Free for All
Roxanne Roberts's paean to Kuwait's envoys ["Diplomatic Duo," Style, Feb. 26] breathlessly acclaims Rima Sabah's tall, blond, stilettoed looks and her husband's dapper cosmopolitanism as the new face of the Middle East. Meanwhile, the ambassador's family, which rules Kuwait, has failed to give women the right to vote, as your front page reminds us ["Democracy in Kuwait Is Promise Unfulfilled," Feb. 27].</br></br>Apparently, the best Arabs are those who fit into Washington's cocktail circuit. A prelude to the White House's plans for Baghdad?</br></br>A Feb. 23 graphic on Page A23 sets out to educate the rest of us on "Why Flat Roofs Overload," providing instead a snow job of its own.</br></br>The text of the graphic states that snow weighs 60 pounds per cubic foot, which is approximately correct, adding that snow weighs "much more" if it's "soaking up" rain. As Winston Churchill would have put it, that adjunct constitutes a "terminological inexactitude," as well as a "gross misrepresentation of the facts."</br></br>Anyone who dabbled in high school physics knows that water weighs 62.4 pounds per cubic foot. That is roughly what snow weighs when it has melted to occupy a cubic foot of space, and thus is the limit of what a mix of snow and water occupying one cubic foot must weigh. A given volume of snow mixed with water cannot weigh more than the same volume of water, especially as water expands when it freezes.