Key pirate - FEEDBACK

DELIGHTFUL nonsense – that was Henry Shipley’s verdict on the conspiracy concept that orchestras tune the note A to 440 hertz because of a Nazi plot (18 January). He observes that the subject could introduce a strange unit: the foot as a unit of pitch. Or not so strange: the speed of sound in air means that the note middle C is produced by an organ pipe about 2 feet (0.6 metres) long, while a 1-foot pipe produces the  C an octave above this. And in this connection, David Fletcher points to an as yet underappreciated consequence of carbon dioxide emissions: global flattening. Back in 1998, he wrote that calculations published in the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Acoustics – which we have not tracked down – dealt with the increase in density of PAUL MCDEVITT air with CO2 concentration. These revealed, he reported at the time and at bit.ly/global-flattening, that the pitch of a baroque instrument which today is A = 415 Hz would at the time of construction actually have been A = 438 Hz.

The BBC in January reported exciting news  of “finding a way to do 3D surgery on the brain” – as opposed to how many dimensions,  Dave Goodwin wants to know

AUSTRALIA’S Abbott government has, unfortunately, made it crystal clear to the rest of the world where it stands on climate change. Lindsey Slights was still shocked by comments from environment minister Greg Hunt on the cost  of rescuing passengers from the Russian research vessel the Akademik Shokalskiy, stranded  in the Antarctic in January. He described the affair as “a reminder that everyone operating in the Southern Ocean – be they whalers, protesters, climate believers or those of a different view – has to put safety ahead of everything else”. As Lindsey says: “to have the Environment Minister suggest that the climate itself may or may not actually exist is really taking it a step  too far".

  WHEN we asked whether readers knew any other examples of acrostics in science, we should have known  that it would be a mathematician who came up with something more elegant than the undergraduate physics essay featuring a Rick Astley song in the first letter of each line (8 February). Peter Johnstone sends a paper published in 1981, in which he answered the question of whether a mathematical structure introduced by Dana Scott a decade earlier, known as the Scott topology, had the property called “sobriety” – which Feedback does not pretend to understand  (doi.org/c23mkw). It was natural, then, that this short paper be titled “Scott is not always sober”; and the initial letters of the sentences spelled: “I’m not being personal Dana" Peter recalls that the publisher’s lawyers insisted that these letters  and the word “acrostic” be in bold type, afeared that Dana Scott would sue – “though he had already seen, and been heartily amused by,  the article”. The late John Isbell subsequently “completed” Peter’s paper “by giving an example of a complete lattice whose Scott topology fails to be sober”. He circulated an abstract entitled “Johnstone is not all there”, the initial letters of the sentences spelling out peccavi – Latin for “I have sinned”. Unfortunately, the editors were having none of that in the published paper RESPONDING to highly publicised and disastrous crashes involving cars proceeding in the wrong direction on high-speed highways, New York State is installing radar systems to spot such wrong-way drivers. These systems will warn drivers with illuminated signs – and by sending text alerts to their cellphones. This initiative was announced by the same state governor, Andrew Cuomo, who has pushed for laws preventing drivers from texting. CBS News reports at  bit.ly/wrong-way-text that “the new system doesn’t allow drivers to violate the no-texting laws”. Feedback is still trying to work out how this works. We dismiss the idea that people who drive  the wrong way would obey a legal requirement that they bring a passenger to read the text to them. And who would volunteer to be that passenger? FEEDBACK, Mike Green says, “appears to have completely misunderstood a simple difference between schools ‘getting better all the time’ and ‘grade inflation’ ”. We were considering UK Education Secretary Michael Gove’s explanation that all schools could be above average if they were “getting better all the time” and admitted this was technically possible, only if test scores rose continuously (1 February). “Getting better all the time”, Mike observes, “is what happens when my party is in government; ‘grade inflation’ when it’s yours.” FINALLY, Feedback harbours a suspicion that Michael Gove did not necessarily intend the logical sense of “getting better all the time”, the distinction of which from “grade inflation” we discuss above. We remind him of the words of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, which continue:  “I used to get mad at my school / The teachers who taught me weren’t cool / You’re holding me down / Turning me round / Filling me up with your rules.” None of this is, we believe, in complete accordance with stated government policy.