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In excess of 11 million people live on Japan's four main islands of Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku. The country's total landmass is approximately twice that of the United Kingdom, yet only around 8% of this is usable for agriculture. Japan too is very short on raw materials which have to be imported in hundreds of millions of tons. The country's population explosion, combined with the dearth of mineral assets, has led Japanese nutrition experts to forecast a grave food crisis. ‘Futuristics’, a subject which fascinates the Japanese, is being used to help solve the projected food problems: And in this the sea is seen as the saviour of Japan.

WHILE MIGUEL DE CERNANTES SAAVEDRA languished as a guest of King Philip of Spain in a small noisome cell of the Madrid prison, he had time to do two things. He wrote each day at a rickety table with the quill and parchment he had bribed his jailer to supply. His manuscript concerned an old gentleman farmer, grey, lean, and weatherbeaten—like Cervantes himself, then fifty‐six—who had read so many books about chivalry that ‘his brain had dried up and he had gone completely out of his mind’. The old man was obsessed that he must leave his farm and ride out as the knights of old had done into a world of giants, maidens in distress and deep enchantment. Nearly four hundred years later the name of the old knight‐errant is still world famous, for Cervantes chose with care the name of his run‐down hero, Don Quixote. (Cervantes spelt it Quijote.)

A NOTED engineer of our acquaintance started his career as an apprentice working under a foreman of Huguenot descent and who was known affectionately—well, generally!—as Papa Poisson. He was very knowledgable and was very fond of telling his juniors how he had worked, many years previously, at Rolls‐Royce when that name really meant something.

We recall Sidney Greenstreet's profile of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon: ‘Upon my soul sir, you are a character, you really are.’ The same might be said of Gorby, the leader of the second most powerful country in the world, whose stated philosophy over seventy years has been: profit is a moral evil.

WITH, no doubt, tears in his eyes, Mr. Russell Miller, who is a National Officer employed by the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS) complains in a recent issue of his Union's Journal that quangos are “under attack”. Facing drastic cuts, he cries, their very existence is in jeopardy. Is this such a bad thing?

THE army of young unemployed is a blot on our civilisation. That much would be agreed by all. That nothing very positive is being done about it is also all too evident.

FOR the student who has to choose a field of study in which to learn and exercise his bibliographic skills Sociology affords an interesting and attractive challenge. Indeed, to understand his chosen profession it must necessarily be placed within its social context. Most students at some stage of their development reflect on the social problems that beset the human situation, and some, as the mass media would have us believe, are anxious to remould the “sorry scheme of things” as represented by the existing social structure.

IT was in February that we condemned the Finniston Report on the grounds that it had failed to tackle what was surely the first consideration: the definition of what an engineer is. Out of the dozens of recognised qualifications and the countless unqualified people who can and do call themselves engineers, albeit of one sort or another, it is surely impossible to set up one colossal Authority to control the lot, without that definition.

WORDS, the currency of human thought, are easily debased. Frequent repetition can empty them of serious meaning. Rightly used they can, with the brevity and directness of a road sign, provide the pith of a subject. Only when they are widely adopted and used as a label to stick on every package do they lose significance.

“I can't make your drat time on this machine” or “It's all very well you standing there—you don't have to put up with this drat heat hour after hour”, typical comments which you, the work study technician, are continuously confronted with on the shop floor. And this is probably because the operator is trying to get even. Your apparent indifference while the study was taking place released all his pent up feelings about watches, work study, factory environment, pay, bonus and what have you.