Yourcompanysucks.com
Feedback seems perplexed that websites like enron-sucks.com aren’t up and running yet (30 March).
As a webmaster for several big-name corporations, I think I can explain why. For every website I have worked on, the company has asked me to register any domain names that would make the company look bad. One of the most commonis
They do this to avoid having any problems in the future with bad publicity.
Universities to blame
Michael Rennie of the University of Dundee claims that “as with so much else that is wrong with science education in Britain, the problems are with the schools, not the universities鈥�” (30 March, p 52). Later he targets (among other things) “the appalling curriculum that is anathema to most kids”.
Though the curriculum could certainly do with considerable change, Rennie needs toopen his eyes to the role universities play in keeping it appalling. Universities demand that A levels (and their equivalents in other countries) prepare students properly for undergraduate science courses (which as often as not are themselves narrow, technocratic, dull and unimaginative).
In turn, preparing students to handle A levels drives course content lower down in the high schools. Those of us who try to reform school curricula come up against this barrier all the time.
Only when the universities expect new science undergraduates to have less rote problem-solving crammed into their schooling, with more consideration of the nature and history of science and its interaction with other social pursuits, will schools be able to move away from the appalling and (for many) alienating science curricula that universities presently foist upon them.
Who's the fool?
Some 20 years ago, under the pseudonym Iain James, I published an April Fool’s Day joke in New 杏吧原创 (2 April 1981, p 41). My article proposed a system of bubble containment for cold nuclear fusion.
It was therefore with some interest that I discovered your article on cold fusion research in the US with its subtitle “Will popping a few bubbles solve the world’s energy problems?” (9 March, p 4). Is this yet another case of “invented in Britain and developed abroad”?
Curried chickens
Angela Kingston asks why Karswood poultry spice, a chilli-like powder, was added to chicken feed despite birds not having receptors for capsaicin (6 April, p 51). The spice was used to “hot up” the chickens’ rear ends, in the same way that a rather strong curry may affect you or me. This effect was thought to increase egg production.
Superpositioned chip
Robert Clark and his team have built the first ever quantum computer chip but “they’re not sure whether it works” (30 March, p 13). That’s another way of saying it may be working, but equally it may not be working. More to the point, the chip is in a quantum superposition of the non-working and working states. I’d say congratulations are in order.
Freud's equation
The Feedback item about “a set of notes by Sigmund Freud detailing his calculations to reach the formula E = mc2” (9 March) reminded me of when former New Zealand prime minister Keith Holyoake told an interviewer that one of his favourite reads was On the Origin of Species by Charles Dickens.
Parks for people
The dangerous notion that conservation can only be achieved by preserving “wilderness” as a place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”, as the 1964 US Wilderness Act has it, has led to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people from their lands all over the world to make way for national parks (30 March, p 42).
Many indigenous peoples reject such a notion. Jakob Malas, a Khomani hunter from the Kalahari whose lands were classified as the Gemsbok National Park, has noted: “The Kalahari is like a big farmyard. It is not a wilderness to us. We know every plant, animal and insect, and know how to use them. No other people could ever know and love this farm like us.”
Ruby Dunstan of the Nlaka’pamux people of the Stein Valley in Alberta, Canada, who have been fighting to prevent the logging of their ancestral lands, has likewise remarked: “I never thought of the Stein Valley as a wilderness. My Dad used to say ‘that’s our pantry’. We knew about all the plants and animals, when to pick, when to hunt. We knew because we were taught every day. It’s like we were pruning every day鈥� But some of the white environmentalists seemed to think if something was declared a wilderness, no one was allowed inside because it was so fragile. So they have put a fence around it, or maybe around themselves.”
Far from being a “moral resource”, as Nash so misguidedly believes, the Western concept of wilderness is a moral menace on whose altars the sustainable livelihoods of indigenous peoples are being mindlessly sacrificed in the name of conservation. We need parks for people, not wildernesses emptied of livelihoods and meaning, preserved only for the recreation of alienated town dwellers.
Life needs light
Your Inside Science article on life in extreme environments (30 March) was in many ways an admirable survey of a fascinating area of knowledge, but I was dismayed to see that it perpetuated a piece of muddled thinking that I hoped I had nailed in The Outer Reaches Of Life (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
It is not true that the discovery of chemosynthetic life overturned the view that life relies solely on sunlight and photosynthesis. The vast majority of chemotrophs need oxygen to oxidise their inorganic substrates (hydrogen, ferrous iron, sulphur, sulphides, inorganic sulphur or nitrogen compounds, and so on). That oxygen originates from sunlight and photosynthesis. This is true of almost all dark ecosystems on Earth, including hydrothermal “black smoker” ecosystems.
A few types of chemotroph are also anaerobes (they don’t need oxygen) and oxidise hydrogen with substrates such as sulphate or carbonate instead of oxygen. But even these depend indirectly on sunlight, because the hydrogen they oxidise arises from the action of microbes on organic matter, which in turn is only present because of sunlight and photosynthesis.
To my knowledge, the only examples of chemotrophic lifeon this planet that might be truly independent of sunlightand photosynthesis are the methane-producing anaerobes discovered deep underground in Washington state. As your article mentioned, these might get their hydrogen from a chemical interaction between ferrous iron and water. However, the origin of that hydrogen remains speculative.
For my part, I think it very likely that terrestrial-type life based on an energy input other than sunlight could persist somewhere, but our understanding of chemotrophy at the moment provides no firm evidence.
Pay attention
I was distressed to read Barry Turner’s argument against preventive detention founded on his misunderstanding of the legitimacy of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnosis (30 March, p 46).
A significant number of children and adults have ADHD. The validity and reliability of the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, as defined in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, are supported by an enormous body of data that Turner chooses to ignore. He fails to mention the significant functional impairments that impulsivity, hyperactivity and inattention make on the lives of affected individuals, and patronisingly describes the diagnostic process as whimsical, claiming it includes individuals who fall within the range of normal.
ADHD is a treatable condition that needs to be diagnosed at an early age to prevent the development of childhood behaviour problems, social and academic difficulties, erosion of self-esteem, early pregnancy, automobile accidents, higher rates of tobacco and substance abuse, and instability in adult relationships and at work.
Letter
Turner notes that the British government is considering changing the law to allow the imprisonment of people with psychiatric disorders who are considered untreatable and dangerous, but who have not yet committed a crime.
This arrogant ideology is reminiscent of the overzealous society of the 16th and 17th centuries which believed that by imprisoning apparently deranged people it was “doing the Lord’s work”. Just as I am certain that no one can scientifically define the Lord’s work, I am also certain that, with the exception of severely exacerbated and extreme cases, no one can define who does and doesn’t deserve a chance of a normal life.
Unsolicited txts
I read with interest your story about being charged for a text message when you have not subscribed to a service or requested the message (Feedback, 6 April).
If companies such as Vodafone charged or demanded payment for unsolicited text messages, in Britain this would surely amount to a criminal offence under the Unsolicited Goods and Services Act 1971. I would suggest readers complain to their local Trading Standards Office.
Who wants digital TV anyway?
I agree that the introduction of digital TV into Britain has been handled poorly (6 April, p 5). However, the main problem is that I and many others don’t believe there are any benefits.
Digital TV could offer superb, wide-screen pictures, but my understanding is that this capability has been sacrificed by squeezing channels into much narrower bandwidths, in order to provide many more of them鈥攆rom which the government presumably expects to make a lot of money. Wider pictures, yes, but I have yet to see any evidence of better picture quality.
Providing many more channels, in itself, is worthless. I watch TV for its content, not to count the number of channels I can receive. Having lived in the US for a few years, I’ve seen, if only briefly, what having 80 channels means: 78 channels showing sport, cheap cartoons and lots of repeats that I have no interest in watching.
I may switch to digital TV in the future, but only if my current, perfectly satisfactory analogue TV fails. And even then I’ll only buy digital if it costs the same as analogue. If analogue transmissions are switched off before my current TV fails, I probably won’t buy another TV.