Just a hobby
Feedback’s item about Richard Dawkins’s books being in the “Religion” section
of the British bookshop W H Smith’s (11 December) reminded me of the fact that,
in the Hastings branch at least, New 杏吧原创 is in the “Hobbies”
section.
When are you all going to get proper jobs?
Correction:
“Playing with Fire” by Shepard Krech (23 October, p56)
contains a phrase that should have been deleted during editing. The
phrase is in square brackets: “There is little argument that Native
Americans…[and hunted buffalo to extinction].”
Prayer power
“Prayers can help patients recover even when they don’t know people are
praying for them, says a provocative new study” (13 November, p 24)( and 27
November, p 101). But it turns out that hidden in the original paper that
describes this study (Archives of Internal Medicine, vol 159, p 2273)
is a result that is even more curious: namely, that prayer works best of all
before it has been started.
The paper reports the following facts without comment. “1013 patients were
randomised, 484 to the prayer group and 529 to the usual care group. After
subsequent removal of those patients who spent less than 24 hours in the
Coronary Care Unit [because it took at least a day to get the prayers up and
running], 524 remained in the usual care group and 466 in the prayer group.”
But look at these figures. While 18 of 484 patients who were going to be
prayed for got better within 24 hours, only 5 of 529 patients who were not going
to be prayed for did so. In a chi-squared test, this difference is significant
at p < 0.001. By contrast, the main effect reported in the paper, namely
that鈥攁mong patients who stayed more than 24 hours鈥攖hose who were
prayed for had better clinical outcomes than those who weren't prayed for, only
just makes it to the p < 0.04 level.
So it seems that either the study has come up with strong evidence of prayer
producing backward causation of recovery, or else there was something wrong with
the way the study was conducted. For example, despite the claim of
randomisation, less sick patients may in fact have been assigned to the prayer
group. Readers should take their pick of these two interesting alternatives.
Fishy figures
Fred Pearce suggests that the warming of the North Atlantic could be the
cause of the decline in cod numbers and could result in the species retreating
farther north (20 November, p 14).
We have been sampling the fish of the Bristol Channel every month for the
past 20 years and since 1986 there has indeed been a marked increase in mean
water temperatures. However, there has also been a surprising increase in the
abundance of cod between 1 and 3 years old within the estuary.
Between 1980 and 1986, we considered cod to be an infrequent visitor, now it
is an important member of the fish community. Our observations are supported by
reports we have received from commercial fishermen working in the Bristol
Channel and off Devon.
If the warming of our seas is reducing cod numbers, why has the abundance of
cod in southwestern British waters increased? We have no answer, but would
suggest that the natural mortality patterns of marine fish such as cod suggest
that diseases caused by viral, bacterial and protozoan pathogens are important
in determining the survival rate of larval and juvenile fish.
Given the well-proven impact of disease and parasites on terrestrial animal
and plant populations, including humans, it is surprising how little attention
fisheries biologists have devoted to disease. While we would not dispute that
populations have been much reduced by fishing, could it not be that some cod
populations are experiencing an epidemic that is reducing the survival of the
young?
Learning by links
The “small world theory” (4 December, p 24) is often used to teach
creativity. One of the lessons I give my students is to link up two seemingly
unrelated ideas in not more than six “associations”. For example “peanuts to
computers”. One approach might be peanuts-monkeys-organ grinders-Charles Babbage
(he tried to get them banned)-computers. A similar sequence might be
computers-Microsoft-Bill Gates-Bill Gates’s income-my income-peanuts.
This type of loose association is also a staple of humour, where one idea
shifts to another. Felix the Cat, the 1920s cartoon, was based upon a
series of visual puns, such as an umbrella acting like a parachute, which is
then upturned to become a boat, turning inside-out to become a tent, and so on.
The humour is based on the shapes being topologically equivalent. The shape
becomes meaningful within the context.
Belt up for cats
The issue of the use of animals in testing usually hinges on the question of
its validity for the betterment of the human race.
However, I gather that the only reason we have airbags in cars (4 December, p
7) is that drivers in the US refuse to wear seatbelts. In which case, why on
earth should cats have to be experimented on and end up deaf in order to test
the effect of airbag inflation on the ear? Let the Americans belt up, and leave
the cats in peace.
No nonsense
I was interested in Feedback’s story about heavy prison sentences in
Singapore for those responsible for rupturing telecoms cables and I was struck
by the apparent effectiveness of this threat (4 December)
In a zoo in the Netherlands I once saw a man feeding chips to fish in a pond.
When his son pointed to a sign explaining that feeding the animals was
prohibited, the father said, “So what?” and carried on. In Holland we are very
tolerant, you see, and people know their behaviour will be tolerated.
By contrast, in a Nairobi zoo which I visited in 1993, I saw a sign on the
fence that separated crocodiles and spectators. It said: “Visitors throwing
litter into this pit will be required to retrieve it.”
There was no litter inside. In the Netherlands, we call this a “no-nonsense
policy”.
Perfect pitch
The “tone languages” of Africa and Asia have been a source of ethnocentric
wonder to Europeans and Americans for a long time, and Diana Deutsch’s
suggestion that they show we all have latent perfect pitch (4 December, p 38) is
a good example. Deutsch’s conclusion is unjustified on two grounds.
Firstly, if tone languages required perfect pitch or something close to it,
we would expect consistency across speakers, not just across utterances of
individual speakers. For example, Chinese high-level tone should be “A” or “C#”
or whatever for all speakers, not just “high in speaker’s voice range”. No study
has ever shown anything of the sort.
Second, the within-speaker consistency found by Deutsch, while it is
remarkable, has nothing to do with tone languages. Over the past 20 years I have
done numerous experiments like Deutsch’s in both European languages and in
Yoruba (a Nigerian language with three distinct level tones). Speakers of
European languages all regularly exhibit the same consistency of pitch level
that Deutsch found in Vietnamese and Chinese. For more detail, see
www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~bob/NS.html.
Veggy reptiles
In his article on animals and alcohol, Martin Brookes makes an erroneous
statement concerning the eating habits of my favourite animals, reptiles. He
says: “All amphibians and reptiles are hard-core carnivores” (27 November, p
44).
Two exceptions come to mind immediately: the marine iguanas of the Galapagos,
which only eat seaweed, and prehensile-tailed (Solomon Island) skinks.
I’ve got a colony of Solomon Island skinks in my home that have been breeding
up a storm for about a decade, are in perfect health, and have never suffered a
fatality (other than one to trauma). No animal protein has ever passed their
lips. I have occasionally experimented with offerings of the sorts of animal
protein that they would be likely to encounter during their arboreal pursuits,
such as eggs and bugs, but neither the original trio caught in the wild nor
those born in captivity showed any interest.
I spoke to a researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville who had
performed an autopsy on a Solomon Island skink. She said they had double,
ruminant-style stomachs, which would explain their preference for high-cellulose
leaves. They will eat fruits, but grow tired of them quickly. Mine primarily eat
romaine lettuce and kale, sprinkled with “bee pollen” and occasional calcium
powder.
Letter
Although there is perfect pitch in our family, my son did not inherit it.
However, as a chorister in Norwich Cathedral he was taught a very simple trick
to overcome this problem.
Choristers were trained to locate their vocal “break”鈥攖he transition
point from a note sounded in the chest to what is called a “head note”. Once
this was mastered, the boys could either identify sounds relative to this or
could accurately pitch a printed note by singing from their break.
Ways of walking
I’m surprised someone didn’t come up with a system of recognising a person’s
gait earlier (4 December, p 18). I am myopic and when my eyesight first became
poor enough to warrant my wearing glasses, I began to notice that without my
glasses on I could still recognise friends from long distances by the way they
walked and how they moved.
Letter
Your article gave me an idea for a way to achieve correct pitch which I have
not seen mentioned elsewhere.
It had not struck me before that people using tonal languages are actually
operating on absolute rather than relative pitch. We must sound very monotonous
to them! Not only that, but each of us speaking a non-tonal language adopts his
or her own “monotone”, that is, the pitch of my and anyone else’s voice does not
vary from day to day.
I am an amateur singer, and as the article correctly points out, many singers
and musicians without perfect pitch are able to correctly pitch melodies in
relation to a given start note. It is achieving the start note which is the
problem.
After reading the article, I realised that my natural speaking voice is
pitched at E. I then made myself a phrase, “This is the pitch for meeeeeeeee”,
and having spoken it, I can find any other start note I want relative to my
native E.