As a trained physicist, I am delighted that we have a new unit of time. A “Scaramucci” was the unit of time derived from the 11-day career of the White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci. But we now have an even shorter career unit of five days, the “Zacharia”, for Donald Trump’s press secretary Katie Zacharia (Report, 16 October). In the final stages of Trump’s presidency, we may find that members of his media team come and go at ever shorter intervals, possibly asymptotically approaching the sub-zeptosecond lifetime of a Higgs boson.
Dr Martin Treacy
Cardigan, Ceredigion
On the 60th anniversary of one man-made fossil-fuel catastrophe (‘I survived for a reason’: Aberfan fights to preserve memory of disaster 60 years on, 20 October), we are subjected to another – the approval of the Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea (Report, 21 October). Do our leaders never learn?
Douglas Currie
Edinburgh
My late mother, Barbara Hulme, is a perfect example of the idea that Wikipedia only covers people who have already been written about elsewhere (Letters, 16 October). She has a Wikipedia page as a result of the obituary published by the Guardian (Other lives, 9 February 2021).
Janet Hulme
Wadebridge, Cornwall
Re another EU referendum, Polly Toynbee says “not yet” (Shall we have another EU referendum? Maybe – but not yet, 19 October). When we can’t even sort musicians’ access to the EU, let alone start the young people’s exchange scheme, wouldn’t “sometime never” be more realistic?
John Bishop
Codsall, Staffordshire
