Stopped in tracks

Now I have heard everything.

To use the state tracks for not committing to new Seymour/Shepparton line rolling stock is ludicrous.

Does Jaclyn Symes really believe that it is just a case of ringing up a manufacturer and saying, ‘‘deliver some new carriages next month?’’

How about specifying rolling stock with modern suspensions that can handle the rough tracks while the Australian Rail Track Corporation fiddles around?

— Ian Carey, Seymour

Guess doesn’t count

Science is knowledge (L. scientia, knowledge).

Stephen Hawking, who died last week aged 76, was a theoretical physicist whom I admire. He is one of my heroes.

However, I do not admire those zoologists who wrongly assumed that the Tasmanian tiger which died in captivity in 1936 was the last ‘‘known’’ one of the species.

A few short, unsuccessful excursions into the Tasmanian wilderness by Land Rover-driving equipment-laden citybased zoologists was not a sound basis upon which to generate the falsehood that the thylacine was extinct.

As zoology is a science, then those zoologists were not scientists. They did not know.

— John J. Maher,

Seymour