What’s in a name?
This month, Sam Bankman-Fried returned to the head of the nominative determinism parade of tech entrepreneurs, following his portentous appearance earlier in the year (28 May). Several readers told Feedback how much they admired the exciting rise and even more exciting plummet of Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency organisations, the FTX exchange and the Alameda Research trading firm. Forbes magazine estimates that Bankman-Fried was worth about $17.2 billion a few weeks ago. It now that he isn’t.
Before Bankman-Fried the Worth-Billions became Bankman-Fried the Un-Worth-Billions, another tech entrepreneur lost a far greater amount. Elon Musk was widely hailed as being the world’s richest person. Then things happened, one of which was that Musk took over Twitter.
Advertisement
Musk may still be the world’s richest person. Before Twitter, he was already the boss of four much-touted companies: Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and the Boring Company. (That’s the case as this column is being written, but we live in volatile times.) A newly published paper called may have little to do with that – but, metaphorically, it is pungent. The paper includes this passage: “the principle underlying the mechanism by which diverse structures of musk compounds generate a common musky odor quality has been a long-standing mystery”. The study includes mention of an organisation called .
This may be a time to mention, again, that this year’s Ig Nobel economics prize went to three scientists in Sicily for , why success most often goes not to the most talented people, but instead to the luckiest.
Non-Newtonian milk
Research is “the mother’s milk of feeding [and] fueling the economy”, according to .
Politicians who wish to extend that metaphor can now, 25 years later, turn to a study published in the Journal of Biomechanics. The paper explores the physics of how breast milk behaves in its pulsatile flow to an infant. The title is Reader Trevor Lipscombe brought it to Feedback’s attention.
Metaphor-makers take care, though! The paper warns that its calculations aren’t the whole story. The scientists did their analysis using only one milk sample. They based their analysis on a simplified – very simplified – model of the geometry of the human milk duct system. And – metaphor-makers be especially aware – the calculations involved seven parameters, some of which may be a little unfamiliar to politicians, from consistency index to infinite shear viscosity.
The paper offers a stark warning, intended for other scientists who study the fluid dynamics of breast milk. Any politician working up a metaphor about mother’s milk can regard that message as a cautionary screech: “Further investigation is required to quantify non-Newtonian effects.”
Politicians might also learn from an exemplary 1982 study called . It says that “the value of mother’s milk in Indonesia exceeds the gross monetary value of tin and coffee, approaches that of rubber and imported rice, and twice exceeds the annual national budget for health”.
A manly pursuit
Menelaos Apostolou and Chistoforos Christoforou at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus looked at the singularity in some lives. Their new study is called . It advises that “low scorers in mating performance found the identified advantages more important than high scorers”.
In 2020, the pair did a 47-factor analysis of the art of flirting. They devised an inviting title for their study: They extracted information from 808 Greek-speakers, focusing on one goal: “for our purposes, flirting refers to covert signals sent between individuals to indicate sexual interest and begin courtship”. The 47 factors range from “good looks” to “intense interest in me”. The study concludes that: “Sex difference [sic] were found for most of the factors.”
Apostolou has widely explored the psyche of men, and the behaviour of women who interact with them. His 2011 paper acknowledges the complexity: “A possible criticism of the theoretical framework developed here is that… male parents look for young men as spouses for their daughters, and young men do not have the time to build an impressive collection.” Apostolou finds that objection to be iffy in several ways, one of them eyebrow-raising: “As the ethnographic record indicates, it is common for older men to keep adding wives to their family unit who are given to them by other men.”
He also recently produced what may be a singular self-help guide. Its title:
Got a story for Feedback?
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.