by Adrian Berry
Belay The Antarctic Tourist!
When A Chinese ship arrived in Antarctica, its crew went ashore and began playing football -using a live penguin as the ball. ‘It’s the sort of behaviour one expects from uneducated people,’ said a British scientist, ‘and it illustrates the problems that are going to arise with growing numbers of Antarctic tourists.’
With 7,000 tourists now visiting Antarctica each summer season (September-December), most of them in large cruise liners at a minimum cost of about £3,700 per head, tour operators face increasing hostility from environmentalists, who fear the eventual ruin of the continent.
At a meeting in Madrid of the 26 Antarctic Treaty nations (where America infuriated environmentalists by refusing to accept an indefinite mining ban), plans were postponed to require all tourist ships to obtain ‘environmental impact certificates’ before they set out, and to prohibit any further construction of Antarctic airstrips.
‘The larger tourist ships are not even ice-strengthened,’ said , of the Washington-based Environmental Defence Fund. ‘We don’t want another accident like the oil spill in 1989 from the Argentine supply ship Bahaia Paraiso which was carrying 81 passengers, and we still don’t have regulations to prevent similar catastrophes.’
Scientists take a more relaxed line, tending to welcome tourists so long as they do not arrive unexpectedly, interrupting scientific experiments. There is growing ill-feeling between scientists and diplomats on the one side, and environmentalists on the other. The latter believe the former are blocking their plans to ban commercial mining. One of them called the 3,000 Antarctic scientists ‘hired henchmen based on exploitation’, while to a scientist the environmentalists were ‘elitists kicking up a fuss as a pretext to raise funds’.
‘On the whole the tourists behave very well,’ said of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, who, in 1995 travelled on the cruise ship Society Explorer with a dual role: ostensibly he was a lecturer, but he was also there to observe how the tourists behaved when ashore.
‘Their worst habit is interfering with the animals. Photographers are particularly prone to this. They are apt to break into colonies of sleeping seals or brooding penguins. The frightened penguins then abandon their eggs, which are never hatched.’
But tourists - usually called ‘expedition members’ and their tours called ‘projects’ - were praised by Stonehouse for doing more to keep Antarctica clean than groups like Greenpeace have ever done.
‘In the Sixties, when they first started coming to the large American base at McMurdo Sound, they found piles of refuse which the scientists had dumped there. Saying: I didn’t travel thousands of miles to see this rubbish, they returned to and lobbied their Senators and Congressmen to impose strict clean-up regulations.’
Scientists are especially bitter at the environmentalist campaign against airstrips, which enable people to reach Antarctica in about six hours from Australia, New Zealand, Chile or the Falklands, instead of going by sea, which can take days. ‘Airstrips can save lives in a medical emergency,’ said Stonehouse, recalling Greenpeace efforts to stop construction of an airstrip at the French Dumont d’Urville base by erecting huts in the path of the bulldozers; and the verbal campaign against the airstrip at the British base at Rothera, for which the British Antarctic Survey has been accused of ‘paving the way for destruction’ by allowing in mineral prospectors.
But the threat of destructive mineral prospecting and talk of ‘ecological fragility’ is a myth, said Richard Laws, former director of the Survey. The continent is just too vast to be imperilled by human activities, he argues.
‘With an area of 14 million square kilometres, a tenth of the land surface of the Earth, there will not be any strong pressures for commercial mineral-related activities there for a long time.’ What he called ‘vociferous, well-financed environmentalist groups’ were to be blamed for their misinformation.
‘The polluting footprint of a scientific station is on average less than a square mile. On a map these stations, instead of being a number of large black dots, would be microscopic. There are about 50 manned scientific stations and therefore some 100 square kilometres may be ‘significantly’ affected, while 99.999 per cent remains virtually unaffected by human activity.
‘One idea, much touted by environmentalists, is to turn Antarctica into a world park . This is unacceptable. It would mean not only severe restrictions on science and tourism, but also gigantic expenditure on policing caused by an expensive, inefficient bureaucracy.’
Antarctica was described by Captain Cook in 1774 as ‘lands doomed by nature to perpetual frigidness, never to feel the warmth of the Sun’s rays, whose horrible and savage aspect I have not words to describe.’ Today the ice-cap continues to attract ‘expedition members’ who find it distinctly more beautiful and spectacular than he did.
Fatal Doses
The book, Dead not Buried, about Herbert Armstrong, the solicitor hanged in 1922 for murdering his wife with arsenic, is a reminder that poison has through the ages been the classic means of murder.*
*Dead not Buried, by (1995)
‘Deadly substances used to be easy to obtain, and the resulting deaths could be made to look natural or accidental,’ said , formerly of the Laboratory of the Government Chemist.
One infamous poisoner who took full advantage of this maxim was , vice president of the Academy of Sciences of the former Soviet Union, who died in 1988 after a ‘long and grave illness’ that might well have been caused by his researches.
Ovchinnikov, suspected of helping to supply some of ’s nerve gas, specialized in creating micro-bial and other poisons from the venom of snakes, scorpions, wasps, puffer fish and fungoids. During his lifetime, an emigre Soviet biologist called him ‘one of the most dangerous men on Earth’.
He planned a genetically engineered bacterial weapon that could have killed millions of people. It would be a poison without cure or antidote that would be equipped with a ‘pili’, or tentacles, enabling it to stick to the walls of the human intestine. A few days after a vial containing it had been dropped into an enemy city’s water-supply, millions would perish. Ovchinnikov was also looking for a way to immunize his own nationals against it.
Poison dates back beyond the dawn of writing to when magician-priests first began to explore the toxicity of plants. The Romans, as television viewers of I, know from the technical discussion between Livia and the poisoner , were skilled and enthusiastic in its use. Their enemy, King Mithridates of Pontus, was so frightened of being poisoned that he built himself a fabulous antidote that comprised all the known antidotes to poison mixed up into a single substance. With this in his body, he boasted that he was immune to at least 46 different poisons. But no one ever found out if this was true, since he was killed with a sword.
It is hard to believe that he would have been immune to some of the poisons created or discovered in the twentieth century. Cyanide kills quickly, but chemists have created the compound 2, 3, 7, 8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, or TCDD, the most deadly of the 75 known dioxins, which is 150,000 times more deadly than cyanide. Neither could Mithridates nor anyone else have survived if they inhaled more than a third of a millionth of a gram of the nerve gas ethyl S-2-diisoprovy laminoethylmethyl phosphonothiolate, or VX, developed at Porton Down in 1952, which Alistair MacLean is believed to have used in his novel The Satan Bug.
Biological toxins are particularly deadly. Some Indian tribes in Colombia are fond of gathering ‘poison arrow frogs’ from the rain forests. These secrete a venom so deadly that when arrows dipped in it are used in war, the contents of a single frog can kill 50 men.
‘Octopussy’, from the film of that name, is no myth. It is a beautiful, 12-centimetre-wide animal, found in Australian waters, that the Guinness Book of Records calls ‘blue-ringed and terror-ringed’. A bite from it kills in minutes - just as quickly as the Australian box jellyfish, which releases a cardiotoxic venom when touched by a swimmer.
One of the strongest nat
ural poisons is found only in Britain. It is from the yellowish-olive death cap fungus, Amanita phalloides, the world’s most poisonous fungus and responsible for 90 per cent of all fatal poisonings caused by fungi. It was used in 1534 to kill Pope , a member of the murderous clan, whose poisoning habits can be seen in the 1995 film La .
Poisoners appear to enjoy their work. Ovchinnikov, for one, was happy to discuss it. Asked whether his knowledge might be better used for curing diseases than causing them, he replied blandly: ‘Not at all. If I bring vaccines to the Central Committee, nobody will pay attention. But if I bring a virus - oh, then this will be recognized by all as a great victory.’
Firkins, Kilderkins and Hogsheads
While many believe that replacing imperial measurements with metric units can be a cultural disaster, others hold the view that an enormous boost to trade awaits us - if only we could bring ourselves to abandon old prejudices.
An eloquent plea to this effect, and a protest against the ‘medieval conservatives’ who oppose it, is given in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews by its editor . Britain and the United States, he points out, still remain obstinate in rejecting metric units to their ‘great disadvantage in global markets’.
Just over 200 years ago, he points out, we could have joined the French in establishing the metric system at a cost of a few thousand pounds in modern money. But today it would cost hundreds of millions - even though we would profit hugely in the long term by doing so.
We are indulging in the same obstinacy that for many centuries prevented us from adopting the arithmetical system of writing numbers as numerals and decimal points. This was an invention, not of Arabs as is commonly supposed, but of a brilliant Indian from the province of Gujarat who first proposed it in ad 595, and who has been called the most famous son of India after .
Without decimals, which took about a millennium to filter through to the Western world - it took that long for us to exploit the fact that we each have ten fingers – modern scientific discoveries would be extremely difficult either to make or describe.
It was not only the numbers but the symbols defining them whose introduction in the West was so long delayed. Right up until the sixteenth century, mathematicians all had their own symbols for an ‘equals’ sign, which must have made it hard for them to understand each other. At length in 1557, Robert Recorde included in a textbook on algebra this trenchant passage: ‘To avoid the tedious repetition of these words is equal to, I will set as I do often in work use a pair of parallels, thus: because no two things can be more equal.’ This became contracted in due course to the now-familiar sign: =.
And how, without decimals, could one write about things that were either extremely large or extremely small? Yet the metric system just does that, in language that is almost poetic. Without it, we would even be unable to describe some of the dimensions of the cosmos. The Sun, for example, weighs 2x10 tons, an expression that means 2 followed by 27 noughts. There is just no way to make such a statement without using metric arithmetic. Powers of 10 give us a whole range of invaluable measurements.
The movement towards metrication started in earnest in the late eighteenth century when there were so many units that it is hard to understand how trade could have been conducted. A guidebook of the time reported that in England the following units were used to measure quantities of liquid: gallon, firkin, kilderkin, rundlet, barrel, tierce, hogshead, punchion, pipe and tun. The use of these terms was almost indiscriminate: it depended on where you were buying your goods. The units themselves varied enormously. In 1752, a weight of 100 pounds in Amsterdam was found to equal 105 pounds in Antwerp, 98 in Basel, 111 in Berne, 105 in Brussels, 97 in Dublin, 143 in Florence, 109 in London, 114 in Madrid, 168 in Milan, and 81 in Stockholm. But in Venice, it nearly doubled, to 182 pounds.
When the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier did his historic experiment in 1781 showing that water was not an element but was made up of hydrogen and oxygen, he created a sensation by quantifying one of his measurements with a decimal, writing: ‘13,6 grains’. (He used a comma, rather than a full stop, or point, a tradition that continues in to this day.)
This was the crucial moment, indeed the turning point: people realized that no great advances would be made in knowledge or trade without units that all would recognize and on which there were no local variations.
Accordingly in 1790, the French Royal Academy determined that a standard metre was to equal ‘one ten-millionth part of the meridian quadrant of the Earth’. And during Napoleon’s conquests the metric system spread through Europe - perhaps because people were reluctant to disobey Napoleon.
But there is still resistance to it today. NASA operates its shuttles and is building the space station in feet per second and pounds per square inch. In Britain, the Department of Trade and Industry last considered the matter in 1991, and the Navy uses 30-millimetre, 41/2-inch guns and the nautical mile side by side.
And there is a growing cultural divide between the two systems. One scientist said: ‘When I see the headline: 80 in the shade - phew what a scorcher! I find it totally unintelligible.’
Those Juggling Fiends
They brought one Pinch, a hungry lean-faced villain,
A mere anatomy, a mountebank,
A threadbare juggler, and a fortune-teller,
A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch,
A living-dead man.
The Comedy of Errors
A soldier weighing 67 kilos hurrying to the aid of his comrades in the midst of a battle, carries three half-kilo cannon balls across a bridge that will only bear 68 kilos. How does he get the ammunition across the bridge?
The usual answer to this ancient riddle is that he juggles the balls, so that one of them is always in the air. The art -and science - of juggling is now receiving widespread attention as people increasingly use it to study brain and body co-ordination, mathematics and its application to future industrial and domestic robots.
Its fascination has become so widespread that there is even an International Jugglers’ Association and a magazine selling 3,000 copies called Jugglers’ World.
Skills are improving. The eighteenth-century juggler achieved what was then considered almost miraculous: keeping 10 balls in the air at a time. But today the record for the number of objects juggled (where each is thrown and caught at least once) is 11 balls, 12 rings or 8 clubs.
Robots are now being taught to juggle, and not surprisingly they can do so much better than humans. , of Brandeis University in the US, co-author of an article on juggling in the Scientific American writes: ‘Even if its pattern breaks down, instead of dropping the balls, the robot can recover and resume with astonishing swiftness.’
Juggling, as Lewbel points out, is difficult for the following reasons: each ball (or other object) must be thrown sufficiently high to allow the juggler time to deal with the others. The time that a ball spends in flight is proportional to the square root of the height of the throw. This means that the need for height and strength increases rapidly with the number of objects thrown.
A great hope is that a robot that has been taught to juggle will have the dexterity to perform tasks that people find tiresome. Clearing a table after a meal, for example, requires enormous delicacy and precision, far removed from the brute force of most robots, which do only such things as driving rivets into car bodies. Plates, glasses and cutlery must be removed and placed in the dishwasher without being broken. After washing, they must be removed from the machine and placed in their correct positions in cupboards. It was believed until recently that a century might elapse before robots could do such things; the new forecast is that experimental domestic robots capable of such feats may appear within a few years.
Jugglers have tended to have a bad press. Being so clever, they were generally viewed as manipulative and disreputable. Theologians were fond of accusing their opponents of ‘juggling with the scriptures’, so as to ‘draw them into carnal and fleshly purpose’. called the witches wh
o tantalized him ‘juggling fiends’, and Batman has an especially evil enemy called the Juggler.
The art of juggling goes back thousands of years. There is even a depiction of women jugglers - some riding on others’ shoulders - on the tomb of an unknown Egyptian prince carved in the second millennium bc. Even animals have been taught to juggle. In Russian circuses, a bear sometimes lies on a cradle juggling a flaming torch with its hind legs.
But the popular answer to the riddle of the soldier and the cannon balls is false. Catching a falling ball would exert a force that would break the bridge.
10 GOTO 10*
*The command in IBM Basic 10 GOTO 10 is a classic bug that creates a ‘perpetual loop’, causing the screen to freeze and leaving the user bewildered and helpless unless he can track the error down and correct it.
A computer program called ‘Literary Expert’ announces that Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities cannot be appreciated by anyone aged less than 43.
British tax revenues will fall significantly short in 1997 because the new computer software designed for self-assessment is riddled with bugs.
A cancer-therapy machine goes berserk in several American and Canadian hospitals, shooting fatal overdoses of radiation into at least six patients.
These are examples of one of a growing crisis, bugs in computer software, errors in the innumerable lines of ‘source code’ which tell a computer what to do. They are always there accidentally, because the programmer has made mistakes, and must not be confused with malicious computer ‘viruses’, which are deliberately designed to make computers inoperable.
The problem is worsening because, as an article in the American science magazine Discover points out, programs are being ever bigger - as the memory storage capacity of computers themselves becomes ever greater - and software typically consists of tens, or hundreds of thousands of lines of source code.