Ringing the changes
The expansion of online schooling in the US (8 September, p 6) brings to mind Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s quote “the medium is the message”. It is a view that is as applicable to education as it was to television.
When the graduates of mass education were needed as workers in manufacturing, schools featured bells, everyone trudging from one room to another, and other sorts of rote activity.
The default role envisioned for the graduates of mass education has now changed – we need workers willing to be tethered to computers all day. The medium of internet-based education expresses this message well.
Dark energy, solved
I really enjoyed your article on neutrinos and the questions they pose for particle physics (8 September, p 30), but surely the answer is obvious. We live in a 10-dimensional space; at the point where matter is created, antimatter forms in a slightly different dimensional arrangement. This shadow universe exerts a gravitational pull – we call it dark matter – while the antimatter-matter interaction produces dark energy. With tongue in cheek, problem solved.
Striding out
Your article inspired by amputee Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius exploring transhumanism, in which technology is used to enhance human capabilities, is interesting (11 August, p 26). The science of bionics is making great strides as technology improves. Maybe we will soon be holding a third Olympic tournament for enhanced humans.
A censor's dream?
You report the growing take-up of radio-over-fibre technology, which can distribute wireless internet to remote locations via a single cable (15 September, p 18). US analyst Jeff Heynen is quoted as saying that an entire town’s wireless traffic could be carried by one such cable.
The internet’s major feature is its multiple connectivity. To limit it to a single medium is to allow it to be controlled, whether by commerce, governments or whoever owns the cable. No wonder it is being championed in China, one of the most repressive countries for internet freedom.
Inspired minds
Surgeon Hutan Ashrafian attributes Egypt’s brief affair with monotheism to visions experienced by the pharaoh Akhenaten as a result of temporal lobe epilepsy (8 September, p 10). I am sceptical of such “medical materialism”, which tries to explain away religious experience as the result of altered states of consciousness due to ill health.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks claims that polymath Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote illuminated books of visions in the 12th century, describes images of the glittering halos seen during a migraine attack. Sacks points out, however, that what really matters is the inspiration she drew from what is a common experience.
Such revelations arise not from the disordered brain, but from the inspired minds of such people.
Special case
Further to your look at the rights and wrongs of athletes with spinal injuries who self-harm in order to prime their cardiovascular system for exercise (1 September, p 10), we must accept that it is their right and privilege to use their unique physiology to overcome their unique problems.
Invisible aid
Reading your article on touchscreen keyboards that adapt to a user’s style to improve typing accuracy (2 June, p 23) left me with a question. Is this best done by software that creates a modified keyboard which is kept invisible behind the standard display, or by showing this personalised layout?
The editor writes:
• The researchers , but accuracy was only improved when changes were kept invisible, which presumably avoids the temptation to try to adapt to a new display.
Still just a machine
Pondering AI consciousness, Ben Goertzel asks how close we are to creating a machine that thinks like us (8 September, p 18). This question is misguided.
For starters, we know virtually nothing about how we think. We know which bits of the brain “light up” when we perform different mental tasks, but little about what is going on at the neuronal level. So we have no real idea what the phrase “thinks like us” means, let alone the ability to recognise a machine that can do the same.
Even more misguided is the jump from how we think to consciousness. The real hallmark of consciousness is not thinking but sentience – that is the occurrence of qualitative characteristics such as the smell of a rose, an itch, a toothache.
It seems possible, even likely, that we will create machines that are more and more intelligent and eventually our superiors when it comes to mental processing. But no one has yet come up with a convincing reason why that would mean we have managed to create something conscious.
Up in smoke
In response to letter writer Martin van Raay wondering about spontaneous animal combustion (15 September, p 29), a cat at a nursing home in London is said to have burst into .
For the record
• In our interview with Joseph Bock (8 September, p 25) we accidently moved the University of Notre Dame from Indiana to Illinois.