Face blindness
I have been interested in the article on face blindness (25 November 2006, p 34) and the letters commenting on it (23 December 2006, p 27). David Fine’s description of recognising “types” (such as a red-bearded man) but not individuals has been my experience ever since an aneurysm burst in my brain a little over two years ago.
I now joke that I remember faces the way other people remember names: through a verbal association with their attributes (Jack Black has black hair). When I first came out of hospital, I could no longer read a non-digital watch either, but that ability has since returned. My neurologist tells me that each of these functions 鈥� facial recognition and telling time 鈥� takes place in a specific part of the brain, which has been identified by PET scan. In fact, infants only develop the ability to recognise faces as their brains develop and start out identifying their mothers by their smell.
Kate Hopkinson asks whether other people have “voice blindness”: I have always had that problem. I can’t bear it when people don’t announce who they are on the phone but only say “hello,” expecting you to recognise their voice.
Black hole turf war
If Michael Fitzgerald had indeed actually seen a black hole surrounded by a ball of lightning ploughing a furrow through an Irish peat bog in 1868, as Pace VanDevender suggests, where did it go (23 December 2006, p 48)? Maybe it had been buoyed up by magnetic fields and induced currents while observed, but how would a 20-tonne black hole then simply disappear without an explosion of any kind?
If it had then reverted to more expected behaviour for such a beast, and plummeted down through the crust to gobble up the Earth’s core, how long would it be before we noticed?
From Mark Millard
The supposed mysterious event left behind a square hole: is this not evidence that what was observed was human activity? I conclude that what was actually being described was someone carrying a lamp coming down the hill to cut turf for fuel. The light bobbed up and down for 20 minutes or so while the cutting proceeded, then, work done, the light was put out and the cutter returned home. The “trench” of churned-up ground was simply the path worn by the cutter over many visits to the hole.
The only mysterious thing here is why such a mundane incident was reported as if it were something strange. Perhaps the whole story was concocted as a joke at the expense of the Royal Society?
Leeds, UK
The editor writes:
VanDevender argues that the mini black hole would probably sink into the Earth; but it would not gobble up the planet because, as the article indicated, quantum rules prevent it eating much and it could be stable for billions of years. Many could pass through the Earth, or be captured by the Earth, and we would not necessarily have noticed. And though the square hole is odd, the events were reported as being observed in daylight.
Monkeys' memory
You quote Robert Hampton as saying “there is nothing an animal can do to tell us about the quality of its private experience” (16 December 2006, p 28). He has shown that the rhesus monkeys he works with are aware of the difference between knowing a thing for certain and being unsure: they can do something as complex as deciding how much of a potential reward to stake on their response to a memory test.
Would it therefore be possible to add a stage to the experiment to find out whether they evaluate their own performance? Might they not be able to judge, at the end of the experiment, how well they performed 鈥� perhaps using another reward incentive?
They may be able to remember, for example, how long it took them to “win” their prize, and be able to communicate this; in doing so, they would be relaying their feelings about “their private experience”.
Colour by number
I enjoyed your festive, light-hearted holiday issue 鈥� until I found the statement “Robotic art dates back to 1973” (23/30 December 2006, p 60). Back in 1963 my aunt, Joan Shogren, collaborated with Jim Larson in the engineering department at San Jose State College in California.
The computer filled in a grid at random, except as constrained by “rules of art” entered on punched cards, specifying colour, colour harmony, rhythm and composition. There were no colour printers in those days, so students and faculty were invited to colour in the resulting pictures.
Price control
Your reference to the “time riots” in England in 1752 could leave the impression that the rioters thought they were losing 11 days of their lives (23/30 December 2006, p 40). Maybe some thought that, but most were upset with good reason. Rents were paid quarterly, and the landlords still expected a full quarter’s rent. No price watchdogs back then.
Server service
We are told that distributing 10 megabytes of information uses the energy equivalent of burning 900 grams of coal (16 December 2006, p 24). It would be interesting to calculate the energy consumption necessary to bring us the same amount of information in the form of, say, old-fashioned photographs 鈥� taking into account the production of the paper, the chemicals, transporting them, processing the photographic film, posting the pictures to friends via mail trucks, and so forth.
Are there significant economies of scale when producing certain kinds of material that is viewed only on the web rather than in the form of very numerous copies of large printed reference volumes? Certainly, web servers concentrate energy demand in one place and time, but it is not at all obvious whether more or less energy is used overall in a society where photographic and reference materials are held on servers rather than as hard copies.
From Colin May
If a large part of the power used by these data centres is used to keep them cool, why not put them somewhere cool to start with: northern Alaska, Iceland or on top of a mountain, for instance? Who knows or cares where the web’s servers actually are? These areas often have interesting alternative sources of power, too.
Zurich, Switzerland
Compulsory free will
Forget free will, says Jim Haigh (23/30 December 2006, p 26). If it is so easy, he ought to be able to rewrite his letter to remove any assumption of free will from it. He tells us that “facing up to the fact that we lack free will seems to be so difficult.” If he is right, then it is either compulsory (for people like him), or impossible; each of us has been determined either to reject free will or to accept it.
His letter is littered with other appeals: for us to choose to “make better progress”, to “consider”, to “live as if” and “to remember”. Each of these are exhortations to make certain choices.
While determinists cannot do without the language of free will, I will continue to believe that the free will versus determinism debate remains a live one.
Design's purposes
Douglas Axe of the Biologic Institute is far from the first to believe that bacteria had intelligent designers (16 December 2006, p 8). In the 17th century, New England settlers took it as a sign of divine providence that the Native Americans were dying of various diseases. Mark Twain in his Letters from the Earth similarly attributes a lot of bacterial misery to an intelligent designer.
Widdershins winds
Feedback muses how, in the absence of an analogue clock, the concept of clockwise and anticlockwise can be expressed (9 December 2006). We could use the nautical terms “veering” and “backing”. Veering occurs when the direction from which the wind comes changes in a clockwise direction 鈥� for instance from the east to the south 鈥� and backing is the reverse.
From Steve Fankuchen
Several years ago I visited a maths class at one of America’s top private high schools and asked them what they thought the 1949 movie Twelve O’Clock High was about: was it probably about smoking pot in the cafeteria during lunch break? All either agreed, or said they had no idea.
I then explained to them that it was about aerial combat and that the title was a method of location entirely contingent on an understanding of analogue clocks. Conversion to digital clocks would do more than delete certain “facts”: it would eliminate a way of viewing the world 鈥� an intellectual impoverishment.
Alameda, California, US
Paradoxical design
Your editorial “It’s still about religion” leaves me somewhat bemused (16 December 2006, p 5). Not because of its advocacy of “good science” over the intelligent design movement, but because of the individuals it refers to whose zealotry requires they play a game that might be called “I’m the king of the (intellectual) castle”.
In order to appear to have some mystical superiority, they contradict the bleeding obvious. To suggest that the complexity of existence is proof of intelligent design is a non sequitur.
Clearly, the opposite is true. Had some super intelligence designed everything, it would have been far simpler. It can be explained logically only by random (even chaotic) evolutionary events 鈥� unless, of course, the designer wasn’t all that intelligent.
Unstable tables
Your article on unstable tables (23/30 December 2006, p 38) will come as no surprise to anyone who studied mathematics at Exeter College, University of Oxford, under Dermot Roaf.
This was one of the “interesting problems” he set to first-year undergraduates each year: he had been setting the same problem for many years before I encountered it in 1996. The proof was exactly the same as the thought experiment in the article.
From Charles Sawyer
Like many theoretical scientists, Andr茅 Martin perhaps lacks broad experience when he claims that any wobbling square table with equal legs can be made steady by rotation. I have such a table on our veranda, which wobbles no matter how it is rotated. Our veranda has uneven paving slabs with abrupt edges: his proof applies only if the ground surface is continuously differentiable (no steps) around the circle of rotation.
Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia
鈥� The editor writes:
To be fair to mathematicians, Burkard Polster and his colleagues do point out in their paper that the ground has to be continuous for their proof to work ().
Doesn't smell right
Thank you for exposing the still mostly secret extent to which the developers, manufacturers and purveyors of scented products and scented environments are attempting to manipulate consumer behaviour through smell (16 December 2006, p 36). Although the odours to which consumers are being exposed may not be “drugs” in the opinion of psychologist Rachel Herz, they do meet the US Food and Drug Administration’s definition: they are physiologically active chemicals intended to affect human behaviour.
Regardless of their odour, they contain volatile ingredients that are readily absorbed by the blood via the lungs, by the brain via the olfactory nerve, and even by the skin and eyes. Given that the risks of chronic exposure to synthetically scented products and environments are unknown, and that even brief exposures produce acute symptoms in people with chemical hypersensitivity disorders such as asthma, migraine and multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), I urge consumers to boycott such products and environments.
From Steve Chalmers
Thank you for making visible the use of fragrances in retailing. I am so sensitive to some fragrances that even sub-odour-threshold doses can trigger my cough variant asthma. I can become slightly intoxicated 鈥� even getting the hangover afterwards.
As a result, retail spaces into which fragrances are dispensed, even at levels I cannot smell, are in effect inaccessible to me. Disability legislation mandating accessibility would seem to apply.
These fragrances do not simply dissipate. They are deposited onto surfaces and absorbed by them. People like me cannot enter some stores, because items we buy will have absorbed so much fragrance they can trigger coughing or intoxication in our own homes.
As a consumer, I want full disclosure of the ingredients of any fragrance dispensed into any publicly accessible space, and ventilation of any such space so the substances don’t accumulate.
Roseville, California, US
From Nic Brough
I have been vaguely aware of the way smells affect me for a long time. I am struck by how wrong your list of smell associations is 鈥� or how it differs from mine. You say melon is associated worldwide with “happiness and youth”; for me it’s lethargy. Lavender is “masculine and stimulating” 鈥� except that it evokes weakness for me, and femininity for a lot of people I know.
I am glad that I don’t fit the generalisations. That gives me an extra line of defence against the marketeers 鈥� I’m truly sick of people trying to make me want stuff that I do not need.
But it worries me that some companies might start impregnating their products with smells. What if I buy a games console and then find that it smells of lemon, which I find draining and depressing and to my girlfriend is nauseating and revolting? What if I go back to the shop and say “I want my money back because this smells bad”?
Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, UK
Placebo problems
As a practising physician in the UK’s National Health Service, I would love to be able to prescribe “pure” placebos occasionally, when I feel it is in my patient’s best interest (16 December 2006, p 42). A multitude of factors, however, prevent me doing so.
The trusts that manage hospitals are terrified of anything that smacks of paternalism, or over which they might be sued by a disgruntled patient 鈥� so they would not allow it. I am sure that the General Medical Council, which regulates my profession, would take a similar view.
Current dogma is that patient, not doctor, knows best, and that the use of pure placebo would be legally regarded as deception. I do not know of a pharmacy that would dispense a pure placebo, as they, too, are tightly bound by regulations governing cost and “evidence-based prescribing”.
As a result, I am sometimes forced to prescribe “impure” placebos 鈥� vitamins and the like. I often see pleasing results in cases where there is a significant psychological component to the symptoms. This has always struck me, however, as being in some ways a greater deception than using a “pure” placebo.