Fertile brain
Substances that make brain cells grow might lead to treatments for baldness,
say dermatologists in Germany (This Week, 6 March, p 7).
A brain-hair connection seems to have been known in certain expert quarters
for some time, as the following shows:
Lord Rayleigh (1842-1919, professor at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge,
and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics) undoubtedly had brains and a fine
head of hair too, at least into middle age.
Returning home from having his hair cut, Rayleigh passed on to his family his
barber’s considered judgment: “Wonderful things brains, my Lord鈥攇ood for
the roots of the hair.” The connection you report, therefore, already seems to
have been made by the cognoscenti nearly a hundred years ago.
The barber’s views can be found in Life of J. W. Strutt, Third Baron
Rayleigh by his son, Fourth Baron Rayleigh (University of Wisconsin Press,
1968).
What bug?
When we wake up on millennium morn and switch on our computers and they are
not working very well, it will be just a day like any other day.
Doctor, doctor
Since the female half of the two-doctor households mentioned in Feedback (6
March) earns, on average, less money than the male鈥攄espite presumably
similar qualifications鈥擨 suggest that rather than referring to such
households as MD2s, they should be called Paradoxes.
Letter
In the near future, half of US doctors will be married to other US doctors.
Further analysis reveals the following amazing fact: precisely half of US
doctors who are married to other US doctors will in fact be married to the other
half of US doctors who are married to other US doctors.
Self-selection
Susan Blackmore argues that the idea of “self” is an illusion, created by
genes and “memes”鈥攅lements of culture or behaviour that are passed from
person to person by imitation (“Meme, Myself, I”, 13 March, p 40,) (Review, 20
March, p 43). Genes were made by the self-assembly of atoms and molecules, but
Beethoven “himself” created his Fifth Symphony. Who was he imitating when he
created it? The breadth of Beethoven’s work tells us that it was his “self” that
created the memes that Blackmore credits with their own creation.
Blackmore’s definition of the self appears to be a self as defined by Hume:
“a bundle of sensations tied together by a common history”. This scientific self
was refuted by Kant, who pointed out that there is a self in the Hume person
which filters out unnecessary information from the virtually infinite amount of
data that the person receives from the environment, and so avoids the massive
number of decisions that a body would be required to make if it had to consider
the total data available.
It is not difficult to imagine that this highly evolved ability to select,
although originating from information sharing between atoms and molecules and
having a physical basis, should find other expression, for example, in the
creation of “memes for pleasure” or “memes useful for survival”. Or memes with
no purpose at all, but which persist because they have a high quality, a quality
which can only be decided upon by the self. If memes are a creation of the self,
then perhaps in this Kantian argument their purpose is to embody as much useful
information in as small and as memorable a data set as possible.
If the whole of survival can be reduced to a memetic short-hand, then maybe
it leaves time to play.
Letter
I cannot see how the wrist-flexing experiment鈥攚hich supposedly
disproves free will鈥攐r the notion that ideas have a life of their own
support Blackmore’s argument that the “self” does not exist. Maybe crucial steps
have been dropped in the shortening from book to article, but beyond that there
seems to be a simple philosophical mistake, the mistake that if you know all the
parts that go to make up a larger entity, then that larger entity does not
exist.
We would never think of making this mistake with a car. We know very well
that a car is made of 10 000 parts (and I should know, I work in a car factory),
but that knowledge does not stop us from regarding a car as an item. Its
“carhood” is not diminished by our knowledge that it is made up of many smaller
parts. And likewise with out minds.
And by the way, there need be no feeling of breaking new ground when
suggesting that Darwinian natural selection also applies to nonbiological
entities. Darwin got both the words and the idea of “survival of the fittest”
from theories of economic competition between companies.
Slow to connect
Peter Hadfield’s describes how the Japanese government was years behind the
rest of the world in giving parents advice about sleeping position and cot death
(Forum, 13 March, p 58).
But some might say that doctors in the US were also reluctant to accept the
connection between sleeping position and sudden infant death syndrome. There was
a suggestion that cot death in the US was a different syndrome from that in
Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Hadfield refers to the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics
about sleeping position, which were published in Pediatrics, the
academy’s journal, in June 1992. He implies that this was the standard that the
Japanese should have met.
However, there was an extraordinarily blustering rebuke in the next issue of
the journal from other paediatricians attacking what they regarded as
precipitate action by the academy. The authors said that “medical history is
unfortunately replete with examples of precipitous action based on preliminary
data and resulting in harm”.
Japanese authorities were slow to see that cot death and sleeping position
were related. The American authorities were too. Only in June 1994, two and a
half years after the beginning of our British campaign and more than three years
after the New Zealand campaign, did the public health authorities in the US
launch an official campaign, once they had finally been given definitive
consensus opinion by their paediatrics advisers.
Wastepaper mines
There has been debate in your pages over emissions of methane, a potent
greenhouse gas, from landfilled wastepaper (This Week, 23 January, p 22).
As your correspondent points out, many old mines had methane drainage systems
routed to the national gas supply (Letters, 27 February, p 55). So why not
deposit wastepaper down disused mines equipped with these systems?
Safe satellites
Your report suggests there is a mystery surrounding an alleged hijacking of a
military communications satellite (This Week, 6 March, p 11).
There is no mystery in relation to Britain’s military satellites. No such
incident has taken place and there is no investigation involving Ministry of
Defence satellites. Indeed, your quote from a Scotland Yard spokesman makes no
such suggestion in relation to the MoD.
The reason is simple鈥攁ll our satellite control systems operate on a
closed network and cannot be accessed from an outside telephone line. This is as
true of our older Skynet satellites as it is of the fifth, most recently
launched craft. Your readers will be relieved to know that the “effectiveness of
their security features” has not been called into question.
A hacker would have more chance of hacking into the system with an axe than
with a keyboard.
Water on tap
With regard to the exploration of Mars, Peter Spencer suggested using
volcanic lava tubes as shelters (Letters, 28 February 1998, p 52), since they
would be easy to seal from the near-vacuum of the surface, providing a large
living space with a minimum of construction effort.
With the possible discovery of ice hidden under the ash and lava of the
Martian volcanoes (This Week, 13 March, p 18) this idea seems even more
attractive. Future explorers may find both plentiful water and the physical
framework for a permanent base near the volcanic massifs.
Blind to the eclipse
Bill Tarver describes how during the 1979 eclipse in Manitoba, a neighbour
sat watching TV during totality (Letters, 13 March, p 63). At the same eclipse,
I noticed drivers turning on their headlights and simply continuing on their
way. But I fear that much of the avoidance of the eclipse results from the
unnecessarily scary warnings often promulgated.
At the request of local university astronomers, I tried to reason with local
authorities at that Manitoba eclipse, but they refused to listen to the real
safety evaluation of watching an eclipse. Too many local or school officials, TV
reporters and ophthalmological associations advise people to watch the eclipse
on TV.
Doing so robs them of most of the splendour of the event, a lot of which
involves noticing the changes in the quality of light and of the shadows, and
seeing the diamond ring and corona in the context of the whole sky.
We ran into the same problem in Western Australia at the annular eclipse of
16 February last month. Our website (www.williams.edu/
Astronomy/IAU_eclipses), includes information on how to watch the eclipse
safely.