Letters archive

Netropolitan is dismayed at the lack of US government funding for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (This Week, 17 October, p 19) . However, I would suggest that the commercial implications of a successful SETI have been overlooked. Should the SETI League be successful with no government funding, then the knowledge of the contact frequency …

Referring to the war over Java (This Week, 14 November, p 17) , Kurt Kleiner writes: "Java promises to allow programmers to write a program only once, rather than having to write separate versions for Windows, Macintosh, Unix and other operating systems such as Linux." This is misleading, because Linux, properly called GNU/Linux, is a …

Your Last Word on how tyres generate noise by contact with the road (31 October) reminded me of an idea that I had several years ago. By cutting parallel grooves in the road surface at intervals proportional to audio frequencies, the road would "talk" to the vehicle through its tyres. Pitch would vary with speed, …

Justin Mullins is excited by the prospect of creating a short film, animations and soundtracks as easily as sending an e-mail (Review, 7 November, p 61) . He could have been doing all that two years ago in the comfort of his own home if he had bought a Macintosh Creative Studio. No, I'm not …

Is not the problem with the Millennium Watch from the Science Museum catalogue (Feedback, 31 October) not that it might break down out of guarantee before the millennium, but rather that it will never actually tell you when the millennium has arrived? In the first place, no wristwatch I know of keeps time accurately enough …

I recently bought a copy of the new book by Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma, containing a layman's outline of the recent proof of Fermat's last theorem. If you recall Fermat's note, his "truly marvellous proof" unfortunately couldn't fit in the margin. Something similar occurred with this book. As I moved through the book, eagerly assimilating …

May I suggest an entirely contrary view to that of Ella Clark (Letters, 31 October, p 62) ? If everyone could choose the sex of their baby and if most people in the world chose boys, two entirely beneficial results should follow. First, this is the most effective and humane way of reducing population, or …

Dinah Ashman seems to imply that the ordinary Chinese accept the practice of eugenics, striving to have the most perfect baby they can because it contributes to the common good (Letters, 14 November, p 58) . However, because perfection is seen to imply male, the preponderance of baby boys has led to a situation where …

I am surprised that Dinah Ashman appears to believe that prenatal screening in China would result in a society where "so many" will be "perfect". I understand that 80 per cent of impairments occur after birth (and not all other impairments can be screened for in any case).

The surprise expressed by David Walland over high levels of tritium in fish in the Severn Estuary (Letters, 14 November, p 58) is misplaced. It is rooted in the misguided beliefs that allow nuclear and other industries to routinely discharge massive quantities of tritium into the natural environment. The reasoning runs like this. Tritium (T) …

Tritium monitoring programmes around British nuclear plants and Cardiff's Nycomed Amersham works have been running for nearly a decade. Seaweeds containing up to 20 000 becquerels per kilogram and flatfish with even higher levels have been regularly measured near Cardiff since the early 1990s. But only when Friends of the Earth Cymru published sample numbers …

In your editorial on the medical use of cannabis (14 November, p 3) you wrote "Doctors in Britain have been allowed to prescribe heroin for people in chronic pain, yet there is no evidence that this heroin ends up on the black market." "Have been" may be the nub of the statement. Back in the …

It's good to see soil, the Cinderella of Earth systems, getting the recognition it deserves (Inside Science 115, 14 November) , especially following Tam Dalyell's recent comments on the necessity of legislating to protect it (Thistle Diary, 24 October, p 54) . But the penultimate paragraph of the Inside Science article propagates a myth. Soil …

The phenomenon of the tendency for humans to operate on a 25-hour cycle while living in a cave should not be a mystery to any electronics engineer, being simply an example of a biological phase-locked loop (PLL) with its input gone missing. A PLL has a number of useful functions in analogue electronics, such as …

As Susan Taylor pointed out (Letters, 28 November, p 58) , names like "aqua" for water come from European Union labelling regulations. You can find out a little more from the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association website at http://www.ctfa.org/ . So why does a botanist know about this? I was asked once to proofread the …

Feedback (21 November) may have learnt elementary genetics not wisely but too well. The advertisement for The Economist is referring to phenotype, not genotype. "Blue eyes from mother" means one blue-eye gene from the mother, who is apparently also blue-eyed, and one blue-eye gene from the father, whom we must presume to be brown-eyed (or …