Pi-day baby
Being a pi-day baby (born on 14 March like Albert E), I was wondering who the ultimate pi-person was. As any of the numerous pi sites I found will point out, the ultimate pi moment was 31/4/1592 at some riduculous number of hours/minutes/seconds/fractions of seconds past midnight, based on the value for pi. However, no one can seem to agree on whether this is UMT, GMT, local, am or pm. Nonetheless, I couldn’t find out who was born then, and none of the sites I visited seemed to even wonder who.
Can readers from New 杏吧原创 help?
Having recently covered this topic with my year 8 pupils, I can tell you that if anyone was born at this time, they were born prior to the invention of the microscope, and so probably knew that their blood circulated rather than swished through their body and that the heart pumped it, but didn’t know about capillaries or red (or white) blood cells. I hope this helps.
Redundancy watch
I was amused to read of RAS (Redundant Acronym Syndrome) Syndrome in the 26 February Feedback. I’ve been collecting redundancies, acronymic and otherwise, since sometime late in the last millennium. My “Redun-watch” website, , has 437 examples of redundancy collected.
It also has subsections of collected mixed metaphors, common mispronounciations, and malapropisms. Some recent Reduns are: BTK killer (bind, torture and kill killer), first-time rookie, and the classic “I was thinking to myself…”
Old favourites include Rio Grande River, emergency EPIRB rescue beacon (emergency Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon rescue beacon), and the famed Torpenhaugh Hill. Apparently Tor is Scandinavian (Viking) for hill, pen Cornish or Celtic for hill, haugh Saxon for hill. So this place name translates to “Hillhillhill Hill”.
Wages of sin
You quote Daleep Mukarji of Christian Aid as saying, “We were disappointed that Pope John Paul II did not realise the Roman Catholic policy on condoms actually contributed to many deaths in the fight to control HIV/AIDS” (9 April, p 11).
Of course the pope and the Catholic church knew that deaths would result from their policies. According to the Bible, the “wages of sin are death”, and many right-wing Christians think that to permit the use of condoms would be to encourage sex outside marriage, or sex inside marriage that is not for its proper purpose of procreation. The logic follows that those who sin will die and, while this is perhaps not entirely desirable, some probably do not view it as an entirely bad thing either, as it serves as a warning to others of what will happen if they “sin”.
The human moment
I agree with almost all that A. C. Grayling has to say on choice and reproductive technologies (9 April, p 17). However, I can’t help thinking that the point at which “a fetus becomes independently viable” is even more arbitrary than “the moment a zygote is formed” to decide when an object has become human.
At least “the moment a zygote is formed” can be defined reasonably easily. The point at which “a fetus becomes independently viable” is wide open to interpretation. On the one hand, modern technology can allow fetuses born up to 20 weeks prematurely to survive. On the other, one could hardly expect even a baby carried to full term to be independent.
The vital reaper
It is ironic that in the same issue (9 April) you have two articles on death: one describing it as an important evolutionary strategy (p 32), the other on attempts to abolish it (p 38).
Death is vital to any organism, species or culture. It removes the obsolete and allows the living to move on, unencumbered by previous generations. Those who seek a much longer lifespan have clearly not thought through the effects this would have on society.
Many countries have controls on reproductive technologies. It is now time to create controls on technologies for evading death, for they would wreak far more havoc in the world than a few designer babies.
From Mary Midgley
When our immortalist friends have solved the small problem of abolishing death, what are they proposing to do about the other little difficulty 鈥� overpopulation?
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK
Stay-at-home footprint
In the study assessing the environmental footprint of sporting events there is no mention of the energy that these people would have consumed if they had stayed at home (16 April, p 11). Generally, it is more efficient to cater for people when they are collected together than when they each use their own electricity for lighting, heating, boiling the kettle and so on. If we add up just the electricity and gas for the time these people are away from home we may find that they have consumed less energy.
The energy they would have used if they had not gone to the match should be subtracted from the amount consumed due to the sporting event. Many people would have used their cars to visit friends, to go shopping, or for some other trivial purpose. Travelling to the match by bus may well use less fuel than these alternative activities.
Andrea Collins and Ken Peattie of Cardiff University write:
鈥� The point that studies should consider the supporters’ impact if they had stayed at home is valid and one that we have considered. We estimate that if the 73,000 supporters had stayed at home, their ecological footprint for travel and food consumption would have been 376 hectares. Add to this the additional 39 million kilometres travelled and the large amount of highly processed fast foods eaten by supporters 鈥� 38,000 pasties, 13,000 beef burgers, as well as 370,000 pints of beer or lager 鈥� and it is not surprising that the FA Cup final generated an additional footprint of 2675 hectares. The environmental impacts of major events do add up.
Missing patents
Paul Marks may have unnecessarily alarmed your readers about the amount and quality of patent information available in electronic databases (2 April, p 26). Perhaps I could offer some reassurance.
The research you quote, published in the journal World Patent Information, suggests that some 322,000 UK patent documents are “missing”. In fact, more than 305,000 of these alleged missing documents were never published. The confusion arises from the numbering system used prior to 1915. As for the remainder, we are aware of a few small gaps and are now plugging them. The good news is that more than 2 million UK patent documents published since 1900 are now publicly available online.
The electronic search tools now available to patent office examiners are far wider in their coverage than the limited paper collections that preceded them. In fact, the UK Patent Office, in common with many others in Europe, uses the European Patent Office’s query system (EPOQUE) to search a full-text database of more than 15 million worldwide patent documents, including more than 2 million UK documents.
Additionally, EPOQUE provides access to more than 64 million records in databases of abstracted patents and many millions of non-patent records. This means that searches are more complete, which surely can only be a good thing.
From Chana Lajcher, Jerusalem College of Technology
We have become quite spoilt by the internet, expecting every published/printed/painted/performed work instantly for free. And anything not on the internet simply does not exist.
A patent search 10 years ago involved expensive abstracting databases and then handwritten, paper mail purchases of individual photocopies of patents from a patent depository library. A small private inventor or a student could not afford these services for every clever whim.
The body of available patents is far from complete but it is getting better every year, and is already good enough for most first-level searches.
One would hope that the various government patent offices have better facilities than a small college library but if not, one cannot blame the internet. Bad bibliographies and overwhelmed patent offices have nothing to do with the format of the materials.
Jerusalem, Israel
ET's soliton?
Two nearby articles in the 9 April issue caught my attention. The first suggested that instead of searching for extraterrestrial communication signals, we should look for large-scale artificial structures (p 11). The second article discussed the extraordinary “soliton” galaxy known as Hoag’s Object (p 15). Any science-fiction fan would be prepared to consider the possibility that each of the two articles is an answer to the other.
For the record
鈥� In our technology trends story on voice recognition (9 April, p 22) we mistakenly stated that humans can expect to recognise all but 0.05 per cent of spoken words. The figure should actually have been 0.5 per cent.
鈥� The diagram of the eye in our article on evolution’s greatest inventions (9 April, p 28) erroneously included spiders and scorpions in the list of arthropods that have compound eyes. As reader Michael Grounds pointed out, they do in fact have simple eyes.
Copper poisons bugs
It came as a small surprise to see that you had an article about Indian brass “mutkas” (9 April, p 14). Many old civilisations used bright copper vessels to store water in, as this killed bacteria, and even today I believe that NASA uses a system with copper and silver to help purify water, rather than chlorine, in its space programme.
Soundless speech
I have great doubts about the feasibility of a system that would detect speech without sound (9 April, p 21). The speech signal has not been found to be encoded in either the nervous system or the speech musculature, and signals at that level are not invariant. The perception of the speech signal is highly dependent on the acoustic characteristics that are provided by the shape and size of the vocal tract and the movements of the articulators.
DNA offer
Every case of rape I hear about fills me with anger, not just at the rapist, but at those who reject the one thing 鈥� a national database of DNA profiles 鈥� that could quickly and reliably reveal his identity, secure his rapid apprehension and prevent him from raping again (9 April, p 3 and p 12).
The risks of misuse surely pale into insignificance compared with all the horrific rape and murder cases that could be solved and 鈥� more importantly 鈥� prevented. I invite everyone to join me in offering a sample of our DNA to the government as the basis for a voluntary DNA database.
Obviously, criminals are not going to volunteer DNA samples, but the more people the police can eliminate as potential suspects the easier it will be for them to do their job and catch the culprits.
A voluntary DNA database would overcome the stigma attached to the present non-voluntary police database, which is drawn only from actual criminals and people who have been arrested.
From Sean Williams
David Lazer asks: “Would you want J. Edgar Hoover to have his hands on everyone’s DNA?” My answer is why not? What possible harm could he, or anyone, do with such information? I fail to see anything substantial behind such theatrical posturing.
The England and Wales National DNA Database is clearly working. The results speak for themselves. The sooner everyone is on the database, the better.
Adelaide, South Australia
From Mark Griffith
This was a good piece about the risks to civil liberties posed by DNA databases, but an important danger was missing. DNA databases create a huge resource for criminals to plant seemingly unambiguous evidence at a crime scene that will incriminate someone else.
Budapest, Hungary
Salty aquifers
The salinisation of coastal city aquifers, and indeed of many inland ones too, is already well under way (16 April, p 9). But a minimal rise in sea levels will have less effect than over-abstraction in upstream drainage basins to meet human demands.
For a coastal aquifer to remain non-saline, the hydrostatic pressure from freshwater absorption, or recharge, must be high enough to prevent the incursion of seawater. After all, many aquifers do not stop at the coastline but extend out under the sea. If recharge is inadequate, then the freshwater hydrostatic pressure falls and seawater can enter.
That is happening in some places even now. In many flood plains, the supply of water to coastal aquifers is being depleted by over-abstraction upstream, especially for irrigated agriculture. This water evaporates and leaves behind some salt, which builds up on the irrigated fields. When this salt is eventually all washed out at once, during storms for example, it is transported downstream. So recharge downstream is from slightly saline water, exacerbating the problem of saline incursion promoted by the falling water tables.
Many of these aquifers will be irreparably contaminated by salt long before the delicate natural hydrostatic balance between fresh and saltwater recharge is affected by any climate-change-induced sea rises.
Glacial meltdown
A look at the website of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) shows that its figures do not support David Bellamy’s claim that glaciers are expanding (16 April, p 28). The service itself talks about a “spectacular loss in length, area and volume of mountain glaciers in the 20th century” and says that “the recent shrinking of glaciers for the first time now coincides with man-induced climate forcing” (see ).
The latest WGMS figures for 2002/2003, shown at , indicate even greater losses for that year and do not support Bellamy’s claim that the glaciers in Norway are “growing at a record pace”. A separate site at gives no support for the view that New Zealand’s glaciers show any long-term growth.
The NASA-supported GLIMS (Global Land Ice Measurements from Space) project seems justified in claiming that “most of the world’s glaciers are stagnant or in hasty retreat”.
I read Bellamy’s letter with amazement. He suggests that glaciers are not shrinking overall. Is this in order to deny that global warming is occurring? On the other hand he does seem to concede that there has been measurable warming of 0.6掳C. What is the main point of his letter apart from rubbishing the “Kyotoists”?
I checked some of the facts he quotes and I believe he is being more selective than he accuses the Kyotoists of being. He quotes the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich. Figures published by the WGMS, and the National Snow and Ice Data Centre to which it refers, actually show considerable and continuing overall reduction in glacial mass of the monitored glaciers since 1980. Map and pictorial evidence stretches much further back.
Individual glaciers do show increases in particular years, but the increases are generally much smaller and a lot fewer than the decreases in any one year and are not sustained. I suppose if you count them all up a majority of glaciers may have grown for one or two years at some point over the decades. But the overall bulk of glacier decreases almost every year.
Greenland may be cooling locally (because of the Gulf Stream slowing), but the ice sheet is continuing to thin and is melting faster than ever over recent decades. West Norwegian glaciers did indeed grow during the 1980s and 1990s following unusually heavy snowfalls. However, there has been a large retreat overall during the past century and they have been retreating rapidly over the last several years.
I found no overall estimate of the thickness of the east Antarctic ice sheet. Comments suggested that some parts may be thickening while others are not. The west Antarctic ice sheet is definitely and rapidly retreating and breaking up and has been for decades, according to the published pictures and maps.
Most of the Sierra Nevada glaciers are reported to be retreating rapidly and have been over the last century. The only exceptions are the Mount Shasta glaciers. However, Shasta is a comparatively isolated peak which tends to collect any precipitation going, and warmer may mean wetter. The Mount Rainier glacier is actually much smaller than it was 100 years ago. It did temporarily advance, but it is now reported that through the 1980s and 1990s it was shrinking faster than ever. The Perito Moreno glacier is reported to be stable overall by several university geoscience researchers, both advancing and retreating in an irregular cycle. It is also noted as being the only glacier from the south Patagonian ice sheet that is not retreating. Other North and South American glaciers are almost universally described as shrinking.
Numerous other sources picture and describe retreat and shrinking of the majority of glaciers. Nearly all the Google hits for glacial advance concerned general glaciology, ice ages and the little ice age, not currently or recently growing glaciers.
It is a pity that such a respected scientist should appear so blinkered in the face of the evidence. Whatever the cause and regardless of whether we can or should do anything about it, it is a fact that glaciers are shrinking 鈥� on average.
Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria, UK