Strange brew
Has the trick with kopi luwak coffee been tried with any animals other than the civet (16 October, p 44)? Feeding the green beans to your toddler might produce an acceptable “home-made” variety, and would be considerably quicker and cheaper.
Rhythm on the river
Readers interested in syncopated rowing (25 September, p 23; 16 October, p 23) will welcome the news that there is indeed a video clip available for download from the British Pathe website that shows the London Rowing Club testing a boat in 1929 using this style of rowing. You can see it at .
Hapax legomenon
I hadn’t made the connection between “googlewhackblatt” and “hapax legomenon”, so hats off to Jeff Bock-Brown for that (Feedback, 16 October).
However, he is under the impression that the phrase is a “Greek/Latin compound” and says that “true pedants will prefer the pure Greek googlehapaxgraph”. Actually, really true pedants will know that hapax legomenon already is pure Greek: hapax means “once” and legomenon is the passive participle of the verb meaning “say” (so the whole thing means something like “having been said once”).
By the way, Google gives about 7600 hits for hapax legomenon. It would have been too good to be true if鈥�
Worrying about up
The battle between Bohr and Einstein evidently gave a phantom victory to the former, now that Einstein’s realist spirit is hitting back at quantum weirdness.
Measurement is indeed vital in quantum signalling. The garbling of messages between those quantum buddies, Alice and Bob, is caused not only by the disturbance of photon spins during transit but also by detector noise. How photon detectors function is a crucial question that has been addressed by Trevor Marshall and Emilio Santos’s purely wave description of light (). It is high time the proponents of phantomly entangled photons faced the Einsteinian reality challenge.
Worrying about up
I cannot believe that the quantum community has got its knickers in such a twist over the direction of up. This seems to me to be one of those can’t-see-the-wood-for-the-trees issues.
Modern computers are quite powerful and software programmers are very inventive people. Couldn’t a simple, agreed program 鈥� such as a word or cookie that all quantum computers know and read only one way 鈥� be sent first between the communicating computers? Then the receiving computer could look at the data (spinning photons) and decide which are 1s and which are 0s to get the desired result.
Once this has been achieved, a simple translation program would compensate for the differences. This method could also be used for encryption purposes. If the hacker doesn’t know what the key is the data would be useless. Should I patent this? Watch out Bill Gates!
Average of averages
I was fascinated by the beauty of Miss Average Face (2 October, cover). You can enhance her beauty by viewing her stereoscopically together with her brother, Mr Average Face, on the front of the “Secrets of the face” supplement.
Remove the pull-out supplement and place the two pictures side by side in a good light (sunlight works best, if you can find any). Then “cross” your eyes and merge the two pictures in the middle. The resulting face has an even more ethereal quality, now in three dimensions.
The startling thing is that the 3D face is undoubtedly feminine. Is there a message here?
Roman taxes
A possible explanation for that ancient archaeological puzzle, the Severan Marble Plan, could be that it was for the purposes of collecting taxes (2 October, p 36). One could easily keep track of who had paid their taxes by making notes on the surface of the map using charcoal, wax or something else easy to erase for next year’s record. Although the map was displayed high off the ground, it could be reached by ladders on rollers, like those in large libraries.
Bags of trouble
Caroline Williams reviewed the “battle of the bags” in many countries (11 September, p 30). In Tarapur, India, plastic bags caused a public relations fiasco for a waste management facility.
In May 1995, routine sampling of a storm-water drain at this facility detected a small amount of caesium-137, which was traced to steam condensate from the plant. The leak contaminated an area of about 40 square metres, well within the premises.
The radioactivity was so dilute that a person would have had to drink 50 litres of storm water every day for an entire year to exceed the maximum safe dose. And the plant personnel disposed of the affected soil safely. The leak posed no health risk.
But the story “grew legs”. Dozens of reporters descended on the site. Some attributed the leak to a nuclear power station nearby. In some versions, the leak had killed local cattle. The Times of India, one of the most widely circulated newspapers in the country, published photographs of the skeletons of animals said to have been killed by the leak.
Angry villagers dragged the carcass of a calf to the site. I was at Tarapur to investigate the leak. During the autopsy, which I requested, the vet pulled out several kilograms of polythene bags from the dead calf’s stomach. The body did not contain an abnormally high amount of radioactivity.
Stomach clogging by thin plastic bags causes 90 per cent of cattle deaths in parts of India. In one state capital, the authorities keep an ambulance with rescue personnel ready to rush to the spot to do emergency surgery on cattle in distress. They get many calls every day.
New ape, or not?
I look forward to reading further details about a “new species of ape” supposedly found in the north of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 鈥� especially since this “new ape” is supposed to eat “a diet rich in fruit, typical of chimps” (9 October, p 32).
Obviously those reporting this purported new species have not read my own research reports about my studies of gorillas in the Kahuzi-Biega region of the DRC during the early 1970s. There I found that during certain seasons of the year, the Kahuzi gorillas ate far more fruits than their cousins in the Virunga Volcanoes region, which runs along the borders of the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda. The behaviour of the latter population had, until then, been taken as typical of all mountain gorillas.
We must appreciate that there are, inevitably, huge variations in the diets and behaviours of all species of great ape, just as there are in our own. So let us not be too hasty to claim yet another new species of great ape. The forests of the DRC are indeed still vast and could yet hide many new biological treasures. I wait to see the details of the evidence 鈥� and all of it.
Betting on clones
Tam Dalyell wants to legalise the cloning of racehorses (2 October, p 41). This would be disastrous for the horse-breeding industry, which depends upon the horse-racing industry, which in turn depends upon the gambling industry. For bookmakers to make a profit, the outcome of races must be essentially random. If there is a sure-fire winner, the bookmaker must either face certain losses, or withdraw from making odds.
If horse cloning, and then horse genetic engineering, were allowed, all horses would eventually be engineered and the status quo would resume. But before this could happen there would be a period when some horses were certain winners. Under these conditions, bookmakers would withdraw from horse racing and turn to other, less predictable, sports 鈥� and the punters would follow them. The one certain loser would be the race-goer.
Worrying about up
Your article “Which way is up?” states: “It is impossible to tease apart the quantum characteristics of the two particles. So if you do something to the quantum state of one particle, it inevitably, and instantaneously, affects the state of the other, no matter how far apart the particles are” (2 October, p 32).
No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t affect the other particle, it just reveals what its state is. When particles are entangled, their characteristics 鈥� the state of their spin, polarisation and so on 鈥� are known. If you know the state of one you know the state of the other by simple deduction. Period. And since no “action at a distance” is involved, there is no effect. This is one quantum “mystery” that should be edited out.
India's e-votes
Brazil has used electronic voting since 1996.
The editor writes:
鈥� It is true that both India and Brazil have successfully conducted much larger all-electronic elections without the kind of problems experienced by the US. See 22 May, p 4.
Organic land hogs
Research shows that organically farmed land supports wildlife better than intensively farmed land, but this is not the same as demonstrating that a move to organic farming would be good for biodiversity (9 October, p 9).
The point of farming is to produce food, not to occupy land. Therefore we should compare the environmental impacts of different means of producing a certain quantity of food, not different ways of occupying a given acreage of land.
Organic farming makes extravagant use of land. If we took the land and labour that would be used to produce an amount of food by organic means, we could, using intensive farming methods, produce the same food using not much more than half the land and significantly less labour.
In principle, the spare labour could then be used to manage the spare land in the interests of wildlife. If this comparison still showed that the organically farmed land produced better biodiversity, that would be an impressive result indeed.
If we occupy land, we ought to do so effectively. At worst, organic farming could result in huge amounts of land being taken unnecessarily into agricultural use.
India's e-votes
Your lead news story questions the reliability of the e-voting methods proposed for the US (16 October, p 6). Here in India, electronic voting machines were used with great success in the last general election. The major advantage was that results came out fast. This is extremely important in a large and physically varied country such as ours. Another major problem, particularly in rural areas, has been booth-capturing. This hurdle has been done away with, thanks to these machines.
I find it quite strange that in a place like the US, where anything and everything is computerised, people are so wary of e-voting.
New ape, or not?
In your article there is a photo of a dead chimpanzee held up in a sitting position by two African men, credited to me. It has been pointed out to me that some readers could assume that this chimpanzee was killed by me or by some other person mentioned in the article.
This is not the case. The chimpanzee was killed (near Bondo) a year or more before our visit to the area, by a poacher who, with misplaced pride in his action, had his photo taken with it. None of the researchers associated with the chimpanzee population of Bili and Bondo would ever be persuaded to kill or harm a chimpanzee.