Letters archive

Feedback reported on the London train that divides at Ashford International sending four coaches to Ramsgate, with the other four continuing to Ramsgate (25 February). Sadly there is no beam-splitter at Ashford International station; the answer is rather more prosaic. The train does divide, with one section heading east to Ramsgate via Canterbury. The other …

• In our reproduction of the "hockey stick" temperature reconstruction in the 2001 IPCC report (18 March, p 43), an error led to the blue lines being misaligned relative to the rest of the graph. They should, of course, have been centred on the black line.

Andrew Simms reviews a book by Lester R. Brown, whose "picture of climate-change-induced chaos is terrifying and convincing. It includes the awful image of the world's poorest people competing for food with an ever-hungrier biofuels industry" (25 February, p 50). Where have we heard this before? Oh yes, it was in the 1970s, when the …

The views of Judith Rich Harris on the foundations of personality made me think of something in my own home (25 February, p 48). My partner and I own Macintosh G4 computers. No doubt when they left the assembly line they were identical – give or take perhaps 0.1 per cent. After a few months' …

Francisco Ayala is clearly right that Daniel Dennett's diagnosis of religions as parasitical memes merely obstructs serious efforts to understand these human attitudes, rather than helping them (4 March, p 48). But this diagnosis has also a disturbingly irrational and non-scientific aspect. Why do memeticists always apply their methods to doctrines that they dislike, such …

Hazel Muir speculates that the red particles responsible for the episodic discoloration of rain in the Indian state of Kerala in 2001 may be red blood cells from an as yet unidentified, but terrestrial animal (4 March, p 34). Meteorological analyses of the rainfall events make this unlikely, but there is more direct evidence. Godfrey …

Are plane manufacturers perhaps borrowing some lessons from the humble golf ball in using rough surfaces to reduce air resistance (4 March, p 32)? For over 100 years – and probably much longer – the surfaces of golf balls have been covered with dimples or a rough pattern to reduce drag.

Feedback intends to register a trademark for computer monitors that smell of dusty libraries (11 March). Are you sure you don't mean dusty archives? Libraries are not dusty places. They are dynamic, vibrant places as full of electronic resources as of books (and back copies of New Scientist , of course). And librarians or information …

Whatever happened to Synroc? Reading your report about the problems of disposing of nuclear waste (4 March, p 38), I wondered yet again what had been done with this Australian invention. ANSTO, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, is reportedly working on it, but no mention ever seems to appear in articles such as …

After a bit of internet searching, I may be able to shed a little light on "the lady who sold time" (25 February, p 52). The article stated that almost nothing is known about Ruth Belville's mother, Maria, who handed over the time-carrying business to her in 1892. Ruth's father John Henry Belville married Appolonia …

Fred Pearce's article provides an excellent service in highlighting the chronic problems around the world of excessive groundwater exploitation – but it may not be taking us much further forward in finding solutions (25 February, p 32). Rainwater harvesting cannot be regarded as a universal solution and may, in some circumstances, actually compound the problem. …