Epileptic deity
So the prophet Ezekiel may have been an epileptic
(17 November, p 20)?
What balderdash under the name of science.
The scientific dogma that everything in the world can be explained naturally
is more faith-based than religion itself. Diagnosing diseases correctly is hard
enough with living patients, never mind people whose writings are all we
have.
An alternative diagnosis, given the symptoms described, could be narcolepsy
or perhaps even propheticepsy. Or perhaps it was God who suffered from temporal
lobe epilepsy, and Ezekiel was just delivering his message. Then again, people
with a propensity for lengthy writing and dream-like delusional blather can be
found all over the scientific community.
Correction
The Voynich manuscript is approximately 234,000 characters, not
words as stated in the article. The total number of “words” (word-like strings
of characters separated by a space) is about 40,000, and there is a vocabulary
of about 8200 unique words.
Smoke control
We were very pleased to read the excellent discussion of tobacco harm
reduction
(10 November, p 28).
We would like to clarify that the Institute of Medicine report,
Clearing the Smoke, is cautious, but not negative,
about tobacco harm reduction.
The report states that the health benefits of tobacco harm reduction have
still to be established, because potential reduced-exposure products have not
yet been comprehensively evaluated. However, the report concludes that harm
reduction from tobacco is “a feasible and justifiable public health policy”.
But the report does warn that without a comprehensive public health programme
surrounding the harm-reduction strategy, the net outcome could be negative. The
report lists several conditions under which tobacco harm reduction could be
pursued to optimise the chances of a positive impact on public health. These
include regulations to assure truthful advertising, continuing public health
monitoring and surveillance, research to establish a solid base of evidence on
the effects of the products, and a comprehensive national tobacco control
programmme. We hope the report is seen as a positive step towards the serious
consideration and scientific evalution of harm reduction.
Bye bye anthrax
The anthrax scare here in the US is a great burden for the postal system
because they must irradiate letters or subject them to other tests.
There is a simpler way to take the pressure off鈥攅ncourage people to use
postcards, which cannot carry significant amounts of anthrax spores. And the
postage required for a postcard is 13 cents (about 8 pence) less than that for a
letter. It’s also greener than sending a letter in an envelope, saving many
trees.
Another approach is to write the letter as usual, then fold the paper(s) in
thirds, staple or paste the package shut and write the address on the outside.
This is even greener than sending a postcard because more people would send
letters. Using some reasonable assumptions, I calculated that sending letters
without envelopes could save some 300,000 tonnes of paper annually.
Incidentally, this approach was used here during the Second World War as a
way to save weight on the mail delivered to GIs overseas.
Chemical crutch
I disagree with the editor’s comment that what many addicts need is a safe
supply of drugs
(3 November, p 3).
Drug addicts who do manage to curb their
addiction come to realise that drugs do nothing for you. It’s only when they
reach rock bottom that they can see how worthless their life was, and only by
getting over it can they experience the meaning of being truly alive.
Drug addicts are people who have buried their feelings and substituted the
chemical roller coaster ride for the ups and downs of real life. The message
that has to be sent out is: stop using the drug, and seek out other ways of
helping you get through life.
Having worked with drug addicts myself, I can say that not one of them would
have been in therapy if they had access to a free supply of drugs from the
government. Yes, not all drug addicts will stop taking drugs and, yes, some will
die from an overdose. But let us look at those who have managed to get out of it
and who are presently living a substance-free life.
Singin' in the loo
I was intrigued by Paul Devereux’s assertion鈥攓uoted in Mike Pitts’s
review of Devereux’s book Stone Age Soundtracks
(17 November, p 54)鈥攖丑补迟
Neolithic burial tombs were used for ritual male chanting, based
on his measurements of their resonant acoustic frequencies.
I can honestly say that I have never yet encountered a bathroom (and I have
been in a few in my time) that does not strongly resonate within my vocal range
somewhere in the room. Crouching in the bath near the corner furthest from the
door seems to work best. Can this be a mere acoustic coincidence? I suspect
not.
Would a future archaeologist, running with Devereux’s logic, then deduce that
20th century bathrooms were, in fact, sacred enclosures where we might ritually
wash and shave before the solemn singing of You’ve Lost That Loving
Feeling into the dark mirror? Perhaps this would be followed by an act of
worship at the strange hoop-shaped object reminiscent of ancient Mayan ball
court apparatus, resplendent upon a porcelain throne.
But where could our womenfolk have chanted, if at all? Has anyone checked the
acoustics of the modern cooker hood recently?
As a footnote, I might add that public toilet cubicles also tend to have a
resonant frequency in the human vocal range鈥攁lthough I would suggest that
any readers wishing to try this for themselves should make sure they do not have
an audience before commencing ritual chanting. Otherwise they may be offered the
opportunity to test the acoustics of police cells鈥攐r even the
sound-damping qualities of padded ones.
Found in space
A virtual-reality system to train people to navigate in the International
Space Station is a typical example of trying to deal with the symptoms rather
than addressing the causes
(3 November, p 24).
Surely a simpler solution would be to paint the wall of a module (including
fixed equipment) a distinctive and soothing colour to denote which way is
“down”. Tunnels and passageways could have one quadrant painted in that colour.
Hatches could be painted in other distinctive colours to denote “north”,
“south”, “east” and “west”.
ABC, you're in
After reading your paragraph on “alphabetical bias”
(Feedback, 17 November),
I consulted my Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Entries
under A to M filled 504 pages, while N to Z filled a mere 244 pages. The average
length of each entry seemed broadly the same, so it would appear that twice the
number of scientists deemed worthy of mention fall into the first half of the
alphabet, compared with those whose names fall into the second half.
Of the contributors, 18 came under A to M, and 17 under N to Z (including the
consultant editor), so subconscious bias on their part can be ruled out. The 2:1
ratio seems very like Feedback’s test with the telephone directory (65 per cent
A to M). It could be that the second half of the alphabet simply contains more
of the “peculiar” letters鈥攕uch as O, Q, U, X, Y and Z鈥攚hich don’t
appear at the beginning of as many names, at least in the West. This is borne
out by my copy of Who’s Who in British History鈥�590 pages for A to
M, 278 for N to Z.
It would be interesting to compare different Western languages, and indeed
others, such as transliterated Chinese.
Of course, the biographies only record those who made it to the top, but your
telephone directory test mirrors it, so the “classroom effect” seems
irrelevant.
Letter
I remember encountering a hypothesis that in school classrooms, everyone gets
nervous when the teacher gives out the marks after a test. The teacher often
begins with the kids whose names start with the letter A. The stress level of
the people with names beginning with Z was kept high longer after each test,
which eventually had a bad influence on the self confidence and academic
performance of those people.
Letter
The reproduction of one of the pages of the manuscript on p 36 seems to show
the flower head of the pineapple mayweed, Matricaria matricarioides,
being “filtered” into large containers or baths where women who seem to be in
pain are splashing about. This plant has been known for many years to be a
herbal remedy for period pains. So I suggest that this page is indeed giving
herbal medicinal advice.
This crystal ball is cracked
Didier Sornette thinks he has found a way to predict stock-market crashes
(17 November, p 30).
Let’s suppose he is right. He does a thorough analysis of
the market’s past behaviour and comes up with something that really works.
Around the world, dealers switch on their computers and see that the market will
crash on, say, 14 April, plus or minus two days.
They duly sell their holdings a few days ahead of time and the market crashes
on the 10th鈥攆our days early. The modellers note the discrepancy and build
it into their model. The next time around, they allow a leeway of plus or minus
five days, and the crash happens eight days too early. Isn’t feedback a
wonderful thing?
Sornette may have found a way of “predicting” the market’s past behaviour,
but that’s not exactly a challenge. Predicting its future behaviour is rather
harder. Anyone who thinks they have found a way to do it would be well advised
to keep it to themselves鈥攑ossibly for selfish reasons, but also because it
will stop working the moment the rest of the world finds out about it.
Language of flowers
Having never heard of the Voynich manuscript
(17 November, p 36),
I was really intrigued and also amused by the various attempts by the world’s best
cryptanalysts to decipher it.
As often happens, clever people tend to seek sophisticated and complex
solutions, but maybe it’s better here to look for simpler methods. The article
mentions that the crudely drawn flowers and plants are unlike anything found in
nature and maybe that hints at a possible solution. Could the drawings
themselves hold the transcription key to decipher the text on each page?
The plants shown in the article reveal leaves and roots that can easily be
counted, and possibly the resulting numbers provide the key to translate the
different pages of the document. Would it not be very ironic if all these years
people have been searching for a key while it was right in front of them all the
time?