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The past year has ended on a disturbing note. On 2nd December the engineering unions called a 24‐hour strike which benefited nobody and did great harm to the country's industrial output. This affair was followed some days later by the graver threat of a national railway strike which, for the moment at least, has been averted.

An aircraft sustaining rotor blade having a main longitudinal structural member 10 of oval‐tubular cross‐section, the major axis of which is disposed substantially in the direction of the blade chord, a superstructure including former ribs mounted on the member 10 and a blade covering 27 supported on the superstructure and spaced thereby from the member 10. As shown, the minimum radius r of the member 10 is not less than one‐third of the minor axis 6. Clips 11 are mounted on the member 10 and carry a forward spruce part 16 to which is glued a nose fairing 28 and a rear part 17 grooved to receive a cord which secures the fabric cover. A trailing‐edge fairing 22 is secured to the part 17. The centre c of the member 10 lies in the forward quarter of the blade chord.

The burden social theorists must be willing to accept, respond to, and act upon pertains to the difficulties that predictably accompany all efforts to convey to nontheorists the unwelcome fact of heteronomy – that as actors, we are not as autonomous as we were told and prefer to assume – and to spell out what heteronomy in the form in which it has been shaping the developmental trajectory of modern societies means for professional theorists. I introduce the concept of “vitacide,” designed to capture that termination of life is a potential vanishing point of the heteronomous processes that have been shaping modern societies continuing to accelerate and intensify in ways that prefigure our future, but not on our human or social terms. Heteronomy pointing toward vitacide should compel us as social theorists to consider critically both the constructive and destructive trajectory that social change appears to have been following for more than two centuries, irrespective of whether the resulting prospect is to our liking or not. In this context, the classical critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, pursued what turned out to be an evolving interest in rackets, the authoritarian personality, and the administered society – concepts that served as foils for delineating the kind of theoretical stance that is becoming more and more important as we are moving into an increasingly uncertain future.

MY reaction to being appointed Director of Library Services would be one of frank amazement, rather as if I had been a commercial traveller in a rather dubious line of trade, such as ladies' underwear, who had suddenly been offered a bishopric. The recovery from this amazement would take about ten seconds flat and I would doubtless find myself in the thick of finding an office, a desk, a rubber plant and a regulation‐size piece of carpet appropriate to my grade. My first real task would be to bring some order to the seven sections of the D.E.S. now dealing with library matters and to initiate among librarians generally some radical thinking on the problems that face us all.

WHEN THE LIBRARY WORLD asked me for a letter from Finland, I was very glad, for I like writing letters. To me it is a pleasure to write letters. Of course it is equally pleasant to receive letters, and I hope that we can soon receive a letter from Great Britain as a reply for our journal Kirjastolehti.