LETTERS IN THE EDITOR'S MAILBAG.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Editing ignored enemy abuses

Regarding "Pentagon confirms Quran was kicked at Guantanamo" (Register-Guard, June 4): The Register-Guard picked up the above-referenced story written by Robert Burns from The Associated Press. Burns wrote three AP releases on the subject. Each of them mentioned 15 abuses of the Quran by the detainees. Surprise, surprise - The Register-Guard edited this out.

Full explication of five American abuses; full disregard of 15 enemy abuses. Truth is once again subordinated to the newspaper's agenda of undermining the Bush administration in both editorial and what passes for news coverage.

DUNCAN MURRAY

Eugene

Think harder about phone poles

This is straight from the You-Gotta-Be-Kidding Department, but I read it in the May 31 edition of The Register-Guard.

Timber industry spokesman Chris West wants to turn old growth timber in the McKenzie River watershed - the source of Eugene's abundant, clear water - into telephone pole cross members. "The big old trees are needed because there's no other wood that's strong enough," West said, apparently with a straight face.

Approximately "3,000 acres of old and mature federal stands" in the McKenzie watershed are scheduled to be clear-cut this summer or next. These are public trees, belonging to every American. The U.S. Forest Service timber sale program loses about $900 million a year.

Eugene's water flows clear and clean from those public forests. Clear-cuts threaten the purity of our water supply and diminish fish runs in the McKenzie River. So, what's it going to be - old growth forests, clean water and abundant fish runs or govern- ment-subsidized destruction of the forest to provide telephone poles with cross members?

I suggest that the telephone pole people find another material for their cross members - heavy duty galvanized angle iron comes to mind - and that we congratulate the Eugene City Council for taking a stand against logging in our watershed.

MIKE HELM

Eugene

LIGO seeks tiny gravity waves

The Register-Guard's coverage of the World Year of Physics, and in particular some of the physics research at the University of Oregon, has been exceptional.

In response to the May 22 article on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory project, the June 3 letter from Donn B. Kirk refers to studies of a certain type of gravity waves. However, these waves should not be confused with the types of waves being investigated by LIGO.

The gravity waves in Jupiter's atmosphere, which Kirk has investigated, are an example of a well-known, common phenomenon referring to the motion of fluids in a gravitational field. Such vibrations are observed regularly in the Earth's atmosphere. A related and familiar phenomenon, deep water ocean waves, are also termed gravity waves.

Something completely different, which is coincidentally sometimes also called gravity waves, is predicted by Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Though these are so tiny they have yet to be observed, this type of wave refers to the vibrations of the very space-time fabric of the universe itself.

LIGO is the most sophisticated attempt to date to try to detect this important prediction of Einstein. When they are observable, they will provide a new window into the universe, similar to the introduction of radio astronomy a half century ago.

JAMES E. BRAU

RAYMOND E. FREY

Center for High Energy Physics

University of Oregon

Eugene

LETTERS LOG

Letters received in past week: 159

Letters published: 65

What's on readers' minds: The top local topic by far was a debate over a proposal to allow Whole Foods, a national natural food store chain, to open a store in downtown Eugene. Opinions were divided about whether Whole Foods would hurt locally-owned natural food stores. On the national front, emergence of the so-called Downing Street Memo rekindled opposition to the Iraq war.