Letter
As a (right-handed) programmer of over 20 years, I have been using a mouse intensively for many years. In the mid 1990s, I found that I had developed extreme pain in my right arm and shoulder, to the extent that the pain never really left, even when I wasn’t using a mouse.
Faced with a career-ending condition, I started using the mouse with my left hand, hoping to extend my career by a few years before that arm gave out as well. To my pleasant surprise, I have found that my left arm did not suffer the same fate, and indeed I am still programming full-time with no problems.
Then there were four
Warrahs 鈥� Falkland Island foxes 鈥� seem to have got around (28 February, p 31). As well as the specimens reported at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and Naturalis, the natural history museum in Leiden, the Netherlands, we too can claim one at the Otago Museum in Dunedin, New Zealand.
It would appear that collecting was most likely a primary cause of the extinction of this species.
Cats in hats
We are now in the 100th anniversary year of the birth of Dr Seuss, and I think it appropriate we pay homage to the man’s scientific genius. Long before talk of grey goo, long before Richard Feynman, Dr Seuss invented the idea of nanotechnology.
In The Cat in the Hat Comes Back the eponymous cat has to clean up a mess he has created. To help him he has Little Cat A, who he keeps under his hat. Little Cat A, similarly, has Little Cat B under his hat and so on all the way down to Little Cat Z (who is too small to see).
If we approximate that the Cat in the Hat is 2 metres tall and each Little Cat is half the height of the previous one, we find that Little Cat Z is 2鈭�25 metres high, or about 30 nanometres. However, to top it all, under Z’s hat is a mysterious substance called Voom, tinier still. Voom very rapidly spreads out, cleans up the mess and tidies up the cats.
I wonder if this affects any of the patents on nanotechnology, as an example of prior invention?
Saying it with flowers
Your information about Interflora not doing AM or PM deliveries except for funeral orders is doubly unfortunate for the company (Feedback, 13 March). In a hospital setting AM and PM refer to “ante mortem” and “post mortem”. So a funeral order that was delivered AM may well not be viewed favourably by the recipient.
For the record
鈥� Last week we published a letter from Moira Smith criticising media overreaction to deaths caused by pain killers (27 March, p 30). The letter was a response to our article about methadone deaths in the US (6 March, p 14).
We did not make it clear enough in our article that the figures we reported (61 deaths in 2001 and 123 in 2002) are not comprehensive for the whole country 鈥� such figures do not exist. The US Federal Drug Administration’s MedWatch database logs reports of adverse reactions to drugs and medical devices sent in voluntarily by medical professionals. It is therefore not a systematic reporting system, but is used to flag up emerging problems. As we reported, the increase is reflected in more systematic data from individual states. For example, in Florida there were 357 methadone-related deaths in 2001 and 556 in 2002.
Evil by rote
The article by Sean Spence did not address the point of whether evil can be taught (20 March, p 38).
And if it can be taught, can it also be untaught?
Thyroid overkill
Following my surprise at the revelations in your article on thyroid radiation doses, I found myself wondering why such simplified practices had become so commonplace (6 March, p 10).
Forty years ago, overdosing was considered a danger to be avoided at all costs, if only because the inevitable consequence of a lifetime on thyroid replacement therapy was seen as highly undesirable. After all, the argument went, you can always give a little more if you need to.
I suspect that economics and medical politics have more to do with the current situation than either concern for the patient or indeed concern for the strict word of law. It is very much easier, quicker and cheaper to maintain a rolling supply of neat 370-megabecquerel sealed capsules of iodine-131, than it would be to provide the dispensing facilities, equipment and staff necessary to optimise each individual’s treatment.
So what is reasonable, what is achievable, and what is practicable? And who should be defining those terms 鈥� physicians or accountants?
ID irony
Your article highlights the risk of ID theft when people share personal information such as passport and driving licence details on the web (13 March, p 24).
However, in the UK this information is hardly private. As a result of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and Money Laundering Regulations 2003, organisations dealing in money (including not only banks but also estate agents, solicitors and accountants) are now required to obtain photocopies of passports, utility bills and similar items and keep these on their files to prove their customer’s identity.
I must have already passed across some half-dozen copies of my passport to various businesses since the act came into force. While I’m sure all such organisations have some sort of file security in place, I have no control over who has access to the personal information I have handed over, or what use is made of it. Any security system based on passport or similar information is compromised. It is ironic that the UK’s new money laundering rules have made the problem worse.
A country called Canada
We Canadians are quite used to Americans believing that the world begins and ends at their border, but we expect better from our British relations. Your news item about bison having nowhere to roam in North America states: “Virtually every large migrating North American animal outside Alaska lives in the Yellowstone Park ecosystem” (13 March, p 4).
This is incorrect. Canada is part of North America, and is home to huge herds of very healthy and very contented caribou, musk oxen, bison, elk, deer, moose, polar bear and a host of other large migrating animals free to roam over vast areas of the Canadian Shield (particularly northern Quebec and Ontario), the northern prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, most of the mountainous regions of British Columbia, and all of the northern provinces of Yukon, Nunavut and the rest of the former Northwest Territories. Anyone of those areas could absorb the Yellowstone ecosystem many times over.
Move the koalas
It is somewhat disconcerting to read of the dilemma for the South Australian state government, which doesn’t know what to do with the excess of koalas on Kangaroo Island (6 March, p 5). Surely many koalas can be moved to other parts of Australia where the numbers have reached critically low levels?
Sinister mousing
You ran a news item about controlling a computer mouse with your left hand (13 March, p 17). As a right-handed person, I changed over a number of years ago, partly as the result of a temporarily bruised hand.
I have never looked back. Within a few days I was as proficient with the left hand as I was, and still am, with my right hand. I didn’t find it necessary to reverse the buttons either. Apart from the possible posture benefits your article mentioned, I find the main advantage is that I can make notes, and use the keypad, return key and also a tablet with my normal writing hand, without removing my other hand from the mouse.
Join the elite, go left. After all, we perform a host of other simple tasks daily with the left hand 鈥� such as changing gear in a car in the UK.
Letter
The effect of the psyche of experimenters on results could be related to the legendary “Pauli effect”.
The story goes that friends of Wolfgang Pauli who were foremost in experimental physics used to beg him not to visit them in their laboratories, because his sheer presence seemed to make their experiments go wrong.
Pauli, with Carl Jung, became the proponent of acausal synchronicity as a mode of explanation to be considered alongside causality, so the story has added importance. Did Pauli’s belief in this alternative form of explanation synchronistically interfere with the “rational” operation of the apparatus?
An important issue buried in the controversy about parapsychology is the absence of a heuristic theory capable of giving reasons for any supposed ESP phenomena. It is not simply, as the articles assumed, that what is involved is the rejection or acceptance of a set of phenomena.
DNA conviction
Helena Kennedy argues against retention of DNA samples except from those people convicted of crimes (20 March, p 20). As a lawyer she should know that compared with the population as a whole, samples from people arrested but not charged, or else acquitted, will contain a disproportionate number of matches with DNA taken from subsequent crime scenes.
Her argument that retention could lead to people being convicted because of cross-contamination fails because the presence of DNA at a crime scene is not in itself proof 鈥� there must be other evidence too. At the same time, giving the police the ability to identify the person whose DNA is at a crime scene tremendously improves their chances of identifying suspects. This is a huge boon that Kennedy and some others in her profession would deprive society of.
Kennedy must be aware of the recent rape case in which the accused was implicated by DNA evidence that was subsequently ruled inadmissible because the prior sample from the accused “should not have been kept” after his acquittal for burglary. Whose civil liberty is Kennedy concerned with? The victim’s? The relatives’?
In the real world people care about the effects of crime. The principle of “innocent until proved guilty” must continue to apply, but every DNA sample should be kept for the benefit of us all. Perhaps one day the existence of a database will even become a deterrent to potential criminals.
Resistance to psi
Robert Matthews makes an interesting point when he compares the results of certain drug trials with the results of certain ESP experiments, and is convincing when he shows that though the latter may have higher statistical significance the scientific community is more likely to give credence to the former (13 March, p 39).
In no other area of scientific endeavour, he suggests, would it be deemed acceptable to consistently reject data that finds in favour of a certain hypothesis and instead to persistently look for flaws in that data.
However, perhaps this difference of approach isn’t necessarily unjustified. The analogy between drug trials and ESP experiments is not a particularly good one, since all that is at issue in the former case is whether or not use of particular drugs has certain results, whereas what is at issue in the latter case is the framework of scientific research itself. If a series of experiments were somehow to conclusively establish the existence of psi, this would entail the revision of so many physical laws as to undermine our ability to use concepts like verification and falsification consistently in the first place.
So it is not surprising that scientists offer more resistance to parapsychological findings than to findings in other areas.