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Doesn't he know "Chinaman" is a contemptuous and derogatory term, which is resented by the Chinese people?
VICTOR WEN
Pacific Grove, Calif.
* Father Arrupe used the word "Chinese." TIME mistakenly used the word "Chinaman" and had no intention of offending.
Sex and Mao
Sir / Regarding your article "Sex and Mao at Princeton" [April 30], I was sorry to note that you seem to have misread the introduction to the birth control handbook as myopically as Mr. Buckley. The booklet does denounce birth control, but not birth control as we know it, through contraception. The booklet denounces birth control through such methods as India's "voluntary" (i.e., paid) sterilization by surgery, a practice that was used as a "preventive measure" against hereditary mental defectiveness in some states in this country at the outset of this century.
Opposition to such practices is not Maoist — it is humane.
CHRISTOPHER SEYMOUR ('76)
Princeton, N.J.
Intelligent Signals
Sir / This is about your very interesting article "Message from a Star" [April 9] concerning possible communications from beyond the solar system.
I would like D.A. Lunan to know that in 1920 Guglielmo Marconi told my father, Admiral Count Millo, that he was sure he had intercepted intelligent signals from out of space on the radio station of his yacht Electra.
At that time there were no other radio stations on earth, except the ones Marconi had started in England and North America and the one on his yacht.
(MRS.) MATILDE MILLO DI SUVERO
Mill Valley, Calif.
It Won't Work
Sir / Reader Beatrice Neal is right, of course, in her assertion that God is the key stone to the understanding of the universe without whom everything is essentially meaningless [April 30], for it is precisely to fill this vacuum that man devised the concept of God in the first place. But try to cajole a group of disillusioned children into believing in Santa Claus again; it won't work, and I suggest we search elsewhere to cure the mass hysteria already enveloping the world as man slowly awakens from a cherished fairy tale.
EMIL R. PERNSTEINER
San Francisco
The Greatest Game
Sir / You ask why baseball survives [April 30]. Is it because baseball does not require overt violence or repeated scoring to keep the true fan alert? Is it because hitting a baseball — a 100-m.p.h. fastball with a "hop," a curve that drops 2 ft., or a knuckleball that defies description— is the single most difficult feat required in all sports?
More likely some grand combination of these and others. But it doesn't matter. The game survives simply because there are fans worthy of it.
Confined to watching rugby, soccer and cricket, I find that the Greatest Game is the piece of Americana I miss most.
LUTHER R. LEWIS
Peace Corps Volunteer .
Mandeville, Jamaica