A few predictions for the next decades

When the mind is not busy with professional obligations, it starts thinking about other things. Mine has not settled down yet to anything specific but it's floating around looking for things to attach itself too. These are some idle thoughts it has had about the future:

The whole concept of 'carcinogen' will be completely reconceived. The current understanding of how specific substances cause uncontrolled cell growth will turn out to be so completely misunderstood that we might as well have ignored everything said about the subject (cause, not treatment, which is understood rather better).

Abortion will go the way of slavery, which it resembles in many ways, in terms of the arguments used to defend it. This will not be because of anything new discovered about the neurophysiology of the foetus, but as a result of changes in orthodox  thinking. In other words, it will be 'liberals' who reject it.

The red Indians will turn out not to be the first humans in the Americas and there will be a social revolution  of some kind in the USA as people realize they owe them nothing that they don't owe to others. In S America it is harder to say, given the politics of the region.

There will be a revolution of some kind in professional sport. People will lose interest in the sports which are constantly being exposed as corrupt. This will affect the Olympics as well as politicians distance themselves from those sports that have become unpopular and stop funding them.

Speaking of politics, stability and prosperity will appear in unexpected areas of the world, and in some of the most stable countries the governments will take one too many liberties with the freedom and patience of their electorates. Specifically, the EU will collapse and some governments will not survive it.

And more immediately, England will win the Ashes.

Stonehenge as Acoustic Experiment

There is a general assumption in anthropology that the larger and more pointless the structure, the more terrified were the people of their gods.
Stonehenge is a case in point. However it was built, and whoever built it, it took a tremendous amount of work. You need a very good reason to do it, and the best reasons of all are to keep the gods happy. They are, after all, the ones who will keep your crops growing, your enemies cowed, and your body healthy. If the idea was just to know when to plant the crops, or when to expect an eclipse of the moon, a simpler, smaller and, above all, lighter, solution would have served. Stonehenge is what it is because, for some reason, it had to be like that.
So was it built in order to reproduce the interference patterns of sound? It’s very tempting to say, err, probably not, but Stephen Waller has worked hard to make his research sound reasonably sensible.
He says, and he’s probably right as far as it goes, that moving around in the space between two pipers piping we experience louder areas where the sounds reinforce one another and quieter areas where they almost cancel out, as though a large stone block were in the way. Ancient Britons were fascinated by this phenomenon, attributed ritual or mystic significance to it, and built Stonehenge in order to reproduce it permanently on a massive scale.
When addressing the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a certain panache and self-confidence are required, especially if the work is a touch speculative. Steven Waller seems to possess these qualities. At least he was heard. I shall leave it to the experts to decide whether there is any merit to his theory, but it’s certainly imaginative.

With Opened Eyes

Regular commenter Vincent, with whom I have often enjoyed a little gentle sparring, takes me to task in a comment on the previous post for pinning an entire rant on three words spoken by a woman called Meg Rosoff as a throwaway in an interview about something else, and (inadvertently) putting that rant in her mouth.

He is, of course, quite right, and I have amended the post, and here I link to the interview, and to her own site, so readers can get a clearer idea of who she is and what she believes, and she can respond if she wishes.

I stand by my opinion of those who want to ban private education, some of whom I have named and quoted in previous posts. Although I paraphrase the arguments used to some extent, I do not exaggerate them at all. And the list is not even complete. But Meg Rosoff did not say any of those things.  Perhaps she has given no serious thought to what her proposal would mean, and gave the answer as the first thing that came into her head that mattered to her.

I post this rather than just answering in the comments because if this blog is about anything (other than hedgehogs and rambling) it is a search for the truth (that's what the title of the blog means, at least to me). It's so much easier to be right when you're talking to yourself, but you don't learn much that way.