An exercise issue
In western countries, diet and lack of exercise are both closely linked to obesity. Surely Paul Campos’s argument was that because the first two are troublesome to record, obesity is often used in epidemiological studies as a proxy for them (1 May, p 20). When reliable information is available, the first two can be seen to be more important. So a commuter cyclist getting 30 to 60 minutes regular exercise every day with a body mass index of 30 may be less at risk than someone with a BMI of 24 who gets no exercise.
Mick Schachter argues that diabetes is strongly linked to obesity (15 May, p 28). But whether this link is causal is moot. Participants in the US National Institutes of Health’s Diabetes Prevention programme reduced their risk of diabetes by 52 per cent by diet plus 30 minutes of exercise every day. They also lost weight.
Promoting exercise, and even encouraging more people to walk or cycle to work by creating pedestrian and cyclist-friendly roads, should, if successful, go a long way towards solving this problem.
Ghostly information
How does electricity move through a metal, your feature asks (29 May, p 38)? It’s difficult for me to see this as anything other than a simple displacement effect. If you push some marbles into a tube filled with marbles then some marbles will emerge from the other end. The fact that they are not the same ones is irrelevant, because something has been transmitted very quickly 鈥� call it force, or information. Whatever it is, it is not marbles.
With electrons in a wire, electrons are forced in at one end and displace other electrons, by collision, repulsion or whatever, until the disturbance, which happens to move at the speed of light, reaches the other end. What is being transmitted is actually information. The movement of sound in air seems a good analogy. Nitrogen and oxygen molecules cannot travel far without colliding, but this does not prevent the transmission of what we call sound, which is also a form of information. Electricity is both electron movement and information movement.
Maybe the ghost in the machine is information.
Rod iron rides again
I don’t know anything about Feedback’s “rod iron” (22 May), but I do wonder about the strength of the “rot iron fence” that is advertised by a sign next to the freeway near Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Letter
While staying with my sister in New Jersey I asked what the various birds were in her garden. She did not know them all, so I decided to buy her a book on birds. The young book store assistant seemed mystified and I repeated myself three times before I realised the problem. They had no books on God and birds.
Letter
When manufacturers introduced CD cases which had two CDs in a single sized package, to prevent confusion, these often had a sticker pronouncing: “This is a jewel case which contains two CDs”. I often wonder whether they originally meant “dual” case but, whatever the intention, the name “jewel case” for CD case seems to have entered the lexicon.
For the record
鈥� Our coverage of the recent work to produce very long-chain omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids in a higher plant (22 May, p 18), gave the impression that the work was done at the Scottish Crop Research Institute in Dundee. In fact the work was done at the University of Bristol, where the lead scientists were Colin Lazarus and Keith Stobart.
Letter
Your Latin is even more anomalous than a humped zebra. The tag is “animal post coitum triste”. A correct variant, but still obscure in its connection to a zebra crossing, or a crossing zebra, would be: “Omne animal triste”, every animal is sad.
Green granny
Georg Tremmel writes about insertion of genes into apple trees to commemorate loved ones in the letter headed “Abstract granny” (6 June, p 31). It’s a pity his family name isn’t Smith.
Firing at the Moon
Aside from g-shock turning astronauts into mush, Jules Verne’s space-gun could not have sent a cannonball to the moon (8 May, p 32). A shell cannot leave the muzzle of a gun faster than the hot gas behind it. Gas travelling at 1 or 1.5 kilometres per second cannot accelerate a shell from 0 to 2 kilometres per second no matter how long the barrel.
In the first half of the 20th century, the big guns of battleships had a range of 25 or 30 kilometres. The Paris Gun of 1918 used a steep trajectory to minimise air friction on a rather small shell to achieve a range of 120 kilometres. To reach near-orbital velocities, the two superpowers later built intercontinental ballistic missiles, not intercontinental cannons.
Hot carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide, with a touch of steam, are the propellants of a Verneshot. This mixture is similar to what comes from igniting gunpowder or guncotton (Verne’s choice of explosive). A Verneshot might well hurl a mountain 50 or even 100 kilometres, but not halfway around the world from say, the Deccan to Yucatan.
It's been done
I would be surprised if Australia’s Nine network can get a patent for a service texting people when their favourite TV programme is about to air (29 May, p 23). Anyone in the UK can go to and get just such a service.
Cod Latin
You have given the letter from Karen Szymczyk about post-coital zebras the heading “Omnia animal tristes est” (29 May, p 31).
The original Latin tag is “post coitum omne animal triste est” (“after coition every animal is sad”). So you have the first adjective in the neuter plural (instead of the neuter singular) and the complement in the masculine/feminine plural.
Is this telling us something interesting about copulating zebras or merely showing that New 杏吧原创 is no new Latinist? Perhaps you need another Latin tag 鈥� “ne sutor ultra crepidam” (“let the cobbler stick to his last”).
"Safe" medicines
David O’Danachair’s letter claims that herbs are basically poisonous whereas drug companies carry out tests to ensure their products are safe (5 June, p 30). However, natural therapies such as British herbs are normally extremely safe, especially when compared with drug-based medicine. The Journal of the American Medical Association (vol 279, p 1200) stated that prescribed drugs are between the fourth and sixth most common cause of death in the US. This study left out overdose, abuse and wrong administration of the drugs, so the number of deaths caused by medical drugs is really much higher.
Charles Medawar, who wrote Power and Dependence, found that at any time 10,000 hospital beds in the UK are occupied by people who have been damaged by prescribed medical drugs. Complementary medicine and orthodox medicine should work together to use the best of both to help the patients.
Four wings first
Jeff Hecht writes about four-winged birds, suggesting they were the first to take to the air (22 May, p 8). Since some insects have four wings, does this hint at similar expressions for the same homeobox genes?
Please don't help me!
The article about software bloat by Nicholas Negroponte started out so well (5 June, p 26). Of course modern software is slow and glitchy because of “featuritis”. The same is true of other electronic goods. I recently purchased a digital radio only to discover that I have to press no fewer than four buttons just to change from one preset channel to another.
If only Negroponte had stopped there and not gone on to suggest that software should have “common sense” and an ability to “do what I mean”. I suspect that the software required to even attempt this feat would be bloated and contain glitches of its own.
I don’t want an editor, say, to second-guess what I mean. If the software does not behave predictably, I cannot think ahead but have to be constantly checking that it has done what I expected. If my editor “notices” that I always type my name after the word “sincerely”, for example, and then does this for me, I have to remember to watch out if I use that word in another context. In short, software with common sense would be hell.
Letter
As Chair of the Board of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST), I was disappointed to read your article quoting a leaked copy of POST’s forthcoming report on the risk of terrorist attacks at nuclear facilities.
It would not be appropriate for me to discuss the report in detail before it is published, but I would like to point out that your coverage gave only half the story, focusing on the worst possible consequences of an attack without examining its likelihood. When POST’s report is published I hope you will cover it in a less alarmist manner.
No reactor risk
Your article stating that a jet crash “could kill millions” was scaremongering, and unworthy of your usual standards (29 May, p 8). While you quote the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology’s report as saying “a large plane crashing into a reactor could cause as much radioactivity as the Chernobyl accident”, you provide no evidence of infringements of the restricted areas (RAs) around nuclear facilities by large planes.
RAs are typically 5 kilometres in diameter and 700 metres high, and an infringement would be recorded even if a plane was inside these areas by 30 metres or so. The Ministry of Defence, by your own admission, confirmed only five breaches of the zones by its own aircraft 鈥� small fast jets that regularly fly at high speed at an altitude of 50 to 100 metres. Small infringements do sometimes occur due to a split-second miscalculation.
The Civil Aviation Authority’s figures are not broken down by aircraft type or size. But in fact, infringements by large aircraft are unknown: such aircraft proceed on flight plans and are monitored on radar for their entire journey.
You cite two successful prosecutions: one of a balloonist and one of the pilot of a “powered hang-glider”. These are the sort of aircraft that occasionally infringe the RAs, piloted by weekend amateur pilots who occasionally make a mistake. I invite you to reconsider your conclusion that one of these could cause significant damage to a reactor. In fact they would hardly leave a mark.