Mammal meals
Your editorial on the US BSE crisis implores the US government to “ban the feeding of mammals to other mammals entirely” (10 January, p 5). Yes, that ought to do it. But is the US population really ready to accept the imposition of a vegetarian regime?
The editor writes:
鈥� Indeed 鈥� though they would still be able to eat chicken, turkey, pheasant, pigeon鈥�
Iraqi casualties
The list of causes of civilian deaths in Iraq made by Steven Johnston (17 January, p 30) missed out the biggest cause of all, the regime of Saddam Hussein. That regime is now gone, thanks to outside military intervention, after all other attempts at its removal had failed.
Quick-start computers
I shed no tears for those folk who switch on their computers and sit waiting for the interminable Windows system to get its act together (17 January, p 21). I use two Acorn machines which are just as powerful in computing terms as a standard PC 鈥� though much less well endowed with dedicated software. They boot up in 7 and 16 seconds respectively, have RISC chips that can use as little as one-fifth the power of Pentium chips. And they have elegantly designed operating systems 鈥� unlike the jungle of computer verbiage that makes up the Windows package.
Faster boot-up, less power from the grid, what grand ideas! But there was just one snag with the Acorn 鈥� er, um, it was British. And naturally it’s just not British to go out into the world and say: “Hey folks, this is the best thing since sliced bread.” So we are stuck with Microsoft, but let’s have a cheer for good old Linux which now makes it possible for PC owners to get started straight away.
Fate of the Mayans
Kate Ravilious shows an ignorance of Mayan history (10 January, p 42). The statement that “16th-century Spaniards found only primitive tribes living in thatched huts” ignores the fact that Mayans have always lived in thatched-roofed, stick-walled houses built on cement foundations, and still do today. Until their slaughter in 1697, the thousands of Mayans dwelling around Peten Itza would have argued that they had not abandoned their cities. The Mayan society did not catastrophically collapse: it morphed over centuries.
Finally, the Pu’uc Mayans read to the Spanish priest De Landa from their library at Mayapan 鈥� hardly behaviour that one could ascribe to “a primitive tribe”.
Where's the warrah?
Thanks for an interesting article on the warrah (20 December 2003, p 80). The picture caption on p 81 states that “there are only two complete specimens of the Falklands Islands Fox” and pictures one from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels. That certainly wets the appetite and you wonder where the other complete specimen is.
To fill in the gap, I can inform you that the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm has another complete specimen 鈥� possibly the only other one, if it is true that there are only two.
Sweeping pole
Valerie Jamieson asserts that a sweeping spot of light from David Marjot’s ballroom mirror globe cannot convey information faster than the speed of light as it cannot carry information from one point to another (10 January, p 31).
This may well be true, but what if you replace the beam of light with a rigid pole 鈥� imagine a very tall skyscraper built so high it extends far into space. As Marjot states, the further from the centre of rotation the faster the apparent speed would be, so if the skyscraper has been built high enough the end would move faster than the speed of light. If a hook was then placed on top, the hook could pick up a bag of mail from one location and deposit it further round in another, just like an old fashioned mail train. Hey presto! Information transfer faster than the speed of light.
Mild peril
Feedback notes the TV warning “contains mild language” (17 January). This wasn’t the first of these messages on adverts. The first I saw was for The Wild Thornberrys Movie 鈥� an animated film which “contains mild peril” 鈥� I was mildly worried.
Just after that, a piece of work starring Eddie Murphy called Daddy Day Care was said to contain “mild comedy violence”. Having read the reviews, it seems that Murphy was in dire need of extreme non-comedy violence for making the film.
For the record
鈥� In Anthony Battersby’s letter about cleaning up injection practices (17 January, p 31), an editing error led to auto-disable (AD) syringes being wrongly described as “auto-disposable” syringes.
Letter
Joan Roughgarden does not draw a clear line between different sorts of homosexuality. Many animals, such as the female bonobos she mentions, show regular homosexual behaviour but this has no bearing on their normal mating and heterosexual reproduction.
Actually Homo sapiens is much the same: males of the species usually have a period of homosexual genital contact between the ages of 10 and 15, and this probably, as she says, fosters group bonding while having no effect on their eventual reproduction. But this (and the bonobos) tell us nothing about men who choose homosexuality as their sole lifetime sexual behaviour.
Call of the wild
John Fowles may be unable to adequately describe the beauty of birds, but his descriptions, and others’ photos, however limited they may be, inspire the rest of us to get out and see the real thing (20 December 2003, p 74). Surely that is a good reason to keep on attempting the impossible.
Who needs fish oil?
Your editorial about farmed salmon states that without fish we would be missing out on important omega-3 “fish oils” (17 January, p 3). I would not expect New 杏吧原创 to side with industry in perpetuating this myth.
No doubt omega-3 oils are beneficial to a healthy cardiovascular system and brain development, but fish are not the best source. Linseed or flaxseed has a far greater concentration of omega-3. Even green leafy vegetables are a source of omega-3. Preformed DHA (from omega-3) can now be synthesised without ever involving any fish. Why not leave the fish alone, cut to the chase and consume these “fish oils”.
Letter
Your news item says we challenge the UK Food Standards Agency’s line on salmon and dioxins (17 January, p 8). This is untrue. The FSA uses the same internationally agreed figures for the relative toxicities of dioxins and PCBs as other authorities, including the World Health Organization, the European Union and the US.
Our exploratory research, to which you refer, suggests that uncertainties affecting these relative toxicities deserve further investigation. The weight given to our work by the FSA when advising consumers is a matter for them, and may properly take account of other factors that were not examined in our study, including substantial reductions in dioxin concentrations since 1997, and the beneficial effects of eating salmon.
War on wealth
The warning from Worldwatch that excessive global food consumption is leading to higher levels of obesity and environmental damage is indeed worrying (17 January, p 5).
Clearly the war on poverty must be matched by a war on wealth. Both extremes are harmful but excessive wealth may prove to be the greater threat to human existence.
Sex and selection
The article on homosexuality and sexual selection seems to miss the point that while genes are the unit of evolution, it is combinations of genes that produce individuals and behaviour (17 January, p 36).
Just because a gene contributes to behaviour which means that 10 per cent of the people who carry the gene do not pass it on via reproduction, that is no indication that the gene will not flourish. In combination with other genes it may produce, in the other 90 per cent of the population that carry it, those who do reproduce and pass it on 鈥� in which case, the gene will survive.
Behaviour resulting from the genes we carry may contribute to the success of the species or may be just a side effect. It might be interesting to observe and categorise behaviour but until one has some understanding of the genes, I suggest that patterns we perceive in behaviour are as likely to originate in the eye of the beholder as in the science.
Letter
The article implies that the sexual selection theory is wrong. But broad adaptive behaviour and sexual selection are not mutually exclusive.
A peacock grows a large tail, that could be the admission price to the big boys’ club: adaptive behaviour. And a peahen selects him because his tail is bigger: sexual selection. An oestrous baboon scatters her favours among the lower-ranking males during early oestrus: socially adaptive. And narrows her search at the time of highest fertility to the alpha males: sexual selection.
Can't see the wood鈥�
On reading your report on “safety net” measures against global warming, I found myself amused and worried in equal measures at the idea of building a “windmill-sized gadget designed to ‘scrub’ CO2 out of the wind” (17 January, p 4).
Such a gadget already exists and can easily be deployed in greater numbers at relatively little expense, ready to function in a few years’ time. Not only would it scrub the CO2 out of the wind, it would also convert the CO2 into oxygen for us to breathe; it is quite the opposite of an eyesore, and benefits the surrounding ecosystem.
An international commitment to this super-cure for the environment could prevent global warming and go some way towards repairing the damage we have wrought on our planet. Yet we are currently removing these things from the Earth with bulldozers and chainsaws, pumping out toxic fumes and CO2 as we go.
Meanwhile, chief scientists at our international conferences are planning giant sunshades for the planet (which would, incidentally, be highly detrimental to these windmill-sized wonder devices), dumping iron in the oceans, or salinising the clouds, all examples of human meddling in the environment which could have nasty and unpredictable consequences.