It all happens on TV
There is nothing novel about using a TV programme to select an astronaut to
go to Mir, as described in your article
(19 August, p 5).
In May 1991 the Juno mission took Helen Sharman to the Mir space station for
an eight-day visit. She had been selected, along with Timothy Mace, during a TV
programme which she describes in her autobiography Seize the Moment as
a Monty Python sketch about four boffins who had accidentally entered the Miss
World contest.
In a series of talks in schools up and down Britain, Sharman subsequently
inspired many schoolchildren, and their teachers, with her accounts of her eight
days in space.
Speaking of tongues
To claim, as Roger Redman does, that learning English as a second language
leaves people at an economic disadvantage is a most obvious falsehood
(Letters, 26 August, p 50).
Many privileged bilinguals would argue that the experience of
attaining a mastery of more than one language has instilled the very mental
agility that aids one in tackling the finer points of scientific enterprise.
That the products of research are typically made known through the medium of
English does not indicate that all other languages should be cast aside. In this
role, English is a convenient convention. Had history cast its die differently,
Dutch, Spanish or German might well have assumed the mantle of science’s first
language. The fact that we “are not learning medicine or horticulture or
engineering” while we study English is beside the point. An education system
capable of teaching any of these subjects must be able to teach a language, and
to say that learning one skill impedes the learning of another is a complete
contradiction of current understanding of the learning process.
There have been regions in which a people’s native language was effectively
repressed in favour of English鈥攆or example, Ireland. The results at a
cultural level have invariably been disastrous, to say nothing of the bitterness
that remains long after the native tongue has died out.
When the peoples of Germany, France and Japan stop being contributors to the
world economy and science, we shall support the imposition of English as
“Worldish” (though we’ll have to invent a less idiotic name). Until then we will
point out that the foundation of racism is rarely as simple as skin tone.
Letter
What a very small world Mr Redman must live in. I am not writing to delve
into the ethical questions he raises, or to point out that organic chemistry is
far more amusing in German or that the US may shortly have to change its
official language to Spanish, but merely to suggest that he visit the Web page
at http://www.aber.ac.uk/courses/welshmedium_schemes.shtml
and perhaps visit a university in France, where I am reliably
informed they speak French, the Luddites!
Incidentally, I would like to share a word from the language of Tierra del
Fuego’s indigenous people, obtained from the Fortean Times. It is
mamhilapinatapai鈥攖he uncomfortable feeling experienced when two
people are hoping that the other will volunteer to do something that both want
done, but neither is willing to do. This would appear to be an extremely
efficient word. So perhaps we should stop speaking English in favour of
Fuegian?
Mythtaken
Since written history began relatively recently in sub-Saharan Africa, there
is a temptation for current writers to speculate with abandon on this
continent’s past. A prime example is Fred Pearce’s feature
(12 August, p 30), in
which he tries to convince us that the large herbivore communities of
pre-colonial Africa were dominated by traditionally herded domestic cattle. It
was only the rinderpest virus, he claims, that allowed indigenous large
herbivores to gain the upper hand after this panzootic swept through Africa at
the start of the 20th century.
Pearce is pandering to a dangerously unproductive mindset鈥攖hat policies
to conserve Africa’s biodiversity are misguided and anachronistic extensions of
Western colonialism. We respond, first, that Africa’s savannah biome includes
the Earth’s greatest diversity of ungulates, quite apart from spectacular
diversity in all other taxa and biomes. On the timescale over which this
diversity evolved, the arrival of cattle (not to mention colonialism or the
rinderpest virus) appears as a very recent event.
Secondly, the conservation of biodiversity is a current issue of global
importance. There is too little time left to dither over what Africa might have
looked like if Western colonialists had not inadvertently introduced rinderpest,
or proclaimed nature reserves.
Pearce’s assertion that these two factors changed the face of his imagined
“real Africa”, in which livestock dominated over wildlife, is simply
back-to-front. Colonial governments eradicated tsetse flies from previously
cattle-free areas and facilitated the spread of domestic livestock across
Africa, to the extent that indigenous ungulates now contribute only 10 per cent
of the total ungulate biomass of the continent. Pearce’s article may add some
diversity to the mythology of Africa, but then the extinction rate is high for
myths that are unconvincing.
Bees make money
The European Union’s definition of honey as the product of bees is not
vacuous, as Feedback thinks
(26 August).
I bet most readers thought honey was
derived from flower nectar. But bees will collect any available sugary liquid
and this includes juices from damaged fruit, brewery and winery waste, and in
particular the excretions of sap-sucking aphids. This last is apparently
relished as a traditional “honey” in parts of Europe. Others consider the
flavour harsh and bitter and would like it to be labelled as a separate product.
In New Zealand it is called “honeydew”.
The very broad definition reached after four years’ deliberation (and I am
sure a great deal of politicking) will not just allow “honeydew” to be called
“honey” as some lobbyists wanted. It would apparently allow European beekeepers
to feed sugar to their bees and call the product “honey”. This should allow them
to continue to compete with beekeepers elsewhere in the world where sugar is not
subsidised and a narrower definition of honey prevails.
Politicians are less stupid but more devious than Feedback imagines.
Creature chefs
I’m wondering what’s so extraordinary about chimps making pur茅es of
fruits and vegetables because they prefer the taste
(19 August, p 6).
My parrot Hamilton routinely dips his crunchy processed pellet food in his water dish to
soften it before eating it. Hamilton is a domesticated pet, but when I was
growing up I remember doves dipping bits of dry dog food in my dog’s water bowl
before eating it. I think the birds were on to this before the chimps.
Letter
While trekking one weekend I placed my pony in a new paddock with a large
patch of low-growing prickly plants. She proceeded to swipe and stamp on the
plants with a front hoof. She was then able to eat the crushed leaves without
prickling her sensitive nose.
And maggots soften their food with saliva before ingesting it. But making
food more digestible is not the same as converting one easily digestible food
into another in a stereotypical and culturally transmissible manner鈥擡d
Term time
I was appalled by your use of personalised, stigmatic terms in “Breath test”
(5 August, p 18).
Individual people with schizophrenia are just that: people.
Not schizophrenics, not schizophrenic patients. In just the same way, if I had
cancer I would not want to be discussed as “the cancerous”.
Not random at all
Barry Fox’s description of the 1933 US patent for a code or enciphering
system similar to the German Enigma machine
(26 August, p 7)
is intriguing. If the American machine really did have randomly moving innards and an output with
no systematic relationship to the typed input, then it would indeed have
produced a completely unbreakable code.
Had the Germans used this system, however, it would have proved impossible
for them to decipher their own messages, let alone British and Polish
codebreakers working at Bletchley Park. The Second World War could have been
extremely short, with one side’s armed forces receiving nothing but gobbledygook
from headquarters.
In his original text, Barry Fox very carefully used the word
“irregularly” to describe the way the wheels and connections keep changing.
Unfortunately someone in the New 杏吧原创 office then changed the word
to “randomly” which, as reader Mark Parry correctly points out, would have made
the machine completely useless鈥擡d