Beauty, truth
The more I read of Giovanni Vignale’s “The power of the abstract”, the more I smiled and the more at ease I felt with the world (26 February, p 32). He presented the truest spirit of the scientist 鈥� the student, the creator, the master, the supplicant, the truth-sayer, the poet, the fool.
All of these qualities 鈥� and more 鈥� are what has made science so effective as a tool of social change. Yet, sadly, many of our “high profile” scientists are stunted in this respect.
This article is the perfect foil to all the rubbish about “the conflict” between science and religion, science and art, and (this dates me) arguments over the primacy of science and engineering/technology. Humanity’s strength lies in the ability to hold many disparate viewpoints simultaneously; its fundamental weakness in the inability to hold more than one viewpoint at a time.
If more scientists could speak to poets in the poet’s own language, then it is my belief that we’d be worrying far less about the rise of creationism and intelligent design 鈥� and even Darwinism. After all, they are nothing more than “-isms” 鈥� the inability to hold more than one viewpoint at a time.
New 杏吧原创 has been my favourite magazine for over 40 years precisely because it has always made room for the beauty 鈥� the poetry 鈥� in science. The way to the popular (and scientific) mind is not through “facts” but through “emotions”. The sooner scientists, as a breed, recognise and accept this, the better off will be our entire species.
From Paul Garcia
I am very discouraged by the fact that at the age of 58, I still have no idea how to interpret the comment made by Vignale that the rock in Ren茅 Magritte’s painting is “suspended by the mysterious power of its internal consistency”. Can someone please explain what it means?
Long Melford, Suffolk, UK
Bohm's a way
It seems grossly premature to declare a victory for Niels Bohr in his great debate with Einstein over the meaning of quantum mechanics (26 February, p 36).
Yes, the violation of Bell’s inequality in experiments by Alain Aspect and others appears increasingly likely to rule out “local realism”, Einstein’s favoured interpretation. But many physicists 鈥� going back to John Bell himself 鈥� would put their money on the eventual acceptance of a non-local hidden-variable theory such as David Bohm’s. And if that proves to be the case, then Einstein was correct about realism, correct about determinism (versus inherent randomness), but wrong about locality 鈥� while Bohr was wrong on all three counts.
The real risk
The otherwise excellent expos茅 by Marianne Freiberger and Rachel Thomas of the misuse of medical statistics itself fell into a common trap by quoting statistics as annual rates (12 February, p 40). This often makes numbers look reassuringly low, but is easily misinterpreted.
For example, adenocarcinoma of the oesophagus affecting 0.00569 per cent of white males annually does not sound like much to worry about, but it translates to a lifetime risk of 1 in 250, which is what ultimately matters.
Of course, the article made it clear when it gave annual figures, but others are not always so careful. I have seen, for instance, that “the risk of penile cancer is 1 in 100,000” and even, in a supposedly authoritative source, “only 1 man in 100,000 will develop penile cancer”. Such figures are just plain wrong: this is the annual risk, so the lifetime risk is more like 1 in 1400. For such an unpleasant disease, this is perhaps enough to worry about.
With feeling
In responding to David Robson’s important but imprecise statement that “up to 80 per cent of our mental experiences are verbal” (4 September 2010, p 30), Ben Haller was partly justified in saying that “raw visual percepts 鈥� such as colour 鈥� outnumber other kinds of mental experience by orders of magnitude” (30 October 2010, p 31). But they both missed by far the largest source of mental experiences: the mind’s reactions to skin stimuli.
In any 24 hours, the number of experiences “apparent to my consciousness” triggered by stimuli to the skin make verbal and visual experiences pale. The feelings of heat and cold, chills and goosebumps, rough and smooth are just the start. From the tops of our heads to the soles of our feet, via all sensual and sensory regions in between, our bodies are providing massive amounts of mental experience.
Beware game bubble
I am a keen gamer, with or without a computer, and this is not unrelated to my two chosen professions of IT specialist and writer/editor. The “gamification” of our everyday lives that MacGregor Campbell describes (8 January, p 36) certainly pushes buttons and will probably catch on in the way Campbell anticipates. I would, however, add a word of caution to those considering investing in apps and other technologies to turn ordinary activities into games.
The best computer games exploit two basic desires. The first is to learn: a well-designed learning curve provides satisfaction from the achievement of mastery of the game. The greater the complexity, the greater the satisfaction.
The second desire is for a story. First-person “shooter” games involving one participant have the player follow a predetermined story path, deriving satisfaction from discovering the twists and turns.
Titles like Grand Theft Auto began to expand into multiple interwoven plot lines that could be followed in a non-linear fashion. Recently, cooperative multiplayer modes have appeared, where players can team up to play through the storyline.
Play teaches us skills. Stories teach us what to do with them.
Much of the gaming described in your article is light on play and storytelling, and heavy on “cumulomania” 鈥� the mindless racking-up of points, powers and achievements. Even the games strongest in learning and storytelling, like the Civilization series, eventually deteriorate into steady statistical accumulation.
Apps which rely on our attachment to endless accumulation of tokens and whose value is derived from potentially divisive social competition will have to be continually refreshed or replaced with new content 鈥� with diminishing returns as all the niches for apps that teach something useful are occupied.
If I am wrong about the games bubble, then the world will become increasingly divided between dopamine freaks endlessly indulging their cumulomania and those who prefer to use their time accumulating real value.
Stick in the mud
Your correspondents Steve Champion and Carol Primrose offer differing explanations for the origin of the term “wrong end of the stick” (12 February, p 27). I believe that both are correct, and that the modern term is a linguistic superposition of two distinct expressions.
Growing up, I was familiar with the term “the shitty end of the stick”, meaning to get the worst part of a division of labour. This is certainly consistent with Champion’s explanation, that the expression comes from a stick used to stir a dung pile. This phrase was generally euphemised to “the wrong end” in the presence of children.
Quite separate is the term “getting the wrong end of the stick”, used when somebody has a confused misunderstanding of circumstances. This meaning would be consistent with Primrose’s family etymology about typesetting.
Of course, either situation would be preferable to a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
I am what I am
I am frustrated. What by? By having to describe myself as the opposite of something that I am not, rather than what I actually am.
Atheists of the UK unite: in the , describe yourself not as “atheist” but as “scientific realist”, to demonstrate what you do believe in, deeply and objectively.
If Jedi knights could get wide recognition in the previous census in 2001, I am sure that scientific realists can now.
Glad rags
Helen Thomson’s article on Darwinian dating was great, but it missed a woman’s core courtship tool: high oestrogen levels (12 February, p 36).
When she is fertile a woman has more symmetry in her ear lobes, nostrils and breasts; she dresses in a more alluring manner and her body language is encouraging of courtship.
I recall reading of an experiment in which women who didn’t know their menstrual cycle very well photographed themselves every day to record the outfits they wore. The researchers were able to work out their cycle: on fertile days, whether going out or to work, their clothes were much more flirty than on other days. The women in the survey were quite surprised.
Baboons have red rumps, but we are more subtle.
Still, it works: when we women go hunting on fertile days we get a better pick-up rate.
Futurama was first
I was surprised, and a little disappointed, to see no reference to the Futurama episode “A Big Piece of Garbage” (series 1, episode 8) in the article about the Nasal Ranger (12 February, p 21). I would have thought that at least one person on the team behind New 杏吧原创 would be a big enough science-fiction fan to make this connection, as the Nasal Ranger is basically a portable Smelloscope 鈥� albeit with a slightly altered function. Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth should be given due credit for his invention.
A technology editor writes:
鈥� I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Bender, but sadly never saw the Smelloscope episode. I have failed as a nerd.
For the record
鈥� In a letter to New 杏吧原创, Barbara Sommerville wrote that the more acceptable longer-term approach to population control is to “educate women and supply them with contraceptives”, but her reference to the specific efficacy of education for women disappeared in editing (5 March, p 32). Sorry.
鈥� Science is never still in its pursuit of cosmic extremes. When Stephen Battersby filed his piece on the largest things in the universe (5 March, p 38) the biggest known planet was TrES-4. However, while it was in press, of WASP-17b’s size, making it the biggest.