Head in the clouds
Further to your article on the perils of storing digital files in the cloud (30 March, p 34), anyone who believes that it’s a good idea to back up documents solely in the cloud, particularly with a single provider, is seriously misguided. If your business relies on digital files or media, you must maintain your own private, offline archive, even if this consists of nothing more than a collection of external hard discs stored in a safe place.
A little knowledge鈥�
Wikipedia’s editorial elite are utterly opaque in their structure and dealings, and their growing power and arrogance has been understood and written about for years (13 April, p 38). They need to be thanked for their Herculean achievement, and stood down. The editorial process must become transparent, rational, fair and truly global.
Wikipedia is indispensable, but the huge variation in the quality of entries has become a headache for users. A vast number of entries carry Wikipedia’s own tags, often years old, identifying problems with the content.
In my own experience these are big issues: related entries, handled by rival editors, may not be linked; additions may simply be appended to, rather than integrated with, existing text, creating repetition; and entries may be “hijacked” by, for example, government and private organisations who contribute (self-congratulatory) text. The list goes on: some entries are straightforward adverts; there is insufficient non-Anglophone perspective (and not just from the developing world); and links to Wikipedia entries in languages other than English are patchy.
Finally, there’s sometimes a failure to ensure that entries are comprehensible to lay readers 鈥� my pet example is the one on the weak nuclear force.
Shy and mighty
Research into the success of shyness as a survival tool in the animal kingdom is a fascinating reminder that animal and human shyness are not one and the same thing (20 April, p 42).
My teenage years were marked by shyness, which resulted in a stammer. This shyness persisted into adulthood, but I taught myself to be gregarious. I became a travel writer specialising in the South Pacific, a solicitor and barrister, and an amateur thespian. And I acquired a voice often described as mellifluous.
I suppose this attests to the fact that the human psyche really is vastly malleable.
Belief over science
In his attempt to explain the difference between the self and an illusion of self, David Hobday is greatly mistaken if he thinks that the Alice in his example has no beliefs (27 April, p 35). She believes that the physical, natural world is all that exists. Her counterpart, Bob, believes that it is not.
The question of the self is one of those philosophical/semantic conundrums on which we must, largely, make up our own minds 鈥� whatever that means.
It is a categorical error to suppose that science has any bearing on that judgement.
Bad connection
I applaud the ongoing search for anything unusual in space that might be a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence (6 April, p 42). But we must be wary of making hasty connections between strange observations and alien life 鈥� a classic example of which was when the signal from a pulsar was attributed to little green men.
The probability that we might detect a Dyson sphere 鈥� a vast structure built around a star to capture its energy 鈥� is not zero. However, what is more likely is that we will spot objects with the same infrared signature as Dyson spheres, but which result from some natural phenomenon not known to us.
Art of psychiatry
In his complaint that psychiatry “started the new millennium a few hundred years behind physics”, Nick Craddock seems not to acknowledge some striking differences between the two disciplines (27 April, p 30).
Psychiatry, being a branch of medicine, is essentially a practical art rather than a theoretical science. Practitioners must listen to their patients with a kind of robust imaginative understanding which physicists simply do not have to use when confronting black holes.
What psychiatry needs is not a single ruling theory 鈥� a “standard model” or “theory of everything” 鈥� but a range of robust conceptual schemes that can fit the huge range of problems it encounters. It is not a lagging horse on the same racecourse as physics, but a response to an entirely different set of problems.
From Jeremy Holmes, School of Psychology, University of Exeter
Craddock is right that academic psychiatry in the UK fails to capture the imagination of the public and young doctors. But his prescription 鈥� lots more neuroscience 鈥� won’t save the day.
Psychiatry is inherently a marriage of art and science, and Craddock therefore needs to encompass the art of human relationships as well as the brain’s biochemistry if he is to see the progress he wants.
No animals required
In your editorial you ask whether society would accept the use of “humanised” animal organs for transplant surgery (20 April, p 3).
As we continue to expand our knowledge of animals, using other species for such purposes becomes more, not less, of an issue. I hope that in the future, by using 3D printers and synthetic tissue, we will dispense with both this dilemma and the risk of an animal disease spreading to humans via an interspecies transplantation.
Time figured out
Lee Smolin says that “we need a new starting point for explaining the directionality of time” (20 April, p 30). I’d like to point to the work of Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine and his book The End of Certainty, which is about unstable systems and irreversible processes. It describes how to extend both classical and quantum mechanics to include the irreversible flow of time.
Leaky universe
Andrew Pontzen highlights that we have not yet found any exotic particles, such as WIMPs, that can account for dark matter’s observed influence on ordinary matter in the universe (23 March, p 32). Maybe we are, quite literally, looking in the wrong place.
The alternative cosmology of M-theory postulates the existence of multiple parallel universes, or “branes”, alongside our own. It also suggests that the weakness of gravity relative to the other fundamental forces can be explained by its ability to “leak” between these parallel universes.
I suggest that what we observe as dark matter haloes enveloping clusters of galaxies might really be the result of the gravitational influence of counterpart structures in these parallel universes, leaking through into our own.
Martian feast
While I thoroughly approve of the first one-way astronauts to Mars being vegetarian (27 April, p 12), I’m intrigued by the suggestion that “meat and fish will be off the menu, at least at first”.
Do the Mars One colonists propose to go huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ the indigenous wildlife? Or does it mean that dissent among the cooped-up crew may lead to one of them ending up on the menu?
Just relax
Thorsten Wirth describes his push-ups cure for hiccups (13 April, p 28), so I thought I’d add my method: I just relax the muscle that is causing the hiccup. I learned how to do this in the same way as I learned to control the muscle that wiggles my ears.
Entangled thinking
I was rereading an article on quantum theory (17 December 2011, p 37) while looking after my 8-year-old niece, Felicity. She asked me what I was reading and I said: “It’s about entanglement and spooky action at a distance. The thing I don’t understand is how scientists keep track of these two separate but entangled photons while sending them over long distances by different routes.”
“Easy,” said Felicity, “they just paint one red and the other blue.”
Can anyone else enlighten me as to how we keep track of entangled photons?
Catch me if you can
In your look at various aspects of the human body (16 March, p 32), you mention that humans are among the champions of long-distance running. However, I believe the real champion of mammalian endurance is the good old kangaroo.
Due to the extraordinary energy efficiency of its hop, a big red kangaroo can travel at 30 kilometres per hour for up to 8 hours at a time and cover remarkable distances.
鈥� Not so fast. Biologist David Carrier, who has studied the impact of human biomechanics and endurance on our ability to hunt, cites recorded examples of Indigenous Australians using long-distance pursuit to exhaust and catch kangaroos ()
Lost in translation
Joop van Montfoort (27 April, p 35) is guilty of wishful thinking if he imagines that LOL (laughing out loud) stems from the Dutch word for fun lol.
As it happens, the Dutch word u translates as “you” and the Dutch for “chicken” is kip, but then UKIP is a political party in the UK. If Brits had any understanding whatsoever of Dutch, I’d be well and truly amazed.