Finger-sticking good
It really is good news to learn of the superglue that dissolves at 90 to 130 掳C
(6 October, p 24).
Next time I glue two fingers together, I’ll just soak
them in boiling water for a few minutes. If that doesn’t work, I can boil up a
pot of oil or even raspberry jam and soak in that. Then off to hospital for an
extensive rebuild, I guess.
Correction
The item exploring whether BSE actually causes vCJD or not
(20 October, p 12)
incorrectly quoted Peter Smith, chairman of the Spongiform
Encephalopathy Advisory Committee, as saying that “Kuru looks like classical
sporadic CJD pathologically”. In fact, it doesn’t, and nor does vCJD, as
correctly stated in the remainder of the quote.
Also, reader Paul Wilkins has now located the mystery New 杏吧原创
article referred to in his letter about the possibility that RNA encodes memory
(29 September, p 52).
It was entitled “The brain as a tape recorder” and was published on 9 May 1968, p 30.
Who are you?
The potential contraceptive technique based on blocking calcium ion channels
to retard sperm motility
(13 October, p 6)
may, as Susan Benoff pointed out, need a bit of development.
Calcium ion channels are involved in neural potentiation鈥攕o they are
probably involved in the memory process. I can see two scenarios as a result of
this. The contraceptive might fail because it made people forget to take it.
Alternatively, it might work extremely well because couples would get halfway up
the stairs and forget what they were doing in the first place鈥攐r, in
extreme cases, that they were having a relationship.
Science gets it right
The bleeding obvious is usually missed in the debate about the sociology of
science
(6 October, p 50).
If science is working properly鈥攁nd it has a
pretty good track record鈥攖he starting point makes little difference to the
final understanding of the underlying real world.
Of course, belief systems of individual scientists will determine the path
that they take to the truth. Beliefs can also blind the scientist to the correct
interpretation of evidence, but persistence and consideration of the evidence
eventually lead all scientists to similar conclusions.
Thus the furious debates of historical science have dissolved in the light of
more science, because science reflects the underlying reality not the social
beliefs of the participants. Is it not truer to say that the development of our
social systems has reflected our science (knowledge) rather than the other way
around?
Virtually sad
Mike Holderness’s article on virtual universities made very sad reading
(6 October, p 48).
To suggest that the practical elements of courses in chemistry
and biology can be abstracted and concentrated (out of context) in one lump,
seems to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of the learning process and
effective teaching.
Even for those areas where the domain and objects of study can be conveyed
through a monitor screen, it is a particularly arid view. If virtual learning
becomes the norm, then why not virtual socialising? After all, you can sit at
home with a drink and talk to your friends on the phone. Why bother going
out?
Flower power
Michael Strawson asks if adding aspirin to water for cut flowers can prevent
them from drooping
(20 October, p 62).
Cut flowers in the supermarket already come with a sachet containing powder
that is added to the vase water. It contains mostly salicylic
acid鈥攁spirin. “Rooting powder” for cuttings also contains salicylic acid.
It looks like this use is quite common.
Letter
I often use aspirin for my cut flowers. Soluble aspirin is best and it works
even better if you dissolve a teaspoonful of sugar in the water as well.
Spaghetti junction
Ben Laurie of London left the linear time solution to solving mazes as an
exercise for the reader
(13 October, p 57).
So following on from his spaghetti method of number sorting:
a) Recreate the maze with spaghetti.
b) Label all the pieces.
c) Join all spaghetti at the junctions with a flexible joint.
d) Take the start in one hand, the end in the other and pull apart until
tight.
e) The labelled pieces can then be recorded and used to trace the path
through the original maze.
Gingered up
I always start New 杏吧原创 at the back to have a laugh over
Feedback and the series of bizarre product instructions before reading of more
serious matters. However, the one on
13 October disappointed me, as fun is poked
at an instruction that has a practical purpose.
Fentiman’s ginger beer is made to an old recipe, which results in the gingery
sediment suspended in the liquid settling out over time. A brief shake
redistributes this, hence the instruction to “upend before drinking”.
Keep it complicated
I loved the idea of erecting truss structures in space using unwinding
superconducting cables
(13 October, p 20).
Sometimes I indulge in an exercise
called: “How complicated can we make this?”鈥攕ort of “Keep it simple,
stupid” in reverse. This idea is way beyond anything I have ever come up
with.
As criticism without a suggestion is just a cheap shot, I suggest that
instead of trusses, structures could be built of simple hollow tubes of some
fibre (carbon, maybe?) and reinforced plastic that is shipped to space rolled up
on a reel and inflated with very low-pressure gas. If the plastic was something
that could be polymerised by UV radiation you wouldn’t need the inflation gas.
The resulting structure would be both light and stiff鈥攁nd a lot simpler
than something held up by superconducting wires and huge magnetic fields.
Sex wars raged in the Palaeolithic
Kate Douglas writes of Homo sapiens that “males and females form
long-term, monogamous relationships within large social groups, with both sexes
cooperating to care for the children”
(13 October, p 42).
Fine, but it is wrong to push that structure back into prehistory.
There is no evidence that any Palaeolithic female knew the father of her
child(ren). Some hunter-gatherers did not connect copulation and conception.
Cooperation in child rearing is a guess.
I guess that young children were reared mainly by their mothers within
largely female groups. It is likely that people lived in small groups (25 to 50
people) in the Palaeolithic, in environments that offered such abundant
nutrition for big brains that women could provide for themselves and their kids.
They didn’t need to swap sex for prime cuts of mammoth鈥攖hough why not, if
you like mammoth?
Finally, there doesn’t have to be a Darwinian (that is, functional, useful)
explanation for make-up. Some things just happen.
Letter
Your article assumes that what has been normal for Western societies until
recently is the norm for all humans. Long-term monogamy is not typical of humans
at all. Roughly only 1 in 15 human cultures can be said to be monogamous. The
rate of polygamy among hunters and gatherers is higher still.
As for the idea of a “sex strike”, a high level of violence towards women
marks contemporary hunting and gathering societies. While some of this is due to
Western impacts, it is unlikely that all of it is. Every surviving culture I
know of allows men to use “rougher than usual handling” to obtain sex from their
wives, with the exception of a few modern Western cultures. Is it reasonable to
assume Stone-Age women were brave enough to challenge this?
Letter
I have often wondered what possible evolutionary advantage could be afforded
by PMT. Presumably, its effect on the males of a tribe where the females were
all on the same cycle was to provide an added incentive to leave the group for a
while and go hunting.
Betta riting
Valerie Yule would like to see English spelling modified, as has happened
with other major languages
(13 October, p 56).
The chief problem is that English
is now the language of many countries. When Russian orthography was modified
after 1917, or Norwegian was updated, or Turkey adopted roman script, all that
was needed was a single government decision. For English, a global conference
would be necessary.
Moreover, English pronunciation varies widely, so that uniformly phonetic
spelling would be impossible. For example, the “a” of “grass”, “pass” and many
other words can be pronounced in two different ways. To add to the confusion,
two different words can sound the same, for example, Americans pronounce “ant”
and “aunt” alike.
Most striking of all, Americans tend to lack one phoneme entirely, so that
“arks” and “ox” share an identical vowel. In the Judy Garland musical, “a couple
of fa la las” rhymes with “the wonderful land of Oz”.
Coincidentally, it was in Australia that a serious attempt was made to modify
English spelling. The plan was to introduce reforms gradually, and spelling
reform number 1, known as SR1, advocated using just “e” whenever a short “e”
sound occurred, as in bred or sed. For some years the Australian Ministry of
Helth was thus spelt. Perhaps someone could update us on what happened to this
commendable initiative.