That's my Lifto!
The SoloTrek strap-on personal helicopter
(26 August, p 17)
must have my parents turning in their grave. I can almost hear my mother saying
“That’s my Lifto!”
Just after the Second World War, when jet propulsion was new and exciting, we
would enliven dull Sunday afternoons playing Inventions. Mum had most of the
ideas and overall artistic control. Dad, a former Royal Engineer, provided all
the practical and technical input. As a toddler, I could only observe and
scribble.
The Lifto was Mum’s greatest achievement鈥攁 combination of egg-whisk (so
as not to scalp the operator), jump jet and rocking chair. Not to be outdone,
Dad invented “Jetslider footwear” for crossing both land and water.
How I wish now I had kept all those sketches and scribbles. The Hovercraft,
jump jet, SoloTrek and Rollerblades鈥擨 could have been a millionaire by
now.
Daft warnings
I am always amused by the reports in Feedback of daft product warnings, the
infamous “may contain nuts” being the prime example.
However, I wonder how many people with nut allergies are alive and well today
because they read an apparently daft warning? Warnings cost very little to put
on products, and have the secondary function of amusing clever people who like
to make fun of them. Just a thought.
Don't shoot!
Asimov’s laws of robotics could only refer to conscious beings that know what
death is and might want to bring it about
(2 September, p 4).
This could be in self-defence like HAL, in revenge and frustration like Frankenstein’s monster,
or from some other motive. The Roboguard can hardly be expected to know that the
odd infrared-radiating things it tracks are people, or why it must not shoot
except when told to do so, since it does not even know that it exists, let alone
that people do.
A Roboguard shooting someone on manual because time delays across the
Internet meant the operator did not know it was pointing at someone’s head, or
even on auto because it was malfunctioning, is nothing like a conscious robot
deliberately killing someone. In the Frankenstein myth, a human creation turns
out to be evil. In real life, it is humans who are the problem. Our robots are
no more capable of evil than a gun or a car.
Millipedes on the line
With regard to “clusters of millipedes” halting an express train in Tokyo
(Feedback, 19 August),
I have a book from my youth called Creepy
Crawlies by Paul Temple (Puffin Books, 1988) which had a chapter on keeping
centipedes and millipedes. In its “Did you know” section, it remarked:
“Millipedes (remember that the biggest are about 20 centimetres or 8 inches
long) have stopped trains. A migrating group can swarm over railway lines, and
when a train runs over them the millions of crushed bodies cause the wheels to
slip. Since the wheels can’t grip the track, the train just stops.” And also:
“65 million millipedes were seen in one migrating group in 1918 in the state of
West Virginia . . . They were probably moving to a new area to find food but
nobody knows exactly why they migrate.”
Beer vs beef
Are mountaineers made of sterner stuff than seafarers? The chart on the front
of the Olde Buzzards pale ale may well not be suitable for maritime navigation
(Feedback, 26 August).
But the label from a can of corned beef aided Felice
Benuzzi and two fellow Italian prisoners of war to escape the tedium of camp
life and climb Mount Kenya. Benuzzi describes his exploits in No Picnic on
Mount Kenya (William Kimber, 1999). Or perhaps the contents of the
containers have different effects on the navigational abilities of the
users.
Letter
Yet another example of Feedback’s tedious mockery of the perfectly
reasonable鈥攊n this case the glass panes covering hammers in trains.
A quick inspection will show that the glass is scored to make it easier to
break, and a moment’s thought suggests that it will be thinner and weaker than
the glass in the windows, and probably designed to break into blunt granules as
well.
The glass is there to discourage casual use of the hammer. Its inclusion in
trains throughout Britain for many years suggests that someone, somewhere is
perfectly happy with the job it is doing.
Safety hammers
Following on from your piece about safety hammers usually being installed
behind glass
(Feedback, 2 September),
I couldn’t help noticing a sign on a recent train journey saying
“Hammers for breaking windows in an emergency can be
found in the First Class compartment”. As the First Class compartment was three
carriages away, I couldn’t help thinking that the spirit of the Titanic lives
on.
Spock's star
While it is true that some Star Trek literature refers to
Epsilon Eridani as the home star of Vulcan
(Feedback, 2 September),
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry decided, with the help of some
astronomers, that the star 40 Eridani was a better choice.
One of the reasons was that Epsilon Eridani is only 1 billion years old,
while 40 Eridani is 4 billion years old. The details were explained in a letter,
co-authored by Roddenberry, which appeared in the July 1991 issue of Sky
& Telescope magazine.
Correction
In our story on jet-powered, high-speed cargo vessels, we mistakenly stated
that the ship would produce a wake 6 metres high
(16 September, p 19).
In fact, this is the height of the waves it will safely sail through, not the height of
the waves it will produce.
Correction
In our news item we reported a neuron simulator developed by Ann Stuart of
North Carolina University, Chapel Hill
(9 September, p 9).
In fact, Stuart and John Moore of Duke University developed educational tutorials called Neurons in
Action which they based on a neuron simulator called NEURON that Moore had first
developed with Michael Hines of Yale University.
Soft landing for alien life
Hazel Muir assumes that all meteorites and similar objects hit the Earth at high speed
(2 September, p 40).
This is surely not true in every case.
A proportion of meteors, meteorites and cometary debris must have their
tracks disturbed by planets, moons, asteroids and the like. A tiny proportion of
these must find themselves in Earth’s orbit around the Sun travelling at almost
the same speed as Earth. These will then fall through the atmosphere at their
terminal velocity, which is very slow for a speck of dust. Detecting this dust
would be difficult in the extreme.
Under these conditions, bacteria would have no problem surviving. Once landed
and having found a suitable food source, any bacteria that arrived this way
would be able to divide at the usual three generations per hour. If such
bacteria exist, many millions, or billions, must have fallen to Earth over the
past 4.6 billion years.
Letter
The possible treatment to control the development of myopia with drugs such
as pirenzepine offers a useful new tool, but one which must, of course, be
monitored closely optometrically. The suggestion under the headline of Nell
Boyce’s article that “short-sightedness may be on its way out”, is therefore
somewhat misleading鈥攗nless some future generation is content to administer
drugs to every child indiscriminately. I hope that day never comes.
Eye wish
In her feature on treatments for myopia, Nell Boyce asks us to imagine what
would happen if half the population wore hearing aids. Everyone “would be
clamouring for scientists to find out what had gone wrong”, she suggests
(26 August, p 32).
Actually, no. If half the population showed such variation in hearing acuity,
then it would be accepted as a normal part of human diversity. Some people would
have the disadvantage of needing electronic amplification, but they would have
the advantage of being able to regulate the incoming volume. (And it is an
advantage, believe me.)
What people would be clamouring for is not to find out what had “gone wrong”,
but ways of ensuring equal participation: subtitling for all television
programmes and films, visual as well as audible public announcements, and free
batteries and aids. Which seems like a good idea anyway, regardless of whether
it’s 50 per cent or 0.5 per cent we’re talking about.
That's rich
The orthodox Marxism of Robert Hardy and Philip Ward
(9 September, p 54)
rather misses the fundamental point of Bouchaud and M茅zard’s analysis,
which is that the distribution of power and influence in any group tends to be
skewed in a manner familiar to Vilfredo Pareto. Observation suggests that even
within Hardy’s organisations of collective popular power, somehow the same
skewing effect also manifests itself in favour of a small group within the main
“collective”. Money is just a particular form of distilled power.
Take the E train
Was I surprised to read Robert Matthews’s claim that the physics behind my
book E=mc2
(9 September, p 52)
is “incomprehensible”? Not
really. As I read through his account, I realised that Matthews was quoting from
a proof copy of my book and not the final text that would appear in the
stores.
In the proof version, an entire 23,000-word section of notes giving key
background on all the science was missing. So it’s not a great surprise that
Matthews found my arguments sketchy. Most books lose a certain amount of
coherence when 23,000 words are taken out.
Matthews also made several factual claims that are worth correcting. He says
that Einstein’s prediction of light-bending was not confirmed from photographs
taken in Brazil, but by plates taken by Arthur Eddington off the African coast.
This would have been news to Eddington who wrote that: “The Brazil party had
perfect weather for the eclipse . . . in the end they provided the most
conclusive confirmation.”
Matthews also suggests that I didn’t focus on the Allied effort to build an
atomic bomb. That’s odd, because two of the four Second World War chapters are
precisely on that effort and the Hiroshima bomb that was built.
He also objects to my writing about the efforts of Nazi Germany to build an
atomic bomb and says that “the Nazis never had a Manhattan project”. This is
disheartening. The Second World War wasn’t so long ago, yet look at how much
it’s faded from general knowledge. Women from the Sachsenhausen concentration
camp were worked to death to prepare the uranium that the Berlin Auer company
provided for the German bomb project; hundreds of scientists and engineers were
employed in the various research and development teams in Leipzig, Berlin,
Hamburg and elsewhere.
Matthews was also displeased with my use of metaphor. But these are always
judgement calls, and it’s perhaps not quite accurate to call them “nonsensical”.
The elaborate metaphor “The atom . . . is a rich miser who, during his life,
gives away no money (energy)”, will seem charming to some and excessive to
others, but was good enough for Einstein when he penned it.
Term time
Tracy’s concern about what we should call someone with schizophrenia ought to be unfounded
(16 September, p 55).
People with schizophrenia are schizophrenic
people just as I, as a person with diabetes, am a diabetic person.
Isn’t it about time we stopped being so concerned about what politically
correct label we give to someone, and more concerned with helping them to deal
with whatever it is that has created that label for them?
The dirt on soil
I was not reassured by P. J. Loveland and J. Webb’s letter about research
showing “small” changes in the organic carbon content of topsoil
(19 August, p 51).
A loss of 0.1 per cent at arable sites in 15 years extrapolates to the
complete disappearance of organic carbon in 345 years. A loss of 0.5 per cent on
managed grassland would lead to the disappearance of organic carbon at these
sites by the year 2106, on average.
My guess is that there might be problems in soil stability and/or plant
growth before these dates. In addition, not all sites are average, and I
strongly suspect that some might be severely depleted well before these
dates.
Letter
In his news story about the decline of Britain’s skylarks
(9 September, p 5),
Rob Edwards described CropGen as a “lobby group” funded by the genetically
modified crop industry.
Wrong. Not everybody funded by industry is a lobbyist. CropGen makes the case
for crop biotechnology, and aims to bring some sense into a public debate
largely dominated by the hysteria and misrepresentation of the anti-GM
lobbyists. We speak on behalf of no particular product nor any particular
company, and our charter forbids our sponsors from having any veto rights over
what we might or might not say.
The comment followed your Editorial
(p 3)
about a modelling exercise from the
University of East Anglia which purported to show that the skylark population
might fall over fields of GM crops.
Against an existing decline of some 75 per cent because of intensive farming
and elimination of the weeds on which the birds feed, such a theoretical decline
was regarded as catastrophic. But the problem, if there is one, derives from
intensive farming, not from genetic modification. Skylarks would be deprived of
food by any reduction in the number of weeds, whether it resulted from the use
of herbicides, GM crops or farmers cutting them down with nail scissors.
Farmers fight an unending battle against scavenging by birds. Remember how
they used to put scarecrows in their fields hoping the birds would go somewhere
else? For farmers to make a decent living, and for the rest of us to enjoy
low-cost groceries, they have to grow fields of crops. Skylarks would no doubt
prefer fields of birdseed.
We may want to grow enough weeds to feed skylarks and their relations, but
there is no reason why farmers should bear the cost. If GM crops help
production, farmers should be encouraged to use them.
Back to nature
The obvious solution to falling wild bird populations on British farmland
(9 September, p3)
is to abandon the Common Agricultural Policy. The CAP distorts
market forces, allowing farmers to maximise profit by overproduction, and leads
to the intensive farming now decimating our wildlife. The surplus food and the
ensuing bureaucracy and fraud are paid for by everyone in Europe.
If market forces were allowed to govern prices, then farmers would be obliged
to reduce food production to meet actual demand, resulting in less intensive
farming. Higher food prices could be offset by using the money saved by
scrapping the CAP to reduce taxes and increase state benefits. The least
efficient land would automatically drop out of production and revert to
wilderness, as happened before the Second World War.