmitted by dirty telephones
(27 May, p 5).
When I started work back in the 1970s, someone would come round the office
every so often to clean the phones.
Then, in 1978, the BBC broadcast The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy in which the planet Golgafrincham got rid of the useless one-third
of its population, including all telephone sanitisers, by sending them off into
space.
The shame must have been too much for telephone sanitisers here on Earth, as
they stopped coming round my office after that. But a virulent disease
contracted from a dirty telephone suddenly wiped out the rest of the population
of Golgafrincham. If we go the same way, will it be Douglas Adams’s fault?
Apeing fire
Your correspondent Brian Robinson suggests that it would be an interesting
experiment to see if chimpanzees could be taught the use and control of fire
(17 June, p 57).
In his book Wild Minds, Marc Hauser mentions observation of “an
orang-utan named Supinah [who] acquired the ability to ignite a fire with
kerosene and then tend to it by waving a trash can lid over the burning embers.
No one taught Supinah these actions, and no one rewarded her for them
either.”
Hauser points out that “orang-utans learn by imitation, by performing an act
from seeing it done”鈥攊n this case imitating the actions of a campsite
cook, although the behaviour of Supinah is nonetheless described as unique for
an orang-utan.
Chimpanzees are apparently mentally distinct from orang-utans, but this is
intriguing nonetheless.
Impractical joker
I was interested to read Feedback’s story about Gerry Kendall’s spoof article
on conveyor belts in aircraft
(10 June). This was not his first offence.
Back in the early 1970s, The Times published a series of letters
from readers about the height from which an egg could be dropped on to grass
without breaking. Kendall, then in his early twenties, wrote to The
Times saying that when he was a pilot in the Second World War he had
dropped eggs from a height of 27 000 feet (over 8000 metres) and they didn’t
break if they landed on grass.
He did not say how he managed to find the eggs to verify their fate. The
Times published his letter.
Mind the gaps
I am intrigued by Barry Fox’s description of Fuji’s new CCD (charge-coupled
device) to improve image resolution in digital cameras by using octagonal
photodiodes
(3 June, p 14).
The benefit of boosted horizontal and vertical resolutions is well explained,
but the octagonal diodes also have linear gaps, albeit diagonal ones, in which
image data will presumably be lost.
I am surely not alone in wondering why hexagonal diodes were not chosen, so
as to eliminate all linear gaps completely and capture all angular orientations
of the elements of an image.
Furthermore, as CCDs are also used in scanners, will they too be fitted with
this resolution-increasing concept, whether hexagonal or octagonal?
Teflon bomb
Your correspondent Gilbert Devey makes the point that some inventions, often
attributed to NASA, were in use before NASA was created
(3 June, p 53). One of
these was Teflon which, he says, “was used in classified military electronic
equipment during the Second World War”.
It is indeed true that Teflon pre-dates NASA, but Devey has missed the real
drama of Teflon’s history. Discovered by DuPont chemists in 1939, it was just in
time to be used at Los Alamos to make the atom bomb.
The huge gaseous diffusion plant that was used to provide enriched uranium
could not work without pump seals, which had to withstand attack from the highly
corrosive uranium hexafluoride but could never be lubricated.
These seemingly mpossible specifications were achieved using the newly
discovered Teflon.
Humps and waists
You report that Boeing found “that the two-hump design unexpectedly decreases
drag” for jumbo jets
(10 June, p 9).
They should have realised that this would be the case.
For at least 50 years, high-speed aircraft have been designed with
“waisting”, usually called the “coke bottle” shape, to reduce drag. That is, the
fuselage is made narrower where the wings are attached. It works because the
resulting aircraft presents a more smoothly increasing cross section to the
airflow instead of a sudden large increase where the wings are.
The two-hump aircraft with the dip over the wings would have the same effect
as waisting, thereby reducing drag. One would have thought even the Boeing
flacks would know this.
Letter
I want to oppose the tide of nominative determinism that regularly sweeps
your column. We had a cooker delivered a few months ago by Mike Fridge. He
couldn’t install it though鈥攈e only did washing machines.