Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Barely (the word is used here cautiously) had animal activist Alan Cooper
been acquitted of playing sex games with a bottle-nosed dolphin off the
coast of northeast England, than the January issue of Green magazine limped
into the office. Its back page carries a full-page advertisement for the
charity Earthwatch.

And what might be the connection? Well, since you ask, remember that
Cooper had been accused of sexually stimulating a male dolphin, to the disgust,
and so on, of members of the public. It was said in Cooper’s defence that
the dolphin, Freddie used his penis as a ‘finger of friendship’.

And now, back to the advertisement. Underneath a picture of four humans
hugging a dolphin sits the strap line: ‘I’ll never forget the first time
he kissed me . . .’ The advert tells the story of Annick, a computer analyst,
and her trip with Earthwatch to Hawaii, ‘a honeymoon paradise’: ‘It was
there that I fell in love with a dolphin . . .

‘I stayed with other Earthwatch volunteers, in rooms at the University
of Hawaii. We were all different ages, different sexes (sic) and from different
walks of life . . . but we were bound together by our love of the dolphins
and the joy of discussing our daily achievements.

‘And there were many . . .

‘Akeakamai was one of the male dolphins and I think I fell in love with
him the moment we met. Within hours I learned to speak some of his language.
He responded to my simple hand signals by leaping high out of the water.
I learned to trust him. Then one morning, when I signalled to him, he reared
out of the water and pressed his cold nose against my lips.

‘It was a moment I’ll never forget.’

As Earthwatch says, ‘If you want to experience something completely
different this year’, then get in touch.

* * *

Erratum slips in books are usually insignificant pieces of paper tucked
among the pages to say that line whatever should read ‘ . . . the Prime
Minister would be heading for his walks in Europe’ and not ‘the Prime Minister
would be beheaded for his talks in Europe’. Not so with Terra Abstracts,
which has just published a 534-page volume of abstracts of papers from a
meeting in Strasbourg of the European Union of Geosciences. Without apology,
Terra Abstracts publishes a separate 98-page volume of errata in that publication.

Transgressions and catastrophisms abound: headings and names are repeated,
sections are missed out and sequences go awry. These are no mere slips but
true faults in the best geological sense. Perhaps the abstracts of late
Cretaceous dinosaurs (around 66 million years ago) were responsible. They
were, of course, Maastrichtian . . . So it is sad to note that the corrigenda
pages are so collated that correct pages in the Abstracts cannot be substituted
for the incorrect ones. Backing up section 6 is section 11, while turn the
last page of section 13 and you are into section 20.

* * *

Post-Maastricht, the modern one, Britain’s science community may find
itself being drawn increasingly towards integration with European colleagues.
But one thing that bothers British scientists is the laxness of peer review
processes on the continent. Likewise, it seems, Britain’s counterparts abroad
acknowledge the stringency of British peer review.

One senior British civil servant recently underlined the point with
an anecdote. He said that while serving on a European scientific grants
committee, he judged one proposal from a close friend to be ‘excellent but
not outstanding’. A German committee member, noticing the verdict, asked:
‘Have you fallen out with your colleague?’

* * *

Art meets science at a trade and industry show for Soviet enterprises
in Islington, North London. The Kharkov Institute for Physics and Technology
was earning its living by handing out press releases about its services
in fields such as developing heat-resistant diffusion coatings, and making
sure of a slice of sterling by selling paintings from the same stall. A
fragment of an oil ‘by a famous painter, I don’t know the name’ fetched
£50, a lugubrious nude proved less appealing. Soviet enterprises?
Well, be careful who you call Soviet or Russian these days. When asked what
was the Russian for ‘thank you’, the angry reply was ‘I am Ukrainian, not
¸é³Ü²õ²õ¾±²¹²Ô’.

* * *

Suspicious atomic object hangs in the air inside Terminal 1 at London’s
Heathrow airport. The purpose of this large, high-tech symbol of the nuclear
age, with fluorescent tubes where you might see electrons, seems to be to
consume electricity.

And why not? It is, after all, an advertisement for National Power,
the fun-loving privatised electricity company with ever increasing profits
and an endangered R&D budget. The trouble is that ‘Nat Pee’ does not
own any nuclear power stations. They got left behind in the privatisation
because the government couldn’t find anyone foolish enough to take those
real symbols of the nuclear era off its hands.

* * *

Feedback has been trying to find out about the fate of the red-cockaded
woodpecker, a rare bird that makes its home on the woodlands of Fort Bragg,
a US military base. Yes, said the friendly public relations officer at Fort
Bragg, she would be happy to help us; but first, a few questions. Had we
ever written about the woodpecker before? Any environmental issues at all?
She would need copies of these articles. And what is New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ? A British
magazine! In that case, our inquiry required approval from the Pentagon.
Any questions, of course, were to be submitted in writing.

We answered, we submitted and we’re still waiting. Makes you wonder
if the Cold War is still on, and who the enemy is.