Letter
The Web is awash with recipes for ginger beer that just use brewers yeast. I would very much like to try brewing some with the traditional ginger plant. Do any readers know where I could find it, preferably in North America?
Sideways is best
So Donald Norman thinks that British sideways door handles are awful (5 October, p 46)? Has he considered the fact that you can open a door so equipped with an elbow, knee, or a suitably positioned buttock? If you have a weak grip, wet or dirty hands, full hands or indeed no hands at all, the door can still be opened. Compare and contrast with a rotary style doorknob.
Letter
When I moved to England from Canada 15 years ago, I was puzzled by the obvious lag in technology and compiled a fairly lengthy list, including: no screens on house windows to keep out the bugs; difficulty in finding a used car with automatic transmission; plumbing that a local tradesman described as archaic even by European (never mind North American) standards.
My conclusion: Brits 鈥� whom I have come to love dearly 鈥� believe it is morally wrong to make life easier for themselves.
For the record
In “Ships wrecked” (5 October, p 38) the equation that appeared on page 40 should have read: 2S + 3O2 + 2H2O = 2H2SO4
Suicide swings
In response to work by Joshua Mott and colleagues on a decline in suicides following the adoption of catalytic converters (7 September, p 24), Graham Jones suggests that potential suicide victims will switch to other methods (5 October, p 28).
A study by Tim Amos, Louis Appleby and myself (Psychological Medicine, vol 31, p 935) examined the changes in suicides by different methods in England and Wales from 1987 to 1998. We found that there was a decrease in suicide by car exhaust asphyxiation which was most marked after 1993 鈥� the year the relevant legislation came into force. However, there was a simultaneous increase in suicide by hanging over the same time period. This seems to be an example of method substitution as described by Graham Jones.
How's your heart?
Heart disease sufferers everywhere will say “all contributions gratefully accepted” to the news of the worms that clear arteries. But, as always, there is a problem (5 October, p 19).
We have come a long way in treatment, but we lag when it comes to diagnosis. The condition is largely silent, with only the subtlest of warning signs (irascibility being one), and the heart attack is usually the first you know about it. In Britain, mass screening has long been ruled out by the NHS, so we need a cheap, coin-slot machine in pharmacists 鈥� a medical “I speak your state” machine that could give early warning.
The first cardiac event gets rid of some 30 per cent of those affected on the spot, and leaves another 10 per cent with serious disablement. Too late to put worms in, I’m afraid.
Dissimilar twins
From name supplied
My mother gave birth to twin girls in her third pregnancy (5 October, p 42). I grew tired of hearing how alike my younger sisters were, and being asked how I told them apart. In truth their similarity was of the same order as that between a domestic cat and a whale. Only once did they ever deceive me when I came upon them seated side by side at a distance of some 20 metres. I knew them instantly, however, when one of them moved her hand.
They were almost exact opposites. One was kind, one mean and selfish; they spoke with different voices and with different mannerisms; they walked in a markedly different manner and were in no way alike in body language; they were completely different in their minds and in their attitude to life; one would deal with you in a direct manner while the other resorted to what she believed to be guile.
I have always considered that, could the two be melded, a wonderful person might have emerged.
Address supplied
Telltale crud
You point out that today’s ginger beer is much altered and purged of its “symbiotic liaisons” (28 September, p 50). Back in the 1950s, when I did fieldwork in Jamaica, Desnoes & Geddes made a wonderful brew that I remember as slightly cloudy with 1 or 2 millimetres of crud, junk or what have you in the bottom of each bottle.
Today Desnoes & Geddes still makes a slightly cloudy ginger beer that it exports to the US, but it no longer has the mysterious and intriguing bottom-dwelling crud that used to fascinate me. Could this detritus have been the ginger beer plant you speak of?
Illusion and reality
John Gray asserts that consciousness is a constantly self-renewing illusion (14 September, p 46). What else does he think it could be? Reality?
Perhaps a better definition of consciousness is a highly evolved level of self-aware abstraction, which helps those who possess it to survive by understanding the world around them to a deeper level than non-sentient organisms ever can. Clearly we all have our own version of it, but the advantage is obvious: individuals, or even whole societies, whose perception of reality strays too far from the “real” reality, will have correspondingly reduced chances of survival.
PS I have also noticed that the sky is blue and water is wet.
Limiting energy use
Sterling Burnett alleges that “environmental interest groups are more interested in directing people’s lifestyles by limiting their energy use than they are in solving the problem of rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere” (12 October, p 26).
I see nothing wrong in persuading people to reduce their resource usage, whether it’s energy or raw materials. Those whose selfish lifestyles are destroying those of others elsewhere on the planet must be encouraged to change.
Limiting our scandalous and polluting wastage of our finite resources will probably solve the problem of rising CO2 levels. Scientific quick fixes do nothing to promote responsible behaviour, and guarantee further problems in the future.
All for the better
In 1972, Jessie Bernard concluded that men were better off married than single, because they had fewer symptoms of anxiety, depression, neurosis and passivity. But she thought that the opposite applied to women. However, recent studies show that marriage also has a positive effect on women, increasing their happiness (5 October, p 20).
Aren’t these studies back to front? Isn’t it more likely that the people who are well adjusted, happy and successful in life are far more likely to end up married?
Letter
It is gratifying that David de Vaus has come to much the same conclusion that Peter Eisen, Rob Goldney and I did in 1985 (Personality and Individual Differences, vol 6, p 97, and Journal of Clinical Psychology, vol 42, p 68).
While wives start marriage with higher neuroticism scores than husbands, their scores reduce over time to fall to the same level as those of their husbands. Had Bernard been right in her claim that marriage was bad for women, their neuroticism would have risen during marriage. It doesn’t.
Hope for cryonics
The letter from Ralph Scurlock misses the point of the cryonics competition (12 October, p 26). Everyone knows these facts about cryopreservation, including cryobiologists working at cryonics organisations, who are seeking methods of minimising this damage.
Cryonics is a speculation that future technology will be able to restore the damage to which Scurlock refers. This damage can be described as “atoms in the wrong place”. If nanotechnology (or indeed something completely different and not yet conceived) can be developed to put them back in the right place, then restoration is conceivable.
Even if the chance of reanimation into good health is only small, then this small value is better than the zero value of burning or rotting your body after death. Nobody can at the present time quantify this “small value” unless they know the future.
The competition has helped people to think deeply about the issues surrounding the application of science.
From Venus to Earth?
Could Venus be a “haven of life” (28 September, p 16)? Our late Director Emeritus, Donald Barber, worked at the Norman Lockyer Observatory in Sidmouth from 1936 to 1963. During his time there he exposed many photographic plates recording the spectra of variable stars. He noted that his plates suffered sporadic attacks by bacteria in the spring water fed to his laboratory. The bacteria liquefied the gelatine emulsion and were immune to both silver and silver halides. The Lister Institute attempted to identify the organism but failed.
In an attempt to explain these events it was discovered that they occurred when Venus and Earth were on the same side of the Sun and there was a concurrent geomagnetic storm. Each attack was preceded by heavy rainfall and a wind direction predominantly northerly. Barber speculated that the bacteria could have originated in the cloud tops of Venus and were carried to the Earth by the solar wind. See .
Dirk Schulze-Makuch writes: This is intriguing. But it is difficult to understand why Venusian organisms, if they exist, would be adapted to eating gelatine, and to do so in the relative cold temperatures of the observatory location. I would expect them to be adapted to quite the opposite: hot, acidic conditions and basic nutrients such as inorganic sulphur compounds. If they were indeed extraterrestrial, they would more likely be from Mars, based on the properties described.
It is most likely they are terrestrial, suspended in the atmosphere and reactivated in suitable conditions. However, the correlation to Venus’s position and the geomagnetic storms is puzzling, and it is certainly possible that microbes could travel from Venus relatively unharmed 鈥� Ed
Sch枚n's patents
The revelation that the breathtaking advances accomplished by Henrik Sch枚n at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs were fabricated got me thinking (5 October, p 4). Did Sch枚n and his colleagues file any patent applications on his work, and are any of these available in the published literature?
US patent 6284562 has graphs very similar to those of the fabricated data reproduced in your piece. The patent covers the invention of thin film transistors by Sch枚n, Bertram Batlogg and colleagues and was published 4 September 2001. On 5 September 2002, the same group filed US patent application 20020121669 describing the invention of a superconducting switching device based on C60 molecules.
Patent attorneys sometimes joke when asked what their job is that it is to write science fiction. In this case, the joke may have come true. Bell Labs having fired Sch枚n, one wonders what will happen to the patent cases he is associated with.
Eugenie Samuel writes: Lucent Technologies withdrew this patent application and 5 other patent applications based on Sch枚n’s work at Bell Labs last week. The patent that was granted is actually held by a spin-off company of Lucent Technologies called Agere Systems of Orlando, Florida. As New 杏吧原创 went to print Agere Systems spokeswoman Vibha Agrawal had no statement on whether the company was prepared to enforce the patent or not.