For the record
鈥� The “university” mentioned in our Upfront piece about a bioresearch lab in downtown Boston (29 January, p 5) is Boston University.
Dirty by design
Tam Dalyell’s comments on efforts to deal with the ever-increasing incidence of antibiotic-resistant MRSA infection demonstrate how the government and health authorities have failed to recognise the fundamental problem behind this increase (22 January, p 47, UK and US edition only). This is that hospitals in the UK, for all their technological advances in other areas, are still using the same inefficient cleaning methods first adopted by Florence Nightingale’s generation in the mid-19th century.
In the food-processing industry, in which I work, such methods have long since been abandoned. If you handed a worker in a modern food factory a hospital cleaner’s normal cleaning equipment 鈥� a broom, mop and bucket, for example, or a cloth and squirty-bottle 鈥� and told them to go and clean their working area, they would look at you in horror and refuse, recognising that you were asking them to deliberately go and contaminate it. They would expect to be provided with a range of alkaline and acid cleaning foams, a 100-psi pressure gun and a chlorine-dioxide-enhanced water supply to pump through it, plus a range of other more concentrated chemicals for specialised areas.
They would also expect their working area to have been constructed with such cleaning methods in mind, with awkward corners eliminated, small or otherwise portable equipment mounted on wheels, motors and electrical or data sockets fully waterproofed, cables armoured and pipes and conduits mounted clear of supporting surfaces, as well as adequate drainage in the floor, and so on.
What’s more, hospitals permit hordes of people without protective clothing to traipse about at will within this supposedly clean environment, without even requiring them to wash their hands on entry and at intervals after that, or to declare any contagious diseases and viruses that they know they are carrying. In a food factory, anyone not wearing protective clothing is segregated from the clean areas in a separate “dirty” environment of ordinary offices, corridors and stairways. No one is allowed to enter the factory carrying a contagious disease or virus.
We can design MRSA out of all the new hospitals we build in the next few years, simply by changing our standard hospital design, and embracing efficient cleaning technologies already long in use in other industries.
Radio menace
Barry Fox’s report of the plans to send broadband net services along power lines greatly understates the damage this inappropriate development will do (15 January, p 26).
It will not be confined to emergency or amateur radio. The Radio Regulations of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) make no less than 270 frequency allocations, many shared, in the 1.6 to 30-megahertz short-wave band to 21 different radio services. Of these 270, 24 are to the broadcasting service and 23 are allocated to either the amateur or amateur-satellite services. The bulk of allocations go to the various land, maritime and aeronautical mobile services. These are essential to the safe navigation of both civil and military aircraft and ships.
It will be a major disaster if these services can no longer operate because of “net” radiation from power lines. If over-the-grid internet becomes common, the radiation will be impossible to avoid because short-wave propagates so well by bouncing between the Earth and the ionosphere, so it will raise the background noise level in these bands throughout the world. And of course, the radiated noise won’t stop abruptly at precisely 30.0 megahertz. It will continue to be a menace up to many tens of megahertz higher.
The Corridor Systems proposal to use surface-wave transmission in the 0.8 to 10-gigahertz band would be even more calamitous. Such waves don’t, as reported, “stay inside the cable”. On the contrary, they travel outside the cable and some of their energy is certainly radiated, and severely so at every kink in the line. So if such waves are sent along power lines every joint and insulator will radiate as an antenna.
Sensation seeking
The idea that sensations are “things we do”, which Helen Phillips attributes to Kevin O’Regan (29 January, p 43), was at the heart of a theory I proposed in a book, A History of the Mind, in 1992, and wrote up subsequently for New 杏吧原创. “Sensations are not so much things we observe as things we do,” I wrote. “They are our own active response to stimulation occurring at the body surface” (New 杏吧原创, 8 January 1994, p 23).
I went on to argue then, just as O’Regan does now, that such an “action-theory” of sensations is uniquely able to account for why “seeing something feels different from touching it”. The explanation lies with what I called the “adverbial style” of the responses associated with different sense organs. Drawing on a musical analogy, I suggested that each type of sense organ has, as it were, to be played like a musical instrument in its own way: “fingered, blown, bowed, plucked, etc…so that the tactile modality might correspond to the woodwind style, the visual modality to the strings style, and so on” (A History of the Mind, p 165).
Eleven years on, with these earlier ideas apparently lost from view, perhaps I can quote the last lines of my New 杏吧原创 article: “This theory of what sensations are and where they came from can explain much of what has seemed most puzzling about the nature of conscious experience. Yet even if the model works as well as I believe, is it likely to be accepted as a solution to the mystery? Probably not. Chasing the rainbow of consciousness is a sport that someone somewhere will always find new reasons for continuing.”
Downside of fertility
Your article on early Europeans discusses a mutation that leads to increased fertility and asks “why doesn’t everybody have this?” (22 January, p 9). You conclude that the mutation might have been re-introduced into the modern human population only 50,000 years ago through “cross-breeding with other species”.
Increased fertility and having more offspring can lower the actual survival rate of your genes. The offspring may all die due to overstretched resources, or may be stunted in such a way as to make them undesirable mates in the next generation. Humans have evolved, like all organisms, to walk a line between maximising the number of offspring and maximising the fitness of those offspring. To find that a gene that disturbs that delicate equilibrium has not been selected for is completely unsurprising, just as it is unsurprising that we do not generally bear litters of babies, having evolved instead to (usually) maximise the fitness of one infant at a time.
So in all likelihood, the mutation discussed is usually slightly harmful and only occasionally beneficial, and thus has been preserved at a low rate in the population. Perhaps for some reason it is more often beneficial in the European climate, and so occurs more often there. This is no more mysterious than Europeans having lighter skin than Africans, and certainly I see no justification for theories about cross-species breeding.
Could I be there?
Stu Witner asks “where do we stop?” when it comes to marking video or pictures as simulated rather than real (29 January, p 27). I agree that things like Hubble images can be subject to a graded spectrum of manipulations, such as false colour, and that there is no obvious place to draw a line. But for every Hubble image, no matter how radically processed, there is a corresponding real event or circumstance “out there”, without which that image could not have been created. The image is a record of something that really happened. This is qualitatively different from a simulated image, which although it might draw broadly from a general class of real events, doesn’t depend upon any particular real event, apart from the execution of a computer program.
On this basis, I suggest a criterion: given suitable transport, life-support and sensory apparatus, could I have witnessed this scene with my own eyes? If not, I want to be told.
Rocks on ice
Donald Ingham’s idea of preserving glacier ice with an insulating layer of rock debris would encounter problems (15 January, p 29).
A very thin layer of rock debris material would actually increase the rate of melting by absorbing solar radiation and heating the ice below. Any layer has to be sufficiently thick to provide insulation. How thick depends upon the local climate. In the European Alps it would need to be perhaps a metre deep to cut the melting rate to a small percentage of the value for uncovered ice. Clearly, this is a considerable quantity of material.
Even after generating this blanket it is not quite so simple as just leaving it on the surface, as the ice mass will move. The thicker and steeper the glacier the faster it flows. Hence the debris cover would be moved downhill on the glacier conveyor belt, and would have to be constantly renewed. Natural rock glaciers achieve this because the ice mass covered by the insulating rock rubble is thin (perhaps a few tens of metres) so they generally move less than a metre a year, allowing the debris cover to be replaced at the top by erosion from surrounding slopes. Where glaciers move more rapidly then debris is moved down glacier before it can build up, and we see dirty glacier snouts with moraines where the snout retreats.
Today, rock glaciers in the Alps and Iceland are revealing buried ice as ambient temperatures rise and even slow glacier flow stretches and thins the debris cover. Ice is exposed under this thinning cover and melting increases. Hence, not only would it be difficult to create the insulating blanket, but it could only preserve a limited volume of ice and for a relatively short time. To cut the melting to zero requires adding even more debris to create a perfect blanket, or keeping the ambient temperature as low as possible. Yet even at high altitudes and latitudes there is some summer melting.
In brief, it would not work.
Fatties are green
About 20 per cent of the world’s population is grossly overweight. Reducing this excess adipose tissue would mean adding roughly 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Fatties are green. Measures should be taken to encourage these public benefactors.
Boy with a handbag
The second picture in your article on Americans and firearms supposedly shows two adults and two boys, the elder of whom is sighting along a rifle (25 December 2004, p 4). This leads Martin Chance to a number of caustic observations about parental responsibility and the general slapdash manner in which those evil Americans observe the rules of firearms safety (22 January, p 26).
A closer observation of the picture will reveal that the boy who is holding the rifle has long, varnished fingernails and a handbag hanging from a strap over his shoulder. Add to this the mascaraed eyelashes and the crop top and you realise that in fact this is no boy 鈥� it’s probably the “other” child’s mother, shopping for a cannon with which to protect her offspring from rabid firearms abolitionists.
Railway bikes
Karl Drais’s name lives on, at least in French (29 January, p 48). Here the platelayers’ trolleys which used to be used on railways are always known as “draisines”. They were, it seems, yet another product of his inventive mind. The wheel has turned full circle, in that it is now possible to hire rail “cycles” on some disused French railway lines and enjoy a ride through the countryside on a draisine.