Meteors, migraine and conversion
The three accounts of Paul’s experience in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles all seem to me more like a migraine episode. In only one (Acts 22:3-21) does Paul state the men with him “saw the light” 鈥� and only Paul was blinded.
It is hard to describe if you haven’t experienced it, but Paul’s report of light “blazing around me and my companions” comes close to my experience of migraines.
Poquoson, Virginia, US
<b>For the record</b>
鈥� We should have described the organisation as representing wind and marine energy producers (16 May, p 6).
This is both funny and not funny
I enjoyed your new Letters page cartoon (11 April) and it reminded me of one I not long ago: “Ah, Mr Schr枚dinger… About your cat. Well, there’s good news and bad news…”
Sidcup, Kent, UK
More roots needed for our values
I was surprised to read an article on the evolution of human values that didn’t have anything at all to say about race, gender or birth control (18 April, p 28).
It is impossible to have an egalitarian world without birth control, and this technology, along with improved natal outcomes, has been pivotal in allowing under-represented and oppressed people a voice.
Freedom from constant child-rearing allowed women to begin the struggle for equality and also pushed back the age at which young people started families, creating a new demographic we call “teenagers”.
Teenagers are people with well-developed intelligence, a strong sense of generational unity and no family responsibilities. Without them, what chance would we have at social change for civil rights?
Yes, an economy that requires less manual labour for food production is an important piece of the picture, but is far from sufficient for creating a society of egalitarian values.
San Francisco, California, US
If we were all part of one observer…
Those who study paradoxes thrown up by quantum theory always seem to assume that there are multiple observers in the universe, and Anil Ananthaswamy does so explicitly (11 April, p 34).
But if you think of a universe with one observer but multiple points of observation 鈥� think of them as its “eyes and ears” 鈥� then it seems to me that most of the paradoxes disappear.
Once you envisage the universe as having only one observer then problems like entanglement, or the speed of light being the same for all observers, simply cease to exist. A single universal observer would also neatly explain why time travel will never be possible.
Jomtien, Thailand
The need for hacking tracking
Marc Goodman says we must marshal resources on the scale of the Manhattan Project to counter the growing threat of cybercrime (11 April, p 26). In the UK at least, cybercrime of “recorded crime”. So there is no way to determine the scale of the problem, or changes from year to year.
London, UK
Werewolf seaweed of old acquaintance
Your article “Werewolf plant waits for full moon” states that Ephedra foeminea is “the first plant ever discovered to sync its activity to the lunar cycle” (11 April, p 16). It has long been known, however, that other species do this. Marine algae of the order Dictyotales synchronise their reproductive development with moonlight.
Geneva, Switzerland
The cold-house weight loss plan
It is exciting that there is now evidence that brown fat can be useful in treating obesity in adult humans, and that it can be activated by cold exposure or a drug like mirabegron (18 April, p 32). Studies using cold exposure to treat obesity have not been very successful, though. Perhaps they have been too short, or the temperature was not low enough.
If cold exposure were a drug, would it get past the regulators? Cold weather increases the incidence of heart attacks, and regulators pay particular attention to the cardiovascular effects of obesity drugs. As somebody who worked on drugs like mirabegron 35 years ago, I would be delighted if it was discovered that people who take it not only find it easier to control their bladder but also lose weight.
Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, UK
Meteors, migraine and conversion
Christianity’s rise was hardly meteoric: it was insignificant until well after the emperor Constantine’s conversion in AD 313. The descriptions of Paul’s conversion in Acts were written in about AD 100, long after the event, and show every sign of being imaginative fiction rather than serious history writing.
Maybe Paul just hallucinated or, wily cult leader that he was, made the whole thing up.
Liding枚, Sweden
Meteors, migraine and conversion
That was the 1st century. It was believed that strange and wonderful astronomical events happened when great men were born or died. So people naturally assumed that one must have happened when Jesus was born, just as when he died, so one was put into the Gospel stories.
Were Paul a 21st-century man he might have said he had “a light bulb moment”. If our descendants see any of our cartoons with light bulbs over the heads of great thinkers, perhaps they will try to find out how those strange pear-shaped objects worked.
Waramanga, ACT, Australia
Editor's pick: Brains have many lovely purposes
In his letter, Peter Silverman states that the purpose of the brain is to “make decisions with the objective of maximising the chance of passing on… genes” (25 April). This is not really true for humans. The brain can choose to commit suicide for a cause or over lost love. It can choose to do drugs, ski down a mountain or dive off a waterfall, all for fun and all increasing the chances of not passing on genes.
The purpose of the brain is to predict the future from existing patterns and make decisions about what to do in the next moments to choose the future most desired. There is no grand fixed objective; we pursue the objectives driven by our emotions, some of which are to have sex, loving relationships, children and a family.
Others are ambitious, destructive or creative. Many are just selfish engagements or indulgences in food, pleasure, entertainment, curiosity or to gain wealth and luxury.
Life isn’t about just one thing, and the brains of people who cannot reproduce for whatever reason are not just spinning away in some futile attempt to pass on their genes.
San Antonio, Texas, US
Meteors, migraine and conversion
The conversion of St Paul on the road to Damascus might well have been triggered by the sight of a meteoric fireball (25 April, p 8). However, he was also supposed to have heard the name of Jesus, which in Hebrew is Yeshua and in Aramaic Eosha. Do meteorites make such a whooshing sound?
Leeds, UK
Random draws and secret ballots
鈥� We believe it is to trace votes in the UK, except for reasons such as fraud detection. So it is a secret ballot in principle.
Random draws and secret ballots
Niall Firth states that the secret ballot is one of the bedrocks of modern democracy. In the UK, each voter has a number on the register of electors and at the polling station an official writes it on your voting slip. So anyone seriously interested in finding out how I voted could do so.
Horwich, Lancashire, UK
Random draws and secret ballots
A better way of obtaining people’s opinions is indeed required, and at a higher frequency than every five years. A basic requirement is good information. The recent UK election was dogged by innuendo, half truths and dubious statistics.
What is our actual national debt? How many hospitals work well and within budget? We need a base of understandable data that is easy to find, rather than having to dig very deeply, as I needed to do on the above questions.
Great Barrow, Cheshire, UK
Random draws and secret ballots
The article on digital democracy listed four flavours of democracy, and said that “direct democracy” in ancient Athens allowed all citizens to vote on policy (25 April, p 38). There were occasions when all citizens were required to vote, but this was too cumbersome for all decisions, so mostly a subset of office holders was selected.
To the Greeks the views of all citizens were equal, but voting for representatives would favour those who were rich, eloquent, powerful or just well-known. Therefore selection by drawing lots was agreed to be the best method to select representatives.
West Launceston, Tasmania, Australia
<b>Weekly social</b>
“If built around a personality it probably has nothing to do with actual thinking”
Justin Harrison Bj酶rn Lomborg’s proposed think tank in Australia (16 May, p 7)
Trickle-down of ancient times
It would please everybody if the super-rich were taxed at, for example, 70 per cent but given a big discount for investing in projects that aim to counter climate change, say to a 30 per cent rate. This would really boost the economy in the areas that will help the world survive.
Bath, UK
Trickle-down of ancient times
Trickle-down theory is rather older than Ha-Joon Chang mentions (25 April, p 28). It was defined, adopted and then rejected as a failure by Imperial Rome some two millennia ago.
And 2600 years ago, that the root cause of the economic problems of ancient Athens was that the hyper-rich were grabbing all the wealth of the city and spending none of it on public works. He proposed laws requiring the rich of Athens to spend their wealth only on public endeavours which benefited the city as a whole.
Glasshouses, North Yorkshire, UK