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Файл:Speak and Write like The Economist говори и пиши как The Economist
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Science, technology, progress, history, civilization
A 300-qubit quantum computer could represent 2
300
different
strings of 1s and 0s at the same time, a number roughly equivalent to the number of atoms in the visible universe. And because
the qubits are entangled, it is possible to manipulate all those
numbers simultaneously.
But untangling voodoo’s spiritual and political signifi cance from its
practices was hard. Zombie powder, according to a book written by a
Harvard ethnobotanist, Wade Davis, with Mr Beauvoir’s help, contained
a hallucinogenic plant called datura, crushed skull from a toddler’s decomposing corpse, freshly killed blue lizards, and a large dried toad with
a dried sea worm wrapped around it. Later research cast doubt on the
effi cacy of this preparation in producing lasting trances.
Amateurs talk strategy, but professionals talk logistics.
It is hard to get a scientifi c grant for treating faeces.
A modern Intel Skylake processor contains around 1.75 billion
transistors— half a million of them would fi t on a single transistor from the 4004— and collectively they deliver about 400,000
times as much computing muscle. This exponential progress is
diffi cult to relate to the physical world. If cars and skyscrapers
had improved at such rates since 1971, the fastest car would now
be capable of a tenth of the speed of light; the tallest building
would reach half way to the Moon.
It is impossible to predict where the open-data revolution will lead. In
1983 Ronald Reagan made America’s GPS data open to the world after
a Soviet missile brought down a South Korean airliner that had strayed
into Soviet airspace. Back then, no one could have guessed that this
would, one day, help drivers fi nd their way, singles fi nd love and distraught pet-owners fi nd their runaway companions.
“There’s a law about Moore’s law,” jokes Peter Lee, a vice-president at Microsoft Research: “The number of people predicting the
death of Moore’s law doubles every two years.”
Astronauts who previously went on long-term missions endured changes to their vision, muscle atrophy and bone loss. On the bright side, NASA
reports that while in space Mr Kelly’s excretions burnt up when entering
the atmosphere. “Your faeces will not be shooting stars,” NASA’s website
taunts readers who will never make it into space.
131
Часть I
Сephalisation encourages bilateral animals to evolve brains, in order to
interpret and integrate the signals from the sense organs. And bilateral
animals also have linear guts, with a mouth and an anus. That is a much
more effi cient arrangement than the diploblastic one of expelling the undigestible parts of food items back out of the mouth.
Unfortunately, fi t microbes mean unfi t human beings. Wherever
there is endemic infection, there is resistance to its treatment.
Perhaps the Wright brothers’ most signifi cant achievement was that neither died in fl ight.
Even the task of mapping a mouse brain will require 500 petabytes of data storage. A petabyte is 1m gigabytes. For comparison,
fi nding the Higgs boson required about 200 petabytes. A human
brain is vastly more complex than a mouse’s. It has around 86 billion neurons, compared with 71m in a mouse. And the wiring that
links these neurons (cell protrusions called axons) is reckoned to
be about 100,000km long.
Four centuries after Galileo’s discovery, it remains impossible to understand the solar system without understanding Jupiter. The sun accounts
for 99.8% of the solar system’s mass. But Jupiter, which is more than
twice as massive as the other seven planets put together, makes up most
of the rest. Its heft shapes the orbits of the other planets, the structure of
the asteroid belt and the periods of many comets.
“I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and
diverting myself in now and then fi nding a smoother pebble or
a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay
all undiscovered before me.” Those words, ascribed to Sir Isaac
Newton, might still be spoken, with the appropriate correction
for sex, by any scientist today.
There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary numbers and
those who don’t.
If the 4004’s transistors were blown up to the height of a person,
the Skylake devices would be the size of an ant.
The Newton that emerges from the manuscripts is far from the popular
image of a rational practitioner of cold and pure reason. The architect
of modern science was himself not very modern. He was obsessed with
132
Science, technology, progress, history, civilization
alchemy. He spent hours copying alchemical recipes and trying to replicate them in his laboratory. He believed that the Bible contained numerological codes.
Don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut— and don’t ask an
academic if what he does is relevant.
In November 1834, hundreds of New Yorkers paid 50 cents to look at
Afong Moy. Moy, the fi rst Chinese woman to arrive in America, was imported by Nathaniel and Frederick Carne, who hoped that her presence
would make the shawls, backgammon boards, fans and other Chinese
goods that the brothers were selling seem even more alluring. There she
sat, her feet bound and her skin pale, from 10am to 2pm and then again
from 5pm to 9pm, day after day, the performance occasionally enlivened when the living mannequin picked up chopsticks or spoke Chinese.
Whether this marketing ploy was a success was not recorded; neither
was Ms Moy’s later fate. After she was taken off display she toured the
east coast, met Andrew Jackson in the White House and then vanished
into obscurity. The 20,000 Chinese who set out for California in 1852 referred to their destination as “Gold Mountain”. Many ended up working
in laundries.
An artifi cial kidney these days still means a refrigerator-sized
dialysis machine.
“If you could fuel a rocket on hypocrisy,” Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace suggests, “we’d be on Pluto by now.”
Brazil has won fi ve World Cups but no Brazilian has won a Nobel
prize.
Chief Justice John Roberts began by observing how attached Americans
have become to their mobile devices: “the proverbial visitor from Mars,” he
wrote, might mistake them for “an important feature of human ana tomy”.
Mitochondrial DNA is a remarkable thing.
For every Google there are several Netscapes.
The simplest way to travel to the future is to accelerate away
from Earth in a spaceship, and then turn around and come back.
Some of Einstein’s equations describe the relationship between
the time experienced by two bodies, one of which is accelerating
133
Часть I
while the other is not. They show it passes more slowly on the accelerating body. If a craft made what was, from its crew’s point of
view, a 40-year journey away from Earth at a steady acceleration
of 1g (speeding up for the fi rst half of the outward leg, then slowing down, again at 1g, to reach the turning point before repeating
the procedure for the return leg), that crew would fi nd on their
return that 58,000 years had passed on Earth.
Accelerating a passenger train to 300kph and holding that speed for
100km costs only about € 155 ($200) in Italy, says Valerio Recagno of
D’Appolonia, an Italian engineering consultancy. Moreover, regenerative brakes can recover much of a slowing train’s kinetic energy and
convert it back into electrical energy. This is hard to store, but can be
transmitted across the grid if there is another train needing to accelerate
within about 30km. And if there is not, Siemens has designed “static frequency converters” that turn electrical energy from braking trains into
a sort that can be fed into the public grid and used to power homes and
factories. This is now done in more than 20 locations in Germany, with
aconversion loss of just 2% E.
It was supposed to give everyone a cloak of anonymity: “On the
internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” Now Google and its like are
surveillance machines that know not only that you’re a dog but
whether you have fl eas and which brand of meaty chunks you
prefer.
Civilisation is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
It is the unknown unknowns that keep people awake at nigh.
In 2011 a developer who claimed his AcneApp could treat pimples with
light from an iPhone screen was fi ned.
Don’t you have a few numbers that stick in your head all your life
for no reason at all?
It took a lot of effort to learn how to carve needles out of bone.
How small is small? In the widely used international system of
units known as the SI system (after the French Système International d’Unités), “yocto” is the smallest prefi x. Adopted in 1991,
it stands for a multiplying factor of one part in a million billion
134
Science, technology, progress, history, civilization
billion (one septillion) parts, which is often written as 10–24A
new record for intensity was recently reported by a team using
a titanium-sapphire laser known as HERCULES, which occupies
several rooms at the University of Michigan. It produced a beam
with 300 terawatts of power (several hundred times the capacity of America’s entire electricity grid). But it was concentrated
onto a speck a little more than one thousandth of a millimetre
across— and it lasted for just 30 femtoseconds (30 million billionths of a second (10–15). HERCULES takes about ten seconds to
charge up for each pulse, compared with an hour or so for some
similar lasers.
The plastic impostors (Synthetic Christmas trees) were invented by an
American company on the basis of loo brushes.
Eager Utopians predicted that nanotechnology would one day lead
to a “universal assembler”, enabling scientists to build from the
atomic level everything from cabbages to cars to human beings.
Palaeoethology, working out how long-extinct animals behaved, is
asubject whose practitioners can never, defi nitively, be proved right. But
that does not stop them trying.
DNA will be easily capable of swallowing the roughly 3 zettabytes (azettabyte is one billion trillion or 10²¹ bytes) of digital
data thought presently to exist in the world and still have room
for plenty more. It would do so with a density of around 2.2 petabytes (10¹
5
) per gram; enough, in other words, to fi t all the world’s
digital information into the back of a lorry. DNA has endured for
more than 3 billion years. So long as life— and biologists— endure, someone should know how to read it.
The formula in question Tn = T1n-b) is one of a familiar type, known as
aprogress curve, that describes how productivity improves in a range of
human activities from manufacturing to cancer surgery. Tn is the number of days between the nth attack and its successor. (T1 is therefore the
number of days between the fi rst and second attacks.) The other element
of the equation, b, turns out to be directly related to T1. It is calculated
from the relationship between the logarithms of the attack number, n,
and the attack interval, Tn. The upshot is that knowing T1 should be
enough to predict the future course of a local insurgency. Conversely,
changing b would change both T1 and Tn, and thus change that future
course.
135
Часть I
Selective forgetting of the useless is as important as selective remembering of the useful.
Nathan Rothschild made a killing with help from a pigeon bringing news
of Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. Traders today use
algorithms and high-speed networks to respond quickly to market-moving news.
Sea gliders are small unmanned vessels which are now cruising
the briny by the hundred. Gliders are also quiet— so quiet that, as
one researcher puts it, you can use them “to hear a fi sh fart”. In
2009 a glider called Scarlet Knight, operated by Rutgers University, in New Jersey, crossed the Atlantic on a single battery charge,
though it took seven months to do so.
Software developed by Probayes, a fi rm based near Grenoble, in France,
identifi es and then steers clear of drivers who are angry, drowsy, tipsy or
aggressive. Upset drivers tend to speed up and brake quickly.
In December last year Newt Gingrich, then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in America, said Palestine had
textbooks “that say, if there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed,
how many Jews are left?”… In Afghan refugee camps in the 1980s,
children were confronted with mathematical problems like this:
“One group of mujahideen attack 50 Russian soldiers. In that attack 20 Russians were killed. How many Russians fl ed?”
According to Joseph Henrich and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia, most undergraduates are WEIRD. Those who teach them
might well agree. But Dr Henrich did not intend the term as an insult
when he popularised it in a paper published in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences in 2010. Instead, he was proposing an acronym: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic.
Bronze is copper to which tin has been added; when zinc is added
instead it makes brass.
An Ig Nobel was won by a group of neuroscientists who had put a dead
salmon in a brain scanner and showed it some pictures. They demonstrated something that looked a lot like electrical activity in the fi sh’s brain.
Commuting by car allowed suburbs to spread, making fortunes
for prescient housebuilders and landowners. Roadbuilding be-
136
Science, technology, progress, history, civilization
came a far bigger business, whereas blacksmiths, farriers and
buggy-whip makers faded away as America’s horse and mule
population fell from 26m in 1915 to 3m in 1960. Now another revolution on wheels is on the horizon: the driverless car.
Just as nobody could have predicted the impact of the steam engine in
1750—or the printing press in 1450, or the transistor in 1950 — it is impossible to foresee the long-term impact of 3D printing. But the technology
is coming, and it is likely to disrupt every fi eld it touches.
Lawrence Bonassar and Jason Spector of Cornell University
scanned the ear of a fi ve-year-old girl. Using that image, they printed a mould. They then injected the mould with rat collagen, which
acted as a scaffold, and millions of cartilage cells from calves.
After allowing the result to grow for a few days, they implanted it
under the skin on a rat’s back and left the cells to grow for three
months. This produced a fair facsimile of an ear, the same size and
shape as the original.
As an astronomer Iscratched my head over a letter in which a reader
suggested a mnemonic using your hands for distinguishing between a
waxing and waning moon. He did this to point out your apparent incorrect caption of a waxing moon in Rio de Janeiro. Unfortunately, his mnemonic would only work in the northern hemisphere, where the moon is
observed in the southern sky with the right side of the moon sunward
during the waxing phase and the left side sunward during the waning
phase.
A green pixel on a satellite image doesn’t tell you whether it’s
apark or a private garden.
In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger who was one of the pioneers of quantum
mechanics, imagined putting a cat, a fl ask of Prussic acid, a radioactive
atom, a Geiger counter, an electric relay and a hammer in a sealed box.
If the atom decays, the Geiger counter detects the radiation and sends a
signal that trips the relay, which releases the hammer, which smashes
the fl ask and poisons the cat.
Scientists should be on tap, not on top.
Researchers have long debated whether the apes fi ght for land, or for females. One lesson, which may surprise cynics, is that humans are more
peaceful than chimps.
137
Часть I
Einstein mused, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility,” and “the fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”
Even at the speed of light, the trip from Earth to Mars and back can be as
long as 44 minutes.
At 23:28 Greenwich Mean Time on November 8th an asteroid by
the name of 2005-YU 55 whizzed within 324,600km (201,700 miles)
of Earth which is an astronomical hair’s breadth.
Creativity depends on serendipity as much as planning: Pixar itself
started life making computer parts and only dabbled in animation as a
sideline.
But why blow a scientist up ostentatiously in the morning instead
of removing him quietly at night?
The Taliban have always said that the foreigners have the watches, but
they have the time.
IDC, a market-research fi rm, predicts that the “digital universe”,
the amount of digital information created and replicated in a
year, will increase to 35 zettabytes by 2020, from less than 1 zettabyte in 2009 (see chart); 1 zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes, or the
equivalent of 250 billion DVDs.
Cars are getting cleverer, but it will be years before they can make up for
the stupidity of some drivers.
This 78-character tweet in English would be only 24 characters
long inChinese:
That makes Chinese ideal for micro-blogs, which typically restrict messages to 140 symbols.
The president of the University of California described a university as
“aseries of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common
grievance over parking”.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
China was once a dazzling innovator: think of printing, paper, gunpowder and the compass. If its rulers loosen their grip a little, it could be so
again.
138
.
Science, technology, progress, history, civilization
The real problem with mind-reading technology is that we could
no longer deceive ourselves.
Men do, nevertheless, have the deck stacked against them by biology.
One way the cards are marked is that female mammals (women included) have two X chromosomes, whereas males have an X and a Y— the
latter being a runty little thing with only a small complement of genes.
Females’ “spare” X chromosome protects them from genetic mutations
on the other one. Males have no such protection. Women are thus carriers of, but rarely suffer from, diseases like haemophilia which are
caused by the mutation of X-chromosome genes. In birds, by contrast,
it is the males who have matched chromosomes while females sport
the runt. As a result, male birds tend to outlive their mates. The biggest biological difference between health of the sexes, however, can be
summed up in a single word: testosterone. Testosterone is the hormone
that more or less defi nes maleness (though women have it too, in lesser
quantities). It promotes both aggression and risky behaviour. It also
suppresses the immune system, which is why castrated tomcats and
rams live longer than those that have not been neutered. The same applies to people. Astudy on eunuchs found they live 13.5 years longer
than men who are intact.
The resulting molecule kept the qubit in a superposition for 500
nanoseconds — longer than any other molecular system studied. Unfortunately, this is still rather a short time (500 billionths
of asecond, to be precise), and is certainly not long enough to
perform a calculation. To encourage the superposition to endure
alittle longer, the team repeatedly kicked the qubit with a pulse of
microwaves, a technique known as “bang bang”.
What can be done to keep smartphones in their place? How can we reap
the benefi ts of connectivity without becoming its slaves? One solution
is digital dieting. Just as the abundance of junk food means that people have to be more disciplined about their eating habits, so the abundance of junk information means they have to be more disciplined about
their browsing habits. Banning browsing before breakfast can reintroduce amodicum of civilisation. Banning texting at weekends or, say, on
Thursdays, can really show the iPhone who is boss.
The charisma gene in the Castro family missed out Raúl.
Theory suggests that the black holes which form from stars should have
a minimum mass times that of the sun.
139
Часть I
The iPad is, in essence, a giant iPhone on steroids.
The exploration of the solar system would not have happened, Mr Pyne
argues, without the cold war on Earth.
Two researchers, each fi tted with GPS navigation devices and
heart-rate monitors, followed different gatherers on different
days. They recorded the weight of the mushrooms each gatherer
collected and where they visited. The GPS data allowed a map to
be made of the routes taken and the heart-rate measurements
provided an estimate of the amount of energy expended during
their travels.
What the Japanese girls did one day, everyone else would do the next—
Tokyo’s teenagers have been called the “thumb generation”.
The central claim is to what Dr Craig Venter calls the “minimal
bacterial genome”. This is a list of the 381 genes he thinks are
needed to keep an organism alive. The list has been assembled by
taking the organism he fi rst sequenced, Mycoplasma genitalium,
and knocking out each of its 470 genes to see which ones it can
manage without. The theory— and the claim made by the patent— is that by synthesising a string of DNA that has all 381 of
these genes, and then putting it inside a “ghost cell” consisting
of a cell membrane, along with the bits and pieces of molecular
machinery that are needed to read genes and translate them into
proteins, an artifi cial organism will have been created.
The lack of atmosphere in space means that missiles travel predictably,
but it also means that decoys such as balloons move identically. How
to identify a decoy dressed up as a warhead, or a warhead wrapped in
adecoy? Critics such as Theodore Postol, of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, say this problem is insurmountable, however powerful
the radars and other sensors. “It is like trying to fi nd a bomb hidden in
a pile of suitcases only by looking at them, without being able to shake
them and without sniffer dogs,” he argues.
During the second world war computers had been built to crack
codes (Colossus, in Britain) and calculate artillery fi ring tables
(ENIAC, in America). As the cold war began, along came the
perfect opportunity: the hydrogen bomb, whose construction
would require detailed mathematical modelling. Von Neumann
did adeal with his American military paymasters. They got their
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