To the Editor: I am deeply troubled that you chose to publish the letter from Paul J. Grosskreuz in the December 2002 issue. I am certainly not an advocate of abortion. It is an issue over which many women have had to make a painful decision, either pro or con.

However, it should be a matter of individual moral choice, not a political or social football. To use our engineering magazine as a forum for such a discussion is totally inappropriate.

Whether you publish my letter or not, I hope that you will use better judgment in the future.

Questions
of Scale
Nick White
Fort Smith, Ark.

To the Editor: Regarding "Where's the Thermodynamics?" a letter in the January issue, I am pleased to see someone entertain the idea that greenhouse gases aren't as evil as we are led to believe. I don't believe that a small change in levels of any gas will have as much impact on the temperature of a closed system as on that of a system generating its own heat.

In addition to the possible causes pointed out by Carl S. Newman, add the possibility that using the last 100 years of data can't begin to show a trend, when climate changes have been shown to happen on the scale of 10,000 years.

To the Editor: I understand that political correctness demands that occasionally an engineering magazine must pay homage to conservative politics. But no one still prints material from the Flat Earth Society, and it's about time respectable magazines and journals just say no to junk science debunkings of the greenhouse effect.

Indeed, a lot of poor science and engineering will always get past the reviewers, but Carl Newman's letter to the editor in the January 2003 issue was surely the worst I've seen in any professional engineering magazine in my lengthy career.

The dominant atmospheric IR absorption mechanisms have been understood for more than a century. The notion that the air is getting cleaner and thus causing the Earth to get warmer is too ridiculous and unfounded to merit a rebuttal.

To the Editor: I would love to see more people become engineers, and I would love to see more women in the engineering profession. I would also welcome any changes to our mentoring programs or our educational system if we are not providing girls the same opportunities as boys.

I just don't think that our profession is going down the drain unless we encourage more women. It will go down the drain if we don't encourage more people to become engineers.

To the Editor: In a letter responding to my article "Earthrise" on the Apollo program and the engineering of green technology, Mike Jennison writes that economics is not addressed. I wrote that we engineers must inform our fellow citizens of the realities of our life-support systems.

Economics is strongly influenced by national policy. For example, the U.S. Congress gave the domestic airline industry $15 billion. In the 19th century, Congress subsidized railroads with large land grants that brought about settlement and commerce in the Midwest and West. In the midst of the Great Depression, New Deal domestic policies brought electricity into our lives.

National policies that alter supply and demand economics result from the will of the people in democratic societies. People's wills are influenced by information from various groups in our society. The Apollo program had the support of virtually all of the American people because leaders such as Wernher von Braun continually informed the American public of the possibilities of space travel and about the Apollo lunar missions being planned.

We engineers should always inform our fellow citizens of the facts. For example, that fossil fuel reserves on Earth are finite and that their consumption contributes to the contamination of Earth's environment, which is vital to our survival.

Burning hydrogen fuel emits zero pollutants and alcohol fuels nearly zero. We can't stop using fossil fuels today, but our nation should most seriously plan on developing alcohol and hydrogen fuel infrastructures, and other new clean energy systems.

Our government is influenced by special interest groups such as the oil industry. The price of gasoline is artificially low in the United States because of our national policy favoring oil. As engineers among mankind, we must do more than make calculations; we must inform our fellow citizens about the facts of life on Earth and lead in developing new ways, so as to sustain life on Earth into the far future.

Editor's Note: The article, "Earthrise," appeared in the May 2002 issue, Mike Jennison's letter in January 2003.

To the Editor: In the letters section of the November 2002 issue, Noah Manring promotes the Biblical account of creation, and asks, "How can any rational being conclude that Earth and life as we know it is merely an incident of chance?"

I ask, "How can any rational being, especially one presumably educated as an engineer or scientist, accept metaphysical explanations of the universe, based as they are on myths invented 3,000 years ago by ignorant sheepherders?"

I also ask, "Does the editor believe that ME magazine should be a forum for the presentation of religious tracts?"

To the Editor: In his letter in the November 2002 Mechanical Engineering magazine, Klaus L. Cappel writes, "I invented this configuration in 1961 ...," referring to what is now known as a Stewart platform.

This image of Gough's six-degree-of-freedom platform appeared in a British engineering publication almost 50 years ago.

Variants of the Stewart platform (also called the Gough platform) are typically used in vehicle simulators, although they have many other applications. Cappel further mentions that he did not see D. Stewart's paper, "A Platform With Six Degrees of Freedom," in the Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers for 1965-66 (Vol. 180, Part 1, No. 15, pp. 371-378) until many years after inventing the six-degree-of-freedom platform himself.

It would appear that neither did Cappel see the 1956 technical discussion by V.E. Gough, "Discussion in London: Automobile Stability, Control, and Tyre Performance" in the Proceedings of the IMechE's Automobile Division (pp. 392-394). I have included a photograph from that publication showing the six-degree-of-freedom platform Gough developed in the early 1950s for use in a tire test stand.

Editor's Note: Keith Moore, senior librarian and archivist for the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in the United Kingdom, adds, "The discussion by Gough is in association with the paper, ÔDesign Implications of a General Theory of Automobile Stability and Control,' by D.W. Whitcomb and W.F. Milliken Jr., pp. 367-391 of the same volume."

To the Editor: In the article "Juice From Water" (Nov. 2002), Harry Hutchinson talks about improving water courses to improve plant efficiency. My father told me of a dam power-generation plant generator that had silver for the windings instead of copper. The silver was used because copper was needed for the war effort. (I'm not sure which war.)

He said the silver windings made the generator very efficient (it's a better conductor than copper). Is there any truth to this story? Has this technique been considered for improving power generation?

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