Super-spy
It is strange that Michael Erard awards hyperpolyglot Giuseppe Mezzofanti the rank of cardinal, as is his due, but downplays the status of Vernon Walters by twice calling him an “intelligence officer” (8 January, p 42). By the same token, the pope could be called “a priest”.
Walters was in fact deputy director of the CIA from 1972 to 1976, and later ambassador to West Germany. He travelled to over 100 nations for Ronald Reagan as a roving ambassador. As an internet wit has it, “Close to a dozen governments were still intact when Walters departed the various countries.” Walters is best remembered for knowing how to say “coup d’etat” in ever-so-many languages.
Opportunity knocked
Your article on the miraculous disappearance of dust from the Mars rovers’ solar panels (25 December 2004, p 7) misses the obvious explanation. “Squeegee kids” appeared spontaneously in many North American cities around five years ago. These young citizens rushed up while you were stopped at traffic lights, smeared dirty water over the windscreen of your car and sullenly demanded financial reward.
Fortunately for western civilisation, their activities are now restricted by the Safe Streets Act in Ontario, and the equivalent in many other areas. Obviously this enlightened legal approach has not yet reached Mars, which is why “these exciting and unexplained cleaning events have kept Opportunity in really great shape”.
Ice cap collapse
Your article on the possible meltdown of the world’s ice sheets omitted two effects of rapid melting and collapse (25 December 2004, p 25). One is that surface melting exposes dirt and dust and makes ice and snow more grainy. This can greatly reduce their ability to reflect light, which would increase warming and lead to further melting.
Also, changing sea levels and earthquake tremors create stresses which promote ice shelf collapse. So we are threatened by an even scarier and probably quicker scenario than the article describes.
Gyros and pendulums
Peter Grant raises the question of whether gyroscopic navigation systems would register the reported anomalous effects observed in pendulums during a solar eclipse (25 December 2004, p 30). This is currently under study. It depends on what kind of interaction, if any, causes the deviations. If it is a tilt or horizontal force component, it is unlikely that this will be detected on board an aeroplane. If it is a rotational force, it might be detectable in principle.
Any disturbances would be small, though. You need a laboratory in a quiet site to perform reliable measurements.
Lice upon lice
Progress reports on new cures for head lice are encouraging, but treatment is only one aspect of this long-standing public-health issue (25 December 2004, p 64). Although most parents treat their children as soon as lice become noticeable, cases that consist of 10 or fewer lice can often be asymptomatic and go unnoticed. Reinfestation in treated children may then occur through contact with these undiagnosed cases.
Paddy Donaldson, medical officer of health for Teesside, UK, demonstrated in the 1970s that coordinated detection by thorough inspection of everyone at risk dramatically reduces the prevalence of head lice. Failure to apply the principles he established has led to the piecemeal use of three groups of insecticide, and lice have consequently become resistant to them.
From Gerald Coles, University of Bristol
The trial of coconut derived emulsion (CDE) referred to in your article on head lice failed to show fully the efficacy of the product. For practical reasons, only two treatments were applied to wet hair during the trial, and some of the children in the families concerned remained untreated. Where three treatments are applied to the dry hair of every member of a family within two weeks, the results are outstanding.
CDE does have certain limitations. It is not persistent and has no obvious ovicidal effect, so rapid reinfestation is possible, making correct use important. Nevertheless, I believe CDE applied on a family or community basis has the potential to eradicate lice with a safe natural product.
Langford, Bristol, UK
Science in tongues
Do you have to speak English to do worthwhile science? Or is it merely arrogance, ignorance and/or laziness on the part of English speakers that means results published in other languages are ignored by them?
Govert Schilling, in his article on Maurice Allais’s studies of the behaviour of pendulums during eclipses, reports Thomas Goodey as saying Allais’s big mistake was that he published his results almost exclusively in French (25 December 2004, p 30). French is not a minor language, and it should be possible for English-speaking people to read and understand languages other than their mother tongue. What matters is not which language a paper is in, but what it says.
Dangerous Darwin
I was disappointed to learn that Mary Midgley attributes much of Christian fundamentalists’ fear and hatred of evolution to Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism, which he promulgated in the US in the late 19th century (25 December 2004, p 29).
It is impossible for me to believe that the anti-evolutionist sentiments expressed by today’s Christian fundamentalists have anything to do with a lingering distaste for social Darwinism. In fact fundamentalists are unlikely to even know the meaning of that term, and most wouldn’t understand if you explained it to them. Instead, they fear what Daniel Dennett calls “Darwin’s dangerous idea”, which is that evolution 鈥� properly understood 鈥� is completely incompatible with any religion that is predicated on the primacy of humans and on a God who even cares that we exist.
From Marc Pengryffyn
The dichotomy Midgley draws between the beliefs of the sects promoting creationism and simple-minded social Darwinism is false, or at least incomplete. Most of these sects contain a strong streak of Calvinism, wherein sect members are “saved” or “elect” and everyone else is damned, a similar idea to the “survival of the fittest” principle. The philosophical difference is purely cosmetic 鈥� it is just a matter of who does the selecting.
Understanding the fundamentalist campaign against evolution isn’t complex. Just read their internal literature 鈥� the stuff they write for themselves. It’s not social Darwinism they rail at but secularism. They cannot tolerate the separation of church and state, or the idea that humans can decide for themselves how they should live. They target evolution as the founding myth of our secular civilisation. Reduce the founding myth, they believe, and the civilisation comes tumbling down.
The creationists, by whatever name, are very well funded and highly organised, with strong political lobbies and effective media campaigns. The scientific community needs to forge alliances with religious liberals and moderates in our mutual efforts to expose the lies, both religious and scientific, of the fundamentalist minority.
Evatt, ACT, Australia
From Paul Mealing
The Family First party recently gained parliamentary representation in Australia, while publicly distancing itself from the Assembly of God religion which had spawned it. After election the party announced its support for changing the school curriculum to include creationism. To the horror of many, including moderate church leaders, some parliamentarians from the larger parties saw this as a politically correct idea and gave it tacit support.
The best response to this was in The Age newspaper, where letters to the editor suggested that the Genesis story should be taught alongside all the other creationist myths, including Hindu and Aboriginal dreamtime stories.I think that would solve the problem of including creationism in school curricula, because it would be inclusive of other religious belief systems and would be mind-broadening to boot.
Ivanhoe, Victoria, Australia
Never the Twain…
Feedback quotes “Twain” as being an acronym for “thing without an interesting name” (18 December 2004). It is my understanding, however, that Twain is not an acronym.
I have been involved in the document-imaging business for many years and followed with interest the development of Twain in the 1990s. When customers ask where the name comes from, my reply is based on the following extract from the entry “What is TWAIN an acronym for?” in the FAQ section of the TWAIN Working Group website, .
It reads: “The word TWAIN is from Kipling’s ‘The Ballad of East and West’, ‘…and never the twain shall meet…’, reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry ‘Technology Without An Interesting Name’ continues to haunt the standard.”
In the line of fire
The picture says it all! The second photo illustrating your article on use of firearms in the US is testament to some obvious truths that don’t require rigorous scientific analysis, just common sense (25 December 2004, p 4).
The picture shows four people in a gun shop: a boy sighting a rifle; a man who is probably his father, looking on unconcerned; the salesman, who appears to be in the boy’s line of fire; and a younger boy staring intently at the barrel, which is almost pointing at his head at point-blank range.
Neither of the adults seems in any way troubled by this introduction to the rifle. Instead of laying down non-negotiable ground rules on safety, both adults seem happy to allow a young boy to try out a rifle in an incredibly dangerous way. Surely an experienced firearms salesman should be giving better advice than this.
While I agree with Philip Cohen’s argument that proper science needs to be brought into the US gun debate, nothing is going to redress sheer unadulterated stupidity until gun licences in the US are based on demonstrated handling and safety proficiency.
From Geoff Smith, Firearms safety training coordinator, Regency Institute of Technical and Further Education
In Australia firearms may be owned for a variety of legitimate reasons, including pest control and recreational shooting. Firm but reasonable controls have been in place for 11 years in South Australia, and over this time the misuse of legally owned firearms has declined dramatically.
Between 1978 and 1993, shooting accidents were responsible for an average of 2.2 deaths a year in a population of about 1.5 million. The controls introduced in 1993 made it compulsory for all new gun owners to complete a course of theoretical and practical training. It became a condition of the shooter’s licence to store firearms and ammunition under lock and key, out of reach of any unlicensed persons. Firearms could only be purchased by people holding a licence and an approved permit to acquire one, and then only after a cooling-off period of 28 days. This ensured that the legal firearms trade was no longer subject to impulse purchases and helped authorities keep tabs on legal firearms at least.
The outcome of this has been extremely gratifying. There has not been a single fatal accidental shooting in South Australia since the law changed. In this period more than 15,000 new licences have been issued. This example demonstrates that proper training and adequate security can reduce the toll of death and injury.
Regency Park, South Australia