Letters selection box
The Letters editor
Every now and then we receive letters that don’t quite belong on the letters page but that we would love to publish anyway. As it’s Christmas we have decided to ignore our own rules and start with a few of them. Thanks to everybody who has written to us this year 鈥� and apologies that we couldn’t print everything.
With best wishes for the season
Numbers game
Graham Clarke of Edinburgh, UK, wrote to tell us about a remarkable three-level coincidence that he noticed when working on one of our Enigma puzzles.
The number 113 is prime, as is its mirror, 311. The squares of each, 12769 and 96721, are also mirrors of each other. For the treble, this second pair are respectively the lowest and highest of all five-figure squares that do not have repeated digits.
Can you think of any similarly remarkable coincidences buried in numbers? If so, head here and tell us about them. We will publish our selection of the submissions in early 2011.
A limerick for CERN
The 杏吧原创s at CERN fill with pride, As the Protons are set to collide.
They’ll crash and they’ll splatter, When they measure the Matter, Will the Higgs be revealed, or still hide?
Keith FitzPatrick, The Netherlands
Catechismic chaos
Did nature in creation spurt with math as part of One,
Or are numbers a religion making all obey to Sum?
Whatever be the truth of it I never feel less grave,
Than when Nature to The Numbers, refuses to behave.
Anna Tambour, Australia
The end of the world
When you planned your super collider, we doubted it would work.
Now we marvel at the way you hid its magnets underground, energised its vital tubes in secret, threaded complex circuit wires, connected all the parts.
Then you flipped the switch, caught me in its gravity.
You reassured it would not be the end of the old universe, not one last big bang.
I realise now if you’re wrong we will never kn
Norman Staines, UK
Raised hands
Your Instant Expert on the evolution of language says the selection pressures that encouraged our heavy reliance on speech rather than sign language remain elusive (4 December). I have never used sign language, but it must be tricky addressing someone who is not already looking at you. I suppose there is no equivalent of shouting or whispering.
It would be worth consulting someone who habitually uses both, to learn more about the merits of the two modes.
The editor writes:
鈥� Good point. The counter-argument is that there are certain disadvantages to speaking out loud, such as alerting predators and prey to your presence. It is also precluded in noisy environments.
Gentle robot hands
Since I used to farm chrysanthemums, growing around 80,000 cuttings a year, I was interested in your report on bean-bag “hands” for robots (30 October, p 23). Each of my cuttings was handled five times, which cost money and increased the risk of spreading disease.
I followed every avenue searching for methods to mechanise these five processes, but because of handling problems all my efforts failed. Now retired at 84, one glance at the technique illustrated made me think that Eric Brown’s group has a potential solution.
Now, chrysanthemums are peripheral to the demands of agriculture and horticulture, but the same problems are faced in the harvesting, grading and packing of fruit, planting trees and perhaps even catching insects for food. Within 15 years low-paid seasonal workers will become a scarce resource. Who or what will carry out these tasks then? Can this technology solve some of these problems in time?
What culture?
Kate Douglas’s description of the evolution of human culture (20 November, p 38) reminded me of an analysis I reported in the book . This used archaeological and historical data to show that the world population growth curve is punctuated by steps of cultural evolution, each represented by a technological revolution.
The world population in 1390 (guns and ships revolution) was 312 million, in 1790 (second agricultural revolution) it was 625 million, in 1870 (industrial revolution) it was 1250 million and in 1950 (medical revolution) it reached 2500 million. In 1990, during the information technology revolution, the population was recorded at 5000 million. The population doubled increasingly rapidly perhaps because twice the number of people took far less time to conceive the next idea that sparked a new phase of growth-enhancing cultural evolution.
Following this model, the world population in 2010 should be 10,000 million. Fortunately, we have fallen short of this value, perhaps because the information technology revolution helped in the realisation that growth cannot go on forever. If so, this may lead humankind to invest the rewards of each subsequent stage of evolution in quality, rather than quantity of life.
From Peter Weinrich
To refer, as you did, to “culture” as art, architecture, music, language, myth, to say nothing of the stuff we grow bacteria in, and then to extend it to what consenting fish do in their seaweed seclusion, is surely to strip the word of any meaning whatever.
It is not good enough to merely imply that culture is behaviour passed down through one or more generations via social learning. If that is what it is supposed to mean, then say so, and let us not confuse it further with orang-utans blowing raspberries at each other in their version of pillow talk.
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Extreme living
The “Frozen solid” part of your article on life in extreme conditions (13 November, p 36) reminded me of a sick goldfish I kept in isolation in a plastic bucket of water one very cold winter. The bucket of water froze solid for several weeks, goldfish and all. When the water eventually thawed, to my amazement the goldfish, which I had assumed was dead, started swimming about, apparently none the worse for wear.
Attention all polar cod and Antarctic nematodes 鈥� make way for the humble suburban goldfish!
From Syed Reza
If tardigrades have managed to survive in space for 10 days, or live without water for 120 years , then surely there must be life somewhere on Earth’s neighbours, such as Mars. Looking at these tough and resilient creatures here on Earth, the question is no longer “does life exist on Mars?” but rather “why haven’t we discovered life on Mars yet?”.
Tehran, Iran
Beneficial illusions
Visual illusions may be more than a by-product of efforts to “make sense of partial visual details” as you quote Susana Martinez-Conde saying (18 September, p 38).It may be that our brains actively seek differing interpretations of the same image. It would surely be an advantageous trait for any prey species whose foe had a tendency towards camouflage, or operated in poorly lit conditions.
Neurology or nurture
It is apparently becoming more popular to claim that belief in God or gods is hard-wired as a result of evolution, as mentioned in Michael Brooks’s review of Jesse Bering’s The God Instinct, (20 November, p 51).
I was lucky enough to have parents who inflicted on me neither religious nor atheistic beliefs, and it didn’t take me long to classify God with fairies, ogres and wizards, in contrast to things that actually exist. So if belief in God is hard-wired, it seems that the wiring must be rather flimsy and easily disconnected.
Perhaps in most cases a good dose of childhood, or indeed adult, indoctrination is needed to get it working properly.
Be sensible
Feedback ought to have checked the dictionary before ridiculing the “sensible section” of Robert Caillau’s barbecue-thermometer (22 May). I refer you to the full definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, Volume XIV: “Sensible heat: heat perceived by the touch and measured by the thermometer”.
Balancing chirality
I liked Marcus Chown’s analogy of a pair of gloves to explain chirality (15 May, p 28) but you don’t need the mirror he suggests using to turn a left-hand glove into a right-hand one: just turn it inside out.
It might not help to solve his “fiendishly complex” calculations, but it has a practical advantage. If you are right-handed, the right-hand rubber glove you use for washing up wears out much more frequently than the left. By turning your surplus left-hand gloves inside out you can restore the balance.
Two Gordons
Feedback refers to the instance of a paper authored by two different men, both named Alan W. Harris (8 May). I am one of two G. S. Brimbles living in Adelaide, South Australia. On one occasion we both booked the same flight. An amused check-in operator seated us together so we could meet.
Your feet's too big
When reading of the difficulties that may beset cellphone networks, I noticed the size of the feet of the young men in your photograph (30 October, p 44). The women’s feet look normal, but I’d guess the men’s are UK sizes 15 to 20. Is this the camera angle, are they clowns’ shoes, or what?
For the record
鈥� Bob Coecke and Samson Abramsky used a graphical form of category theory in their new approach to allow computers to understand language (11 December, p 10).