Anyone who has seen a flock of starlings wheeling about in the air may wonder how they do so without crashing into each other, and falling to the ground in a heap. Apparently, each starling keeps track of seven ‘wingmen’, and the overlap creates the stability. We also have seven ‘slots’ for instant recall – presumably this is why telephone numbers are seven figures long in Britain, although of course they didn’t used to be – so what happens when the escalation in telephone usage forces an expansion into eight digits? Will our minds explode? Possibly.
Mammals have seven vertebrae in the neck, so perhaps this is where each of the numbers is stored – if the phone numbers increase, we’ll have to grow that bit taller, add another vertebrae to accommodate the dialage. The expansion of the phone network is therefore a key determinant of human height, hence the relatively undeveloped ‘hobbit’ people near Indonesia, who didn’t have access to a phone at all.
This kind of fuzzy nonsense is exactly why we have science, to try and provide empirical proof for what goes on around us. But it can breed a terrible arrogance which is comparable in its bull-headed close mindedness with fundamentalist religion. The Pope is a curious case in this matter – plenty are the stories of him ‘shunning’ science, and the man once known as the ‘Panzer cardinal’ is easy to demonise. We forget in all this that the state is all too eager to draw the line between itself and religion, but people object when religion does it in the other direction.
The church is easy to mock, it always has been – people believing in things they can’t see has that ring about it. But by denying any sense of spirituality whatsoever the extremists on the other side are only limiting themselves, and, aside from that, making life a terribly cold, hard place. (Perhaps this is where humanism comes in, or the more exotic Baha’is Faith.) Perhaps wilful fuzziness isn’t such a bad place to sit – then one can imagine things like this roam the planet.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 