Текст книги "Speak and Write like The Economist: Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist"

Travel was not just about seeing, but about being seen.

Muslims are obliged to go on the haj at least once in their lifetime. So many pilgrims want to make the journey that the Saudis now impose strict national quotas (calculated according to national populations) on pilgrims. Once arrived, they begin their rituals: the changing into simple white clothes, the tawaf or circumambulation of the ka'ba, the drinking at the sacred Zamzam well, the prescribed running and collecting of pebbles, the shaving or cutting of one's hair and the renewed commitment to the principles of Islam.

The Christians all say that reciting the first verse of the 23rd psalm helps them enter a religious state.

Right back at you across the pond: Sprain, Bad Reportugal, Inkland, Direland, Not-so-Niceland, Greece Trap, Francid, Itally, Wild Turkey, Check Republic, Repoland, Slowvakia. You started this.

That approach was first used by German scholars, and then British ones, just over a century ago, on the texts sacred to Christianity, using techniques honed on the writings of Greece and Rome. From small differences in the four Gospels, they drew big conclusions. Matthew speaks of a lamp giving light to «all those in the house»; Luke speaks of a lamp to guide «those coming into the house».

Nowadays, all the world over, people speak with accents.

Halloween bridges the retailers' gap between the return to school and Christmas.

Now that «nigger» (which he calls the N-word) has become taboo in polite society, what happens to Niggerhead Point? The author notes in passing that this cape on Lake Ontario was thus named because it was a point on the laudable underground railroad that helped thousands of escaped slaves to freedom in Canada. That interesting historical association survives in the first name change, to Negrohead Point (which remains on federal maps). But to call it merely Graves Point (as New York state maps do) seems a pity. «Nigger» and «Jap» are now banned on American maps, though a Dago Gulch survives in western Montana. More puzzling to the non-American is the onslaught on the use of «Squaw», which according to some activists (though not philologists) is not an innocent word for a Native American woman, but a derogatory term for her vagina. So Squaw Peak is now set to be renamed after Lori Piestewa, the first Native American woman in the American army to be killed in combat.

Philosophers have rarely flourished on foreign parts: Kant spent his whole life in the city of Konigsberg.

Echoing ancient thinkers such as Democritus and Lucretius, they held ideas that were to prove too revolutionary even for a revolutionary age.

The apocalypse is still a little way off, it is only because the four horsemen and their steeds have stopped to search for something to drink.

Nationalism and religion can be a toxic brew.

Myth and fantasy populate the world with «othermen» – the elves, goblins, dwarfs and giants that live in the wild wood, in the cave or on the high mountain peak. Not animal, but not quite human either, they feed fear and imagination in equal quantity. Nor are such creatures merely the province of the past and the poetaster.

It is not so much the languages that have two dozen words for snow, say, or horse or walrus carcass that impress the most, but those that draw differences between the seemingly indistinguishable. Italian, as one would imagine, is particularly good on male vanity, and French on love as a business. The richness of Yiddish for insults seems to be matched only by the many and varied Japanese words for the deep joy that can come as a response to beauty and the German varieties of sadness and disappointment.

If this walking penitentiary is such a worthy symbol of religious piety, why isn't the burqa worn by men?

For broadcasters, more eyeballs mean more subscribers and advertisers.

Forecasts a decade ahead are no likelier to be accurate than a bet on a horse.

Hell is a city much like London.

When is a Jew not a Jew? When he's a Karaite.

He matured into a man of laconic, sardonic, quintessentially Roman aphorisms: «If you think ill of others, you commit a sin. But you often get it right.»

Morality is powerful stuff, and as such should be used with care.

No wonder novice writers are often at a loss, and put commas where they do not belong. The title of the punctuation-promoting bestseller «Eats, Shoots and Leaves» comes from a joke about a poorly punctuated wildlife guide describing the diet of panda bears.

“ Science, technology, progress, history, civilization

Einstein: «Why is it that nobody understands me, but everybody likes me?»

Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon's law: «90 % of everything is crap.»

Privacy is also at risk. Users were appalled when it emerged iRobot, a robotic vacuum cleaner, not only cleans the floor, but creates a digital map of the home's interior that can then be sold on to advertisers, Standard Innovation, a maker of a connected vibrator called We-Vibe, was recently ordered to pat customers $10,000 each after hackers discovered that the device was recording highly personal information about its owners.

Three-quarters of Americans admit that they search the web, send e-mails and check their social-media accounts in the bathroom.

The GAFA, as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are collectively called, also have good arguments on their side.

Compared with the size of its brain, an elephant's hippocampuses are about 40 % larger than those of a human being, suggesting that the old proverb about an elephant never forgetting may have a grain of truth in it.

For every Spotify there is a WannaCry.

Do you know how a toilet works?

Wherever David Rockefeller went in the world – and in his 35 years at Chase Manhattan Bank, from 1946 to 1981, he ran up 5m air miles – David Rockefeller carried a small jar in his pocket. It was in case he found a beetle on the way. From the age of seven, partly from his own solitary, careful catching, partly from expeditions he sponsored, he built up a collection of 90,000 specimens from 2,000 species, carefully labelled and stored in airtight hardwood boxes at the 3,400-acre family place in Pocantico Hills. His preference was for wood-borers, leaf-cutters and tunnellers, whose industrious activity changed the world in ways few people saw. His discreet gathering of contacts had started in the war, when he was sent to Algiers to work for army intelligence: though of junior rank, he soon assembled a list of people who knew what was really going on. He also collected 131 beetles in his jars.

At the heart of myriad devices, from computers and smartphones to drones and dishwashers, a microprocessor can be found busily crunching data. Switch the power off, though, and this chip will forget everything.

No one has truly understood why shoelaces come undone in the first place. Regardless of any practical benefit, though, the three researchers, are surely contenders for an Ignobel prize. That award is made every year for work which «first makes you laugh, and then makes you think». Their study of laces looks like a shoo-in.

Dolly the sheep was cloned from an udder and named after a singer noted for her ample bosom as well as her talent.

You know, young man, one day all of these will be replaced by quantum computers.

If the history of human civilisation is of the collapse of distance – from walking to horses to carriages to motorised transport to jet engines – then what happens when you take that thread to its logical conclusion, when it becomes possible to move from any one place on Earth to another simply by walking through a door?

People could spot bacteria, but not viruses, which are smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Until the electron microscope was invented in the 1930s, influenza was, like the Higgs boson before 2012, a theoretical entity: its existence was deduced from its effects. In the face of such uncertainty, public faith in medicine wavered. People reverted to superstition: sugar lumps soaked in kerosene, and aromatic fires to clear «miasmas».

«Judge a man by his questions, rather than his answers,» Voltaire advised.

As Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, said: «If quantum physics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.»

Most of the people who buy computers don't even know what a transistor does.

By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur – gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide – than all the world's cars put together.

You can't flush your toilet over the internet.

Once upon a time the space race was driven by the competition between capitalism and communism. Now it is driven by the competition between individual capitalists.

Almost 1.1 billion websites are currently online; global internet traffic will surpass 1 zettabyte for the first time this year, the equivalent of 152m years of high-definition video.

Science is an intellectual dead end.

A 300-qubit quantum computer could represent 2300 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 significance 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 efficacy of this preparation in producing lasting trances.

Amateurs talk strategy, but professionals talk logistics.

It is hard to get a scientific grant for treating faeces.

A modern Intel Skylake processor contains around 1.75 billion transistors – half a million of them would fit on a single transistor from the 4004 – and collectively they deliver about 400,000 times as much computing muscle. This exponential progress is difficult 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 find their way, singles find love and distraught pet-owners find 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.

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 efficient arrangement than the diploblastic one of expelling the undigestible parts of food items back out of the mouth.

Unfortunately, fit microbes mean unfit human beings. Wherever there is endemic infection, there is resistance to its treatment.

Perhaps the Wright brothers' most significant achievement was that neither died in flight.

Even the task of mapping a mouse brain will require 500 petabytes of data storage. A petabyte is 1m gigabytes. For comparison, finding 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 finding 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 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 first 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 artificial 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 five 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 anatomy».

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 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 first 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 find 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 a conversion 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 fleas 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 fined.

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 prefix. Adopted in 1991, it stands for a multiplying factor of one part in a million billion 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 a subject whose practitioners can never, definitively, be proved right. But that does not stop them trying.

DNA will be easily capable of swallowing the roughly 3 zettabytes (a zettabyte 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 (10¹5) per gram; enough, in other words, to fit 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 a progress 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 first 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.

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 fish 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 firm based near Grenoble, in France, identifies 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 fled?»

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 fish's brain.

Commuting by car allowed suburbs to spread, making fortunes for prescient housebuilders and landowners. Roadbuilding became 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 field it touches.

Lawrence Bonassar and Jason Spector of Cornell University scanned the ear of a five-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 I scratched 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 a park or a private garden.

In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger who was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, imagined putting a cat, a flask 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 flask and poisons the cat.

Scientists should be on tap, not on top.

Researchers have long debated whether the apes fight for land, or for females. One lesson, which may surprise cynics, is that humans are more peaceful than chimps.

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 firm, 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 in Chinese: 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 «a series 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.

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 defines 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. A study 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 a second, to be precise), and is certainly not long enough to perform a calculation. To encourage the superposition to endure a little 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 benefits 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 a modicum 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.

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 fitted 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 first 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 artificial 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 a decoy? 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 find 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.