Hiccup cure
Whichever way you spell ’em, I know how to get rid of ’em (8 February, p 16). I have never had to suffer the indignity of more than three or four hiccups at a time since discovering the solution.
1. Upon being assaulted by the first hic, immediately inflate lungs to “max”, preferably while standing up, and hold breath until step 4.
2. Arch neck and thorax backwards as far as balance allows to ensure good stretch of the oesophagus. You should feel a slight pulling in the chest.
3. Having created a little extra room in the thoracic cavity, top up the lungs while maintaining this position.
4. Continue as long as possible (without fainting). When breath is released and you have relaxed, the hiccups should have completely gone.
5. Very occasionally this routine fails to work the first time round. If it does fail, simply repeat steps 1 to 4.
Personally, I have never had to perform this routine more than twice before the problem disappears.
I hope this information will be of relief to sufferers.
Obesity and trust
I’d like to respond to the letter from Kate Hancock-Cooke from Wisconsin (1 February, p 25), following up the report that patients don’t trust overweight doctors (4 January, p 7).
The prejudice she refers to is not against overweight members of society in general. It is against that aspect of the physique or psyche that can be perceived to betray hypocrisy, given the person’s profession. It is the incompetent business executive, the dishonest politician and the atheist member of the cloth who are to be feared, not simply those who are overweight.
Unfortunately, none of these attributes is as immediately apparent as obesity and it is possible for these people to attain a position of power before they are discovered.
No match for go
The inadequacy of chess programs as a measure of progress towards artificial intelligence is at last being recognised (18 January, p 5). The computer has scarcely begun to challenge the capacity of the human mind.
Emanuel Lasker, world chess champion and one of the greatest players, famously said about the Chinese board game Go: “It is something unearthly鈥f there are sentient beings on other planets, then they play Go.”
For many years, considerable effort worldwide has gone into creating programs that can play Go and the result has been abysmal. Substantial prizes are on offer for even a modestly successful program. The best a computer has achieved to date has been to beat the equivalent in Go terms of a very ordinary club chess player 鈥� provided the player does not make unorthodox (and probably bad) moves.
As for tackling the top Korean, Chinese and Japanese professionals 鈥� the equivalent of Kasparov and Kramnik 鈥� the results would be laughable. I suspect that they could concede to the computer the Go equivalent of a queen and two rooks and still beat it.
It is only necessary to play through a professional game to realise that the subtlety and profundity of the human mind is way beyond the capacity of any computer.
As Jonathan Schaeffer suggests, Go should be the yardstick of progress towards AI. A Turing test which included an attempt to teach a computer to play Go would very quickly distinguish a human from a computer, without the need for a pointless conversation.
The message to AI scientists is clear: don’t waste your time with a trivial game like chess. At its present level of development, any intellectual game that a computer can play better than a human must be trivial.
As the saying goes, “Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting.”
Dental ineptitude
As a dentist, I feel it necessary to point out that, although the toothbrush may be the invention that most of us feel that we cannot do without (1 February, p 7), it also seems to be the invention that most of my patients have trouble using effectively. Maybe the instructions need to be easier to understand.
Bush's blessings
Daniel S. Greenberg probably believes his sense of injury about the new US administration arises from George W. Bush’s treatment of science, but his writing appears to be that of a Democrat frustrated at having lost control of the ball (8 February, p 25).
His favourite issues include arms control, abortion and affirmative action, all highly political. He should start by counting his blessings. America is not ruled by a tyrant who thinks that his political will can override the laws of nature.
Indeed, I myself have mile-deep misgivings over Bush’s understanding of scientific issues. But who among the signatories to the Kyoto protocol understood any better? And would any Democrat really care to take the bull by the horns to persuade Americans to accept restriction on their cars?
Finally, in Colin Wheeler’s cartoon what is the President really closing his ears to 鈥� is it science, or is it a scientific cloak on an antitheistic or antimoral agenda? Simply being scientists does not give people a greater grasp of ethical and spiritual issues, any more than it does the ability to play political poker.
Carry on caveman
I was dismayed to read in an In Brief item that “Far from tearing flesh from hunks of meat, our cave-dwelling ancestors grew strong by pigging out on milk and cheese” (1 February, p 22).
Your writer has clearly researched this article by watching Carry On films. Six thousand years ago, our ancestors were competent farmers, living in substantial timber-framed houses, building great stone tombs for their dead, making pottery (to which your author refers), and rearing domesticated animals, from which they got milk and, it now appears, made cheese.
They managed their environment in a manner at least as complex as medieval farmers did some 5000 years later.
GM hogwash
In response to Peter Melchett’s appeal to European Union regulations as the fount of all wisdom on whether gene flow really matters, I believe it is worth pointing out that the EU has never had a sensible approach to the risks of genetic modification (25 January, p 26).
The entire basis of the precautionary approach to GM is based on total hogwash. A gene for herbicide resistance introduced into a plant by conventional techniques 鈥� by embryo rescue, protoplast fusion or irradiation, as well as by inbreeding from weedy relatives 鈥� can be distributed anywhere and everywhere with no problems, but one produced by genetic engineering can’t.
Our entire environment, including organic food, is loaded with bacteria and other organisms that carry many of the marker sequences, antibiotic resistance genes and pesticide-metabolising genes that anti-GM nuts complain of, and have forced governments to legislate against.
So any survey of plants, crops and foods that looks for such “foreign DNA” sequences is bound to come to the conclusion that GM has irrevocably spread and that “big business” has “contaminated organic purity”. This is not a sensible way to walk forward in the world.
Hidden patterns
Calculating &pgr; to 1.24 trillion decimal places may be a useful and enlightening exercise (Feedback, 1 February). Since the digits are believed to be wholly “random”, the incidence of repeated consecutive digits, for instance, should be predictable. So finding the number of occurrences of, for example, consecutive zeros would be important for determining whether the digits are really random or not. If they are not, the philosophical implications could be very significant.
Of course, such a discovery would prompt evaluations of the transcendental number e to a trillion places as well.