That old bore
Just to clarify the Neils Bohr remark in the review of Perfectly Reasonable Deviations on our site (Feedback, 23 July), I suspect part of the reason “some old bore called” was unique in a Google search is that it was wrong. I put the quote in from memory, but in fact Mary Lou said that Richard Feynman had been invited to dinner with “some old bore” rather than that “some old bore called”.
I am still, however, impressed that we managed a unique hit on “some old bore called”, so I’ve left the quote in the review with a correction.
Harvesting halo planets
The hypothetical halo planets present an interesting possibility for directly benefiting mankind (23 July, p 28). A Mars-sized or larger planet in the outer solar system should be able to retain an atmosphere containing helium, including the promising fusion fuel helium-3. It may be easier to mine He-3 there than from other sources, such as lunar regolith or the atmospheres of the gas giants. Reasonable travel times to the halo planets would require use of a fusion rocket with high specific impulse 鈥� but if we’re mining He-3 we presumable already have working fusion reactors.
Bananaphone pride
Following Feedback’s item about mobile phones that make toast and so forth (16 July), you might like to know that there are a fair number of people in the world who still prefer a mobile phone that is just that: a phone. Indeed, my wife is so attached to her Nokia 8110 “bananaphone” that I have several times had to search out replacement batteries for it, Nokia long since having stopped making them. And we’re obviously not alone; one company reckons that there’s enough interest from people who just want a phone and nothing else that they have a business selling just that 鈥�
Oil on troubled waters
Alexandre Chorin and colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley might do well to consult mariners, even ancient ones, before declaring that the purpose of pouring oil on rough water has never been understood (30 July, p 15). The 1937 US Naval Academy textbook Modern Seamanship by Austin M. Knight gives specific instructions on the use of oil, with illustrations. It notes that the practice was so valuable that “all United States Registered machinery propelled ships of over two hundred tons must carry from 30 to 100 gallons (amount dependent on tonnage) of oil…”
The purpose was well understood: “The particles of water in a wave move mostly in a vertical direction. As the wind increases, it sweeps the crests from the waves, building up one large wave at the expense of many others. The water is thus set in motion and the waves become destructive in force. If the adherence between the air and the water is reduced, the waves will remain in their simple form. It is found that certain substances, mostly oils, will do this, as they have lower adherence factors with air. Soap is one of the best agents for reducing this adherence; yet it is not practical as it mixes with sea water, thereby requiring too great a quantity. A second requirement, therefore, is that the substance must float on the water and not mix with it…A third requirement is that the substance must spread rapidly, which means that the oil must have a low viscosity. In general, the best substances are vegetable and animal oils. Mineral oils of low viscosity are only fair as they do not spread as rapidly as the other oils.”
The book goes on to specify that 2 gallons per hour is sufficient 鈥� any more being likely to pose safety hazards for those working around the ship. It provides a good deal of detail concerning the best methods for spreading the oil depending on the conditions and whether the vessel is lying to, engaged in rescue or derelict retrieval, etc.
An interesting final point is the use of oil for crossing a bar. Ships apparently allowed oil, carried ahead of them by a rapid current, to stabilise the water over a bar prior to crossing it.
It has long been a practice of mine to scour old book stores for technical and scientific books. I continue to be amazed at how often material turns up (particularly in aviation, engine and marine texts) that reveals how much we have forgotten as a result of lost contact with once vital activities in the past hundred years鈥攌nowledge that was actually widespread (and also well understood) a couple of generations ago. We seem to believe that we are the only generation that understands the world around us.
For the record
鈥� As several readers have pointed out, an astronomical unit is about 149.6 million kilometres, not 156 million kilometres as we said in the graphic in “Our solar system just got bigger” (6 August, p 10). And in the same graphic the sun should have been at a focus of the elliptical orbit of 2003 UB313.
The echoing green
Steven Mithen describes appreciating music as “one of the most fundamental and defining characteristics of being human” (16 July, p 46). My wife and I teach Scottish country dancing. A tame and house-trained red-collared lorikeet used to come in when it heard us selecting or editing music for class, sit on a shoulder or arm, and bounce up and down in time to the music with obvious pleasure and excitement. And in the grounds of the hall we use for dance classes there lives a large frill-necked lizard, which frequently abandons its trees or bush and comes right up to the door to sit upright looking in at the dancers and listening for hours. It is the driving reels and jigs that attract both, rather than the slow strathspeys.
Reclaim the streets
I read with interest and dismay the solutions to road traffic accidents offered by Claes Tingvall (30 July, p 44). His idea that pedestrians must be segregated from motor vehicles is exactly opposite to the approach taken in London. Here, investment in 20-mile-per-hour zones, redesign of collision hotspots and a reduction of car use through a congestion charge have reduced road deaths and serious injuries by 19 per cent between 2003 and 2004, and total casualties by 10 per cent.
Tingvall talks of making country lanes as safe as motorways with wire barriers. This doesn’t sound very friendly for non-motor-vehicle road users and is extremely expensive at 鈧�140,000 per kilometre. Perhaps we should stick to proven solutions that are considerably cheaper and easier to deploy.
From Martin Parkinson, Transport 2000
Claes Tingvall puts his faith in more technology and accepts the dogma that motor vehicles have become an essential human prosthesis. He thinks we should “design towns and cities in ways that don’t maximise contact between human and car”. This fine aspiration could easily be misinterpreted by planners as a reason to make every city look like Los Angeles in the name of safety. Separating drivers from walkers and cyclists is, in practice, usually accompanied by giving priority to the motor traffic.
There is an apparently paradoxical relationship between risk and safety: when we feel unsafe we behave more cautiously and so become safe (see, for example, the work of John Adams at University College London). For this reason some urban planners have started experimenting with deliberately mixing types of traffic, which in the right circumstances can reduce accidents and give cities back to the humans who don’t have vehicular armour.
London, UK
From Simon Birnstingl
Pedestrians, horse riders and cyclists were here before cars and theoretically under law have the greater right to use the roads 鈥� only motorists are required to have a licence to do this.
Manufacturers can install whatever safety measures they like; others will make devices to disable them if they are perceived to adversely affect a car’s performance. Cables down the middle of roads and GPS governors are extravagances when all that is needed is for society as a whole, and the courts in particular, to see driving offences for the crimes that they are.
Drink-driving is not the problem in the UK that it was 30 years ago because public attitudes have been changed. Speeding, tailgating and aggressive driving could go the same way.
Upper Beeding, West Sussex, UK
Lies, damn lies and PR
I agree with Len Fisher that creating equations for apparently trivial things such as the perfect cheese sandwich can be harmless fun that interests both the media and the public (30 July, p 16).
But there is a boundary, at which Len hinted, beyond which such media equations stray into dark territory, namely those with little or no scientific basis that exist merely to plug a company. For example, early this year the television channel UKTV Gold commissioned an “equation for the perfect sitcom” purely to promote itself, with no real science underpinning it. Such equations make a mockery of science by giving the impression that scientists will prove anything as long as you pay them enough.
Last month I was approached by the PR agency promoting a big consumer exhibition, which asked me to come up with a formula to “prove” that a given date was ideal to start your Christmas shopping: it just happened to be the opening day of their show. I explained that it would just be a few signs and numbers that look scientific, plus a pseudo-explanation of what the terms mean.
I strung the agency along to see how far they would go. They happily said “yes” to all my unscientific suggestions 鈥� until Len Fisher’s piece appeared.
An illness all along
Thank you very much for the article saying that chronic fatigue is not all in the mind (23 July, p 9). The World Health Organization classifies myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) as an organic and physical neurological illness. Unfortunately, there are still professionals out there who seem intent on the outdated notion that it is psychological.
ME is an illness that can leave people bed-bound, tube-fed, unable to hug their family because of pain and with the need to live in utter darkness as their eyes cannot stand the light. One cannot understand what it is like until one has experienced it.
I have suffered from ME for seven years, since a Mycoplasma pneumoniae infection. I am now 19. But I have been fortunate: I was left virtually housebound for only a couple of years.
We do not need psychological treatments that in the majority of cases make us worse. It is to be hoped that Jonathan Kerr’s work and your article will finally bring justice to the thousands of us in a living hell.
From John Greensmith, ME Free for All
Work by some biochemists, neurologists and endocrinologists undermines the view that no one wants to conduct physiological research into ME. But some of this work is at risk of grinding to a halt for want of funding.
The UK Medical Research Council meanwhile has strongly supported areas 鈥� cognitive behaviour therapy and graded exercise, for example 鈥� that have a poor history and may even be harmful. This contrast refutes a claim that liberal spending on psychiatric research does not deprive the search for a physiological cause.
Nevertheless, this is a more optimistic time for veteran ME sufferers who have for decades been written off as malingerers, hypochondriacs and as having a psychiatric illness, also making them the butt of cruel jokes.
Bristol, UK
Well-fed
I wonder whether there are any professors of nutritional science and physiology (6 August, p 46) not employed by McDonald’s who would agree with Harvey Anderson that McDonald’s hamburgers are “delicious” and “just absolutely wonderful”, who describe the breakfast McBagel as “wonderful, fresh”, and who counter criticisms of McDonald’s sugar-laden salad dressings with the sizzling up-to-the-minute nutritional observation that “there’s nothing wrong with a little sugar”?
Waste not, won't rot
That Sweden, Finland and Switzerland have designed deep repositories to keep nuclear waste safe for upwards of a million years is welcome news (30 July, p 18). But geological stability alone is a mirage.
Human intrusion in the nearer future is a more probable cause of a lethal outcome.
No nation has survived beyond a few centuries, no civilisation or mode of communication for anything like 10,000 years. Knowing this, the US Environmental Protection Agency tried hard 鈥� and failed utterly 鈥� to contrive warnings that would be effectual, let alone legible, for more than a few generations.
Their scenarios for technological and socio-political changes two to six centuries hence bore names such as “USA Forever”, “Mole Miner”, “Doom and Gloom” and “Free State of Chihuahua”.
All reached the same dismaying conclusion: no burial site was safe from future scavengers, predators, amnesiacs, robots, even conservationists (“Ten Thousand Years of Solitude” by Gregory Benford et al, Los Alamos National Laboratory). As of now, such risk can be truly reduced in only one way: producing no more nuclear waste.
Global warming and climate change are dire prospects. But curbing and mitigating them ought not be replaced by illusory panaceas for nuclear poisons.
From Tony Scanlon
David Lowenthal raises familiar concerns about the very long-term durability of nuclear waste repositories (9 July, p 20). I think he misses a crucial point.
Surely it is likely such sites would be mined for their valuable plutonium? By the end of this millennium, notorious isotopes of caesium and strontium, with half-lives of decades, will be reduced to a millionth or a billionth of their original levels, making reprocessing relatively easy.
Almost all the plutonium would remain, however. Perhaps in the interest of long-term non-proliferation we should design booby traps into our nuclear waste repositories.
Sydney, Australia
The trouble with faith
Karen Armstrong would have it that religion is reconcilable with science if we understand religious beliefs not as literal truth but as myth (30 July, p 42). Fine by me: as an atheist I can appreciate myths, ancient legends, Greek tragedies and so on, and agree that they enrich my life.
I am moved to tears by Bach’s St Matthew Passion and I deeply enjoy the choral evensong every Wednesday on BBC Radio 3 鈥� as a dramatic, musical and often poetic experience.
Unfortunately, this kind of experience is not enough for those who adhere to a religion. They profess to believe that there exists at least one supernatural intelligent being who knows them individually and makes specific commands, ranging from harmless but futile codes of diet or dress to killing people. For the existence of such a being there is no testable evidence whatever, so for that reason alone such a belief is irreconcilable with scientific understanding.
Danger! Invisible gorilla!
The phenomenon of unseen gorillas infiltrating a basketball court unnoticed (30 July, p 33) would appear to have implications for the safety of head-up displays, which superimpose information onto the windscreen view of a car driver or aircraft pilot.
Although these do not require drivers to move their gaze away from the view ahead, they still require them to take their attention away 鈥� perhaps endangering any cars, pedestrians or gorillas that happen to cross their path at that moment. Has this problem been studied?