Notes and queries

Some uses for 14,000 video cassettes; The man who invented mauve; How we might miss the aliens by a few billion years
Greed notes and queries video cassettes
A fine use for a video cassette ... Erich Von Stroheim's Greed (1924). Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/MGM

Is there any use for old VHS cassettes? My pal has 14,000 of them.

Use them like Lego blocks and build a small shed to store the DVD collection.

Mike Whitley, Long Sutton, Lincs

Yes, you can still watch Erich von Stroheim's Greed on one.

Tony Edwards, West Wratting, Cambridge


Richard Hickman, Church Stretton, Shropshire

I asked at my local recycling centre and was directed to the "Articles that cannot be recycled" bin.

Nick Wilde, Bedford

VHS cassettes and other recording tapes can be recycled, despite the widespread belief that they can't be. One company that does this is the Recycling People in Ross-on-Wye. They make a modest charge for any material where a tape has to be extracted. However, they recycle DVDs and floppy disks for nothing. A tip: if you have to post, do not use the Post Office's extortionate service.

Tom Headland, Brighton

Yes. Artist Lorenzo Durantini uses them in his sculptures and performance pieces.

John MacLean, London Sw17

At the very least, this represents 30,000 solid hours of telly-watching. What was your pal's estimate of his remaining lifespan?

Alan Brown, Wolverhampton

Would it be possible to invent or discover a new colour?

A chemistry student called William Perkin did just that by accident in 1856. I quote from the Guardian of 21 September 2000: "Mauve was the first artificial colour to be produced on a grand scale. It was made from coal tar and came about by accident when Perkin was trying to make artificial quinine to save British troops dying from malaria. He got the molecule wrong, but found that the sludge produced dyed his shirt a brilliant purple."

Perkin originally called his new colour Tyrian purple but the French called it mauve, the word used to describe the stems of their mallow plant. The new colour became extremely popular. Mauve was everywhere – streaming on hair ribbons, waving on carriages, and in a pantomime a policeman told people to "get a mauve on". It also became the Victorian colour for half-mourning.

Sylvia Henderson, Reading

Nicola Tanner (N&Q, 18 May) might be interested to know that the "muddy brown" she created by mixing all her colours together does, in fact, have a name. It was called "smudge" by some of the old railway companies that tipped any leftovers from painting their engines or coaches into a big tub, mixed them together and painted their goods wagons with it. This waste-not, want-not product was an imprecise colour, but was always some species of brown.

Stephen Hannington, Rochester, Kent


The reason why we may never enter into meaningful contact with intelligent life elsewhere is as much a consequence of time as distance. The universe is 13.75bn years old, and life on Earth originated some 3.5bn years ago. Yet human civilisation is perhaps 10,000 years old, and man has had the means to transmit and receive communications across space only for the last few decades – a blink of the eye in cosmic terms.

As Terence Hollingworth noted (N&Q, 18 May), given the likely number of solar systems in the universe with potentially habitable planets, life may well exist elsewhere. But there is no reason why life should have started at the same time wherever it came into existence, or that intelligent life should have evolved at the same place. On Earth, given the dynamics of evolution and the vagaries of mass extinctions and other disruptive events, it is only by chance that intelligent life has occurred at this precise moment in the universe's existence.

If we ever do develop the technology to detect life elsewhere in the vast reaches of space, it is unlikely to have evolved in the same way or at the same pace as us. Any civilisation we encounter may be much more advanced, much more primitive, or it may have evolved in a completely different way, with completely different approaches to communication, language, thought, and social relationships. Yet we assume that if we encounter other beings they will in fact be rather like us, and communicate in ways we find intelligible about ideas that we have in common. That is very unlikely to be the case.

Richard Williams, Kingston, Surrey

Any answers?

Booker judge Carmen Callil called Philip Roth the "emperor's clothes" choice. What would be the emperor's choice in the arts, architecture etc?

AW Simpson, East Hoathly, East Sussex

What is the hierarchy of French supermarkets? I've always considered Carrefour to be best and Super U worst.

Lloyd Evans, Brighton

How do nest-building birds get the first few twigs to balance?

Isobel Lane, London SW16
