How Jaws gets wired
QUESTION
Do sharks target undersea cables? Fish, including sharks, do bite underwater cables and leave their teeth embedded in the sheathings. Yet their impact is small compared to fishing, dredging and seismic activity.
Almost all international data is transmitted by wires at the bottom of the oceans. They are the invisible force driving the internet, with many funded by Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. There are 380 submarine communications cables, mostly fibre optic, spanning 750,000 miles.
Bites by barracuda, shallow and deepwater sharks can penetrate the insulation, but less than 10 per cent of damage to cables is caused by fish.
The fibre- optic is wrapped in copper, which conducts the direct current that powers the cable, sometimes up to 10,000 volts. if broken, the electric current will race to ground, ie the seabed, disrupting transmission of the data.
The best documented case of shark attacks comes from the Canary islands, where a deep- ocean fibre optic cable failed four times in water depths of 3,200 ft to 6,000 ft.
The culprit was the crocodile shark ( Pseudocarcharias kamoharai), which is just 3 ft long, but appears to have a taste for cables.
it was thought that sharks are attracted by the electromagnetic fields radiating from the submerged cables. however, when tested at sea and in the laboratory, no clear link was established.
Cables have been redesigned with greater insulation and tougher protection to withstand fish bites.
human impact causes most faults in cables, with fishing accounting for nearly half of cases. Anchoring is the second major cause followed by dredging, drilling and seabed abrasion. seismic activity may cause damage in deep waters.
Dr Ken Warren, Glasgow.
QUESTION What is the earliest example of the Lord’s Prayer?
The Lord’s Prayer appears twice in the New Testament. The longer version, Matthew 6:9-13, is at the heart of the sermon on the Mount, in the context of
Jesus’s instruction about piety appropriate for his followers. The shorter version, Luke 11:2-4, responds to his disciples’ request: ‘Teach us to pray.’
however, most biblical scholars believe the prayer is derived from a common source they have designated by the letter Q ( from the German word Quelle, meaning source).
Following this theory, Q had a translation of the Lord’s Prayer that Matthew and Luke used differently for various contexts.
While considered to be the archetypal Christian prayer, it is noteworthy that it makes no mention of Christ and is similar to Jewish devotions of the time.
The synagogue prayer the Kaddish (which means holy) reads: ‘ Magnified and sanctified may his great name be in the world that he created, as he wills, and may his kingdom come in your life and in your days and in the lives of all the house of israel, swiftly and soon.’
Jesus might well have taken an existing form and condensed it into an elegant prayer with three short statements about honouring God’s name, kingdom and will.
The version used by the Anglican Church was adapted from the Gospel texts and laid down in the Book of Common Prayer in 1549. The line about ‘trespasses’ first appeared in the 1526 Bible translation by William Tyndale.
The final sentence, ‘for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever’ is called the doxology and has been part of the prayer since 1611.
it is not in the New Testament text, but is known from a late first century Greek text known as the Didache: ‘For yours is the power and the glory for ever.’
Lawrence Goodman, Stroud, Glos.
QUESTION Can Chinese people read the literature of 2,500 years ago as easily as a modern newspaper?
LANGuAGes change over time due to changes in culture or in response to contact with other speakers. Chinese has several varieties, with standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin, being the official language.
Though the way people speak has evolved significantly over the years, written Chinese has altered much less. Characters known as hanzi were standardised during the Qin Dynasty, 221 BC to 206 BC, and have remained similar for more than two millennia.
That is not to say that reading Chinese literature from that long ago is easy. The same character has changed shape in various ways and the pattern has been simplified, though its rudimental meaning has stayed relatively unchanged.
There are more than 47,000 characters in the Kangxi Dictionary developed during the 18th and 19th centuries, but 90 per cent of Chinese newspapers and magazines use just 3,500.
if you were to give a Chinese person a 2,500-year- old piece of literature, it’s likely they would recognise most of the characters and understand the meaning, though not necessarily the whole text.
similarly, most of us can grasp shakespearean english, but it isn’t exactly smooth reading.
Emilie McRae, Trowbridge, Wilts. IS THERE a question to which you want to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question here? Write to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT; or email charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection is published, but we’re unable to enter into individual correspondence.