Back in the day when I was medical correspondent for London Radio Service (amongst other things), I used to peruse the British Medical Journal. Following the heavy papers about myalgic encephalopathy there were articles written by doctors in a lighter vein. One of the authors was in the navy reserve, and he told the story of being in a frigate in the Red Sea, sitting round, nothing much going on, until a native boat came alongside, with a man in it pointing frantically towards his mouth.

So they took him on board – the man spoke no English – and took him down to the sick bay. The doctor looked in his mouth.

“Well, I suppose he’s got a root abscess,” he said. “But what can I do? I’m not a dentist.”

The sick-berth attendant replied, “Not to worry, sir, I expect it’s all in the book.”

“What book?”Continue reading “Whither experts?”

Brian Greene on The Music Instinct (PBS) says there is a black hole that exhibits a frequency 57 octaves below what humans can hear. Hmmm. One octave is a power of two, so if the lower limit of human hearing is 20 Hz, the frequency he describes is 2^-56 Hz. This is 10^-17 Hz. So one cycle lasts 10¹⁷ seconds, or 3 x 10¹⁰ years, which is roughly the age of the universe. Go figure.

Abstract

Einstein has long been a favorite subject for the media. Their presentations of his ideas to the general public are however invariably nonsense, replete with illogicalities and wrong science. The result is to undermine the standing of science as a rational activity that can be understood and overseen by the public. The implications for democracy in our increasingly science-oriented world are profound.

Once when Einstein had to fill out some form that asked his profession, he wrote “photographer’s model.” Portraitists constantly pestered him not just because he looked exactly like what a scientist should look like. The story of his work and his life had captured the imagination of the whole of the literate world, as they continue to do today. Everyone has heard of Einstein and everyone knows he is important. But the remarkable thing is that hardly anyone can tell you why. And even more remarkable, over the years, the media have eagerly seized on Einstein as a story to be explained to a breathless public, and without exception they have failed.Continue reading “Einstein Superstar”

It’s not often you get a chance to add insult to insult, but the Obama administration has succeeded. The other day British Prime Minister Gordon Brown came to visit, and he and Obama exchanged gifts, as heads of government do. You may recall the consternation that echoed around the chattering classes at the present our president gave the prime minister: a set of DVDs. Even if they didn’t come from Netflix, many people would have gone for something more dignified.

But the story doesn’t end there. It turns out that, back in London one evening, Brown decided to watch a movie. So he slipped one of the DVDs into his player. Except it would not play. This wasn’t a technical problem, like if you buy a toaster in France it won’t work on American electricity. No, no. It was to do with the region code on the DVDs. They were set only to play in North America. To play a DVD in Europe, you have to buy it in Europe.
Continue reading “Dividing the World”

By artificial muscle, I don’t mean painted-on six-packs on the abdomen that one can get in spray-tan establishments in Hollywood. Artificial muscle is another term for electroactive polymers. These are magical plastics that when you put an electric current through them, they get smaller, or bigger, or change their shape. You can get them to exert considerable force, and they promise to revolutionize a host of everyday and not-so-everyday devices. While artificial muscles could certainly be a boon as prosthetics to people with a variety of disabilities, that’s a ways in the future yet. More immediately, we’re surrounded by machines that do things using electric motors, and the basic design of electric motors hasn’t changed since the mid-18 hundreds. A different way of creating motion has huge possibilities.
Continue reading “Artificial Muscle”

Education, education, education. That’s the mantra we hear endlessly now from politicians, captains of industry, and pundits of all stripes. Education is the answer to our nation’s ills. But is it?

In 1967 an education journal reported that “…at the headquarters of a well-known corporation the elevator operators used to be grade school graduates. Now they have to be high school graduates. Veteran employees say that there has been no noticeable improvement in the elevator service as a result.”

When I showed this story to an eminent educator friend of mine he was totally unsurprised. The point, he said, was that the kind of people who used to get grade school diplomas now get high school diplomas. So it is natural for the employers to raise the bar. In other words, the diploma indicates not what you know but what kind of person you are. The content of the education is immaterial.Continue reading “Does college make any difference?”

Good news that the cyberbullying woman will probably get off. However appalling was the end result, it is very important that we do not send people to jail for doing things that are not against the law.