Philippa Kaur

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

23 February 2022

Josie Ford
First hands on the moon
Oh, what fun it must be to sit in a tank, and think! It is a thought that strikes Feedback with full vigour as we sit in our stationery cupboard tank – does anyone know how to drive this thing, etc. – surveying the recent paper from UK-based neoliberal think tank the Adam Smith Institute, “Space invaders: Property rights on the moon”.
Feedback isn’t one of those unkind partisans who reflexively associates the word “swivel-eyed” with the output of neoliberal think tanks. Nor are we so unnuanced as to say the paper advocates “privatising the moon”, as some more agitated commentators have. To privatise something, we assume it must be in public ownership first.
No, it primarily addresses the question of what a Lockean-type classical liberal rights-based approach to economic justice demands in terms of adjudicating problems of the individual ownership of land in space. It also argues that the current rules-based international order, based mainly on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, is no longer fit for purpose when various private and national interests are engaged in a new space race and “everyday space tourism is just around the corner”.Advertisement
That’s a mighty long corner, we’ll warrant. But if we are sceptical of the competitive tendering process to allocate land rights on the moon advocated by the institute, it is only because it also suggests a new international treaty underpinning it. This seems to us far too wet and statist. Several frothy free-enterprise outfits will already give you title to a parcel of the lunar surface for top dollar (3 April 2021).We suggest they could be awarded the contract for administering the scheme through some thrustingly free-and-easy “VIP lane” process.
Statistically thin ice
Russell Waugh writes from the Western Australian version of Perth bedazzled by the scoring system in the figure skating at the Beijing Winter Olympics. “The judges were able to add, and even subtract, points for good or poor execution of many different skills, with no common unit of measurement on any of the different skills (sometimes from a negative minimum point and a positive maximum point), add together all points given by seven or eight different judges, and then produce a final ‘measure’ to two decimal places,” he marvels.
We agree that statisticians would also wonder at the lack of any margin of error on the result. But then, that doesn’t appear to be the dodgiest thing going on at the figure skating this year.
However, we were more exercised by the margin of error on the final medal tally of the Great Britain team. We were pleased when, rather late in the day, that turned out not to be zero.
Carbon wormprint
Anyone who, like Feedback, has ever caught themselves wondering how large carbon emissions actually are should look no further than a communication from the Labour party in Hastings, UK, sent in by Gabriel Carlyle.
It celebrates an initiative of the local council to replace every light bulb in Hastings with low-energy LED bulbs. This will lead to an annual saving in just one town-centre car park of 1 tonne of carbon, “the equivalent of 300,000 worms. Layed [sic] end to end they would reach from Hastings to Eastbourne.”
We make that a distance of about 30 kilometres if the worms are laid out by road. This could be messy for all sorts of reasons. We are left wondering whether, if the worms are less than cooperative and just form a writhing ball in the centre of Hastings, that reduces the carbon savings in any way.
Long in the rings
We have a new benchmark in our occasional series on “how old the internet thinks you can be”. Natalie Roberts reports going to the Open University website to order a poster about plants accompanying the new BBC series The Green Planet and finding that the drop-down menu for date of birth allows options back to 1582.
Good for elderly tree sprites who have piled on the rings, we imagine, although it still excludes the most ancient of yews. Our vague concern, prompted by Natalie, about whether birth dates need to be in the Julian or Gregorian calendar leads us to the revelation that the papal bull advocating calendar reform was issued by Pope Gregory XIII in… 1582. We are now wondering whether this is a coincidence, a learned joke by computer elves at the Open University or has some other origin in the deep history of computer programming.
Quantum cat spin
Charles Warren wonders whether a physics-violating perpetual motion machine formed of a slice of falling buttered toast strapped to a cat’s back (29 January) would violate physics if the cat in question were Schrödinger’s cat.
Yes… no… maybe, Charles. We assume the premise of the cat always landing on its feet applies only to live cats. Introducing a potentially dead cat is possibly a new spin too far.
The usual…
It is only recent events that have made it at all notable that Douglas Jabs is the director of the Center for Clinical Trials and Evidence Synthesis at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. But many of you have now noted it, so we note it while on our way out of the room.
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By Bethan Ackerley
Mark Scout, played by Adam Scott, works for a shadowy corporationAtsushi Nishijima/Apple TV+
Severance
Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle
Apple TV+Advertisement
THE first thing you should know about Mark Scout is that he is an employee of Lumon Industries, the nebulous corporation at the heart of new sci-fi thriller series Severance from Apple TV+. He is many other things besides – a cynic, a widower, a former history professor – but it is this fact that has come to define him, right down to his very biology.
That is because Mark (Adam Scott) is one of a select few who have chosen to undergo severance, an irreversible brain surgery that causes their memories of their jobs to be divided from the rest of their life. While working in Lumon’s macrodata refinement department, Mark’s “innie” has no knowledge of who he is outside the office. Likewise, his “outtie” can’t recall how he is treated at Lumon or the nature of the work he performs.
Why sever your job from your personal life? Lumon pitches the procedure as a means of creating a healthy work-life balance. When you head out of the door at 5pm, you really are switching off until tomorrow. For some, there are other benefits: severance means Mark can briefly forget about his wife’s death and hold down a job despite his still-debilitating grief. The severed workers made their decisions willingly, but there are few ways out once the process is complete.
Mercifully, Severance contains no explicit allusions to the pandemic’s effect on our relationship with work, despite the series being filmed in 2020 and 2021. It largely steers away from implausible explanations of how severance is achieved, something that requires suspension of disbelief for anyone with a basic knowledge of how memory works.
Instead, the series is an indictment of what the working world has long been for many: a slow, degrading assault on the soul. Mark’s job is dull, requiring him to sort data packets into folders according to unknown, seemingly arbitrary criteria. He is assured without evidence that his work is of vital importance, and his weak incentives are the promise of a desk toy or a waffle party at the end of the quarter.
Sound familiar? The life of a macrodata refiner is only a few degrees removed from so many jobs. Even the devil’s bargain of severance is just an extreme version of what many employees already do: leave your personal life at the door, do what you are told and, above all, be grateful.
“Severance is an indictment of what work has become for many: a degrading assault on the soul”
It takes the arrival of a new recruit after the sudden disappearance of his colleague Petey (Yul Vazquez) for Mark to start to question this arrangement. Like all severed workers, Helly (Britt Lower) wakes up on a boardroom table and is unable to even remember her name. Her fervent requests to leave are finally granted, only for Helly’s outer self to inexplicably return to Lumon each day, putting her in the confusing position of being both prisoner and jailer. “Every time you find yourself here, it’s because you chose to come back,” Mark reminds her.
Soon, Helly’s defiance rubs off on work-based Mark, while in the outside world he is contacted by Petey, who has reconnected to both sides of his memories at a grave cost to his health. Unbeknownst to each other, the two versions of Mark start to question what Lumon really does.
Severance is a compelling thriller, with a look and feel straight out of a Stanley Kubrick film. Even the most casual Kubrick fan will notice the homages to his style, from the clinical basement where severed workers spend their days to the unnerving stare of Mr Milchick (Tramell Tillman), the department overseer. The Lumon office even sits on the edge of a snowy, isolated town, haunting the residents like a corporate version of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining.
Despite borrowing from such illustrious influences, Severance is a rare beast in that its premise is original. In a viewing landscape increasingly dominated by sequels and remakes, it is a unique concept that provides a genuine commentary on the all-encompassing role of work in our lives. The perspective it offers is disturbing – and will keep you coming back each week, even if, like Mark and his colleagues, you aren’t exactly sure why.

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Almost 200 people died in the German floods of 2021 because experts couldn’t convince them of impending danger. We must rethink how to get through to the public, says hydrologist Hannah Cloke

Humans

| Comment

23 February 2022

By Hannah Cloke
Simone Rotella
IMAGINATION is one of those powerful human traits that sets us apart from other animals. By reading the word “circus”, your brain automatically conjures up a rich tableau of images and ideas. But you don’t need to be daydreaming of clowns to know that imagination plays a vital role in science.
The advancement of this domain intrinsically requires the birth of new ideas. Einstein famously claimed that imagination was more important than knowledge in the formulation of his theories. When researchers test ideas against reality, imagination is hardwired into the process: the point of science is that it allows you to see the future, to look round corners, to extend the capability of human insight. In that sense, imagination in science is alive and well.
But in another sense, it has an imagination problem. I recently gave evidence to two state-level inquiries in Germany into the July 2021 floods in the west of the country. Both inquiries are exploring why almost 200 people died there in a deluge that was forecast accurately several days in advance. It is a complicated question that will probably yield many answers. I believe a lack of imagination may be partly behind this.Advertisement
The scientists couldn’t imagine that their forecasts, delivered in good time and with accuracy, could be ignored. Municipal authorities couldn’t imagine that such dire forecasts might be correct. And many of the people living in harm’s way just couldn’t imagine what a 9-metre wall of water would do, or how badly they would be affected.
The best scientists use many of their human abilities – imagination and creativity, collaboration, communication and empathy – to make discoveries and reach new insights. Yet when it comes to telling people about them, we can turn into robots, unable to deliver important messages.
All of the most compelling ideas are those conveyed to us in ways that we can see and picture and feel. The big bang is a conceptual theory that no one needs to grasp to stay alive, yet it fundamentally changed the understanding of our existence. If physicists were able to describe it only to other physicists, humanity would be all the poorer.
Putting a human face on non-human phenomena can work too. There is good evidence that naming storms leads people to take action to protect themselves. In the UK, we have had plenty of exposure to this recently. The prospect of Corrie, Dudley or Eunice smashing into your home, as opposed to just seeing a generic warning of “gusts greater than 80mph”, engages your brain in a way that encourages a response.
If naming storms works, then how about naming floods? Would people be more or less likely to respond to a warning and move to higher ground if a rising river was renamed Flood Dave? Such a label may be less accurate to hydrologists, perhaps, than saying that a rise in river levels of 5 metres will lead to flooding with a return period of 20 years. But probably more useful to everybody else.
As with the comet-spotting astronomers in the film Don’t Look Up, or the real-life climate scientists that it is based on, it is a tragedy to see danger ahead when no-one acts to avoid it. The most advanced supercomputers running complex simulations are useless if nobody understands the risks that they foretell.
By ignoring imagination when we convey science, we are shirking our responsibility as scientists. If communicating our findings is important – and sometimes, lives depend on it – then we have a responsibility to undertake the task with as much flair, creativity and passion as we use when we do our research. Logic and reason is fine. But when we can’t move beyond the facts, people may die.

Hannah Cloke is a hydrologist at the University of Reading in the UK (@hancloke)

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A new book by neurologist Guy Leschziner looks at the astonishing ways some people’s brains interpret the world, offering insight into how we all experience reality

Humans

23 February 2022

By Carissa Wong

Tasting words is one possible outcome of crossed sensory wires in the brainShutterstock/Brian Mueller
The Man Who Tasted Words: Inside the strange and startling world of our senses
Guy Leschziner
Simon & Schuster UKAdvertisement

VALERIA was 14 years old when she realised that most people don’t see colours and feel textures when they listen to music. Now in her mid-20s, when she plays a piano, bright oranges, purples and yellows flow in and out of her sight, accompanied by fleeting feelings of warmth on her face, an ocean breeze or a sharp sensation around the spine.
Valeria has synaesthesia, a phenomenon in which stimulation of one sense generates sensations of another. People with synaesthesia can’t control how their senses join up and many can’t imagine living with any other form of perception.
In The Man Who Tasted Words, neurologist Guy Leschziner explores how the senses, and the neural circuits that underlie them, shape our view of the world. By introducing us to people with rare sensory capabilities such as Valeria, Leschziner highlights that there is no “normal” perception of reality because what we perceive as being “out there” in the world is entirely generated by activity in our brains.
The book title is inspired by James, another synaesthete, who associates words with flavours. In James’s world, a trip on the London Underground is an uncontrollable buffet of flavours. Holborn station tastes of burnt matches and Liverpool Street of liver and onions.
Leschziner alludes to the fact that synaesthesia tends to run in families, but stops short of a satisfying deep dive into the research on how synaesthesia is linked to genetically determined structural changes in the brain.
As well as chronicling the experiences of people like Valeria and James, who have experienced the world in unusual ways since birth, Leschziner explores cases of sensory alteration that have affected people following illness or injury. Each case reads like a short detective story, with puzzling symptoms pieced together from Leschziner’s perspective as their neurologist, supported by quotes from the individuals themselves.
We meet Alison, whose taste for trout while holidaying in Fiji led to a type of nervous system poisoning that reversed her sense of hot and cold. A sip of icy water now causes her lips to burn, while a warm shower feels freezing cold.
We encounter Nina, who lost almost all her sight after a bout of flu as a toddler caused damaging inflammation in her eyeballs. Starved of visual inputs from her eyes, her brain now hallucinates colourful shapes, cartoons and sometimes zombie faces. This is a condition called Charles Bonnet syndrome, which Nina finds distracting and sometimes upsetting, but is, she says, preferable to darkness.
“Each case of sensory alteration reads like a detective story, with puzzling symptoms pieced together”
Leschziner also meets Paul, who can’t feel pain due to a genetic mutation that affects his sensory nerves. He has had a lifetime of injuries caused by a low aversion to danger because he can’t feel the painful consequences of risky behaviour. This has led to so many bone and joint problems that his movement is restricted. Leschziner explores the emotional toll of the condition on Paul and his parents, who lost a 13-month-old daughter with the same condition after her sepsis went undetected because she wasn’t showing signs of distress.
This book is packed with examples of remarkable perception, but it doesn’t stop there. Leschziner also considers how our senses affect the way we all live our lives. Smell, for example, plays a role in our choice of partners in ways that have driven the evolution of our species. He also touches on more philosophical questions, such as how we know what the world is really like, given that we can’t say with any certainty that our experience of it is anything like that of other people.
Throughout the book, Leschziner makes it clear that every person’s reality is as valid as the next. There are, however, moments where he seemingly assumes that the reader experiences all five senses – and in the “normal” way. At other points, there is unnecessary repetition, which detracts from the message he is trying to get across.
Overall, though, Leschziner provides a thought-provoking journey through the fundamental role our senses play in our experience of life and punctures the illusion that our window on the world is the unflinching truth. The fact that it is anything but only makes it more magical.

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A statistical tool borrowed from ecology suggests that there were originally 40,600 copies of stories about King Arthur and other western European heroes – but only 3648 survive

Humans

17 February 2022

By Chris Stokel-Walker
A scene from the Romance of Lancelot of the LakeThe Print Collector/Alamy
Nine in 10 medieval manuscripts telling tales of chivalry and heroism have been lost to time, according to a new estimate that uses ecological statistical models to understand the volume of literature produced.
Katarzyna Anna Kapitan and Daniel Sawyer at the University of Oxford and their colleagues from around Europe borrowed the ecological concept of the “unseen species model” to understand the volume of medieval literature in the genre of narrative fiction that once existed. These medieval texts include the famous stories of King Arthur and of Lancelot.
An unseen species model is a statistical tool that ecologists can use to estimate biological diversity after surveying an area. Chances are that the survey won’t uncover all of the species in the area, but the model can use the number of observed species and their abundances to estimate how many additional species are present.Advertisement
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“These models use the pattern of the observed evidence to estimate what we’re not seeing,” says Sawyer.
In the manuscript study, the researchers looked at the number of surviving copies of each manuscript – which is a little bit like the abundance of a biological species. Their model states that once all copies are missing, the manuscript is lost – a little like a species vanishing from the study area.
They gathered records of 3648 copies of 799 works written in Dutch, French, Icelandic, Irish, English and German. The model then suggested that these copies are part of a population that originally contained 40,614 copies of 1170 works.
“It’s very valuable for our research that we’re stepping beyond the case studies that dominate our field,” says Kapitan – in other words, it is important to engage with the manuscripts that have been lost as well as those that survive.

Using the statistical data produced, the researchers were able to estimate that 62 per cent of copies of English romance and adventure tales have disappeared, compared with 19 per cent of copies of similar manuscripts in Irish, and 23 per cent in Icelandic.
Finding a way to quantify the missing literature is a “holy grail”, says Kathleen Kennedy at the University of Bristol, UK, because it fills the knowledge gaps medieval scholars have about the context of existing work. “Applying statistical models from ecology offers a tantalising workaround, and the team’s findings generally support existing scholarly assessments,” she adds.
However, Kennedy points out it is still just an estimate – even if it is one rooted in statistical rigour. “In the end, we cannot ever prove or disprove either traditional or statistical estimates of lost literary works, or the manuscripts containing them,” she says.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abl7655

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Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

16 February 2022

Josie Ford
Sleep, perchance to diet
That April is the cruellest month has yet to pass peer review, but there is little doubt February is the shortest. Feedback considers this just as well. Some of our more southerly readers may be sunning themselves on the beach, but in our pre-Arctic stationery cupboard hole, we are just waiting for the winter murk to clear.
It is at this time of year, when we are thinking about getting fit for the bikini season and doing nothing about it, that we want to read, and not question too deeply, headlines such as our own “Getting enough sleep may lower the amount of calories you eat”. The study in question, from a team at the University of Chicago Sleep Research Center, found that an extra hour’s sleep at night allowed participants to cut their energy intake by 270 calories a day – “the equivalent of around three chocolate digestive biscuits”, as the Press Association helpfully put it in its story on the research.
Why stop there? A comforting graph swims into our head of a rising line of hours not consuming calories, crossing over a falling line of calories consumed. The most effective weight-loss mechanism is surely to never get out of bed at all.Advertisement
Getting up the nose
As we take some horizontal exercise, a PR puff is popped our way by a svelte, overslept-looking colleague with a straw hanging from their nose. “To inspire those who struggle to reach their recommended daily intake of water, air up is a world first in food technology that utilises retronasal smell to provide a zero-calorie, zero sugar, zero additive way to drink 100% pure water which tastes flavoured,” we read.
Flavours “from Lime and Orange-Passionfruit to Cola and Iced Coffee” are created by using a special widget to inject bubbles of scented air into the previously 100 per cent blameless water. “We’ve revolutionised the way we drink water. You still have to use your mouth, but the taste has changed!” the company’s website continues. A welcome release for those of us who had been attempting to discover flavour by snorting our water.
Smell my cheese
We note merely in passing a press conference held on 7 February by New York City’s new mayor, Eric Adams, in which he claimed that people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between “someone hooked on heroin” and “someone hooked on cheese”.
Entirely our experience too. Meanwhile, Adams’s own claim that he eats a vegan diet has been called into question after he was seen eating fish. Given that phylogenetically there is no such thing as a fish, we can’t rule out a plant-based variety. As to the cheese thing, as Twitter user Tyler Conway remarked, “let he who has not snorted grated parmesan off the countertop cast the first stone”.
Sperm waving
If not cheese, SpermTree – “a species-level database of sperm morphology spanning the animal tree of life”, recently described in the journal Scientific Data-promises some real, hard science.
What researchers get up to with descriptions of more than 4700 types of sperm, we hardly need to know. We are busy following an atavistic impulse by downloading the spreadsheet and reordering in descending order of sperm length.
Top of the list by some margin is the fruit fly Drosophila bifurca, with sperm over 5.8 centimetres in length when fully unfurled. This strikes us as a mite exhausting for an insect just a few millimetres long. We aren’t surprised to learn elsewhere that this limits its output to a few hundred cells in its lifetime, an apparent limitation on its reproductive chances that has been dubbed the “big sperm paradox”. This is clearly a sticky problem. Still, we are pleased to learn via a graph in the SpermTree paper that publications on sperm morphology are on the up and up.
Toast’s flip side
“Dear Professor Feedback,” Jonty Rix writes, warming the cockles of our heart. “As a social scientist,” he continues, chilling our blood again, “I am perplexed (and a little disappointed) by the failure of your discussions about the landing outcomes of ‘toast’ to fully consider socio-cultural or post-materialist understandings of the possibilities.”
We are beginning to regret reopening correspondence on the fate of falling buttered toast (8 January). But pray continue. “For example, the nature of upness seems a fundamental problem, as does a lack of a rich consideration of the numerous spaces in which toast is experienced, and of course our underlying definitions of toast and butter and the power relations inherent in their production and usage.”
We nod uneasily, wary of saying the wrong thing. We hope some opening into this whole new metalevel of debate is given by Toby Bateson. He disagrees with our assertion, backed up with references, that toast will always land butter-side down in any universe that supports intelligent bipeds (29 January). “By simply making the toast twice as long it will rotate at half the speed and so will land butter side up,” he writes. “The problem arises due to a fundamental flaw in the proportions of toast which can be adapted to solve the problem in any universe, regardless of table height and the intelligence of the bipeds who made the toast.”
We’re off to have a lie-down and burn some calories.
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