The Looking Glass

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We should not judge past literature by the standards of the present

NOAH BUCKLE This essay won the 2020 edition of the New College of the Humanities English Essay Prize. “And thus a change of époque, which is a change of reader, is comparable to a change in the text itself…” ~ Paul Valéry Contemporary literary analysis, echoing D. A. Winstanley’s dictum that “nothing is more unfair than to judge the men [sic] of the past by the ideas of the present,” believes itself an extension of the juridico-political apparatus. Attempting to delineate precisely the aesthetic and moral bases on which we are to assess literature, then, has become a matter of justice; the collective distaste for ‘presentism’, we are informed, is (ironically) an expression of our civility and integrity. But it is also a matter of truth: “We should not,” maintain the ‘anti-presentists’, “judge past literature by the standards of the present, because the standards by which literature is judged ought to be objective.” The apparent modesty of those who would circumscribe criticism of...

An Overview Of Galaxy Formation

JAMIE BARRETT In 1924, Edwin Hubble discovered stars that lie outside our own galaxy. This sparked new interest in astronomers, who since then have directed their telescopes past nearby stars and out towards much more distant objects. Many cosmological marvels have been found, such as the blue giant Icarus, which was identified in 2016 in a spiral galaxy around 5 billion light years away from Earth. However, despite nearly a century of discoveries, the process by which galaxies form is still missing many details. All science relies on data, and to understand the origins of galaxies, we need to study early galaxies. This may seem impossible, but the nature of light provides a helping hand. The speed of light means that the time taken to travel distances on a human scale may be negligible, but on a large scale, a single photon may take many hundreds or millions of years to travel through a galaxy, and even longer to reach us, carrying the same information as when the photons was first e...

Why do imaginary events matter so much, in some narratives of Alexander?

The disparity between accounts of Alexander the Great by ancient authors has proved problematic in the attempt by modern scholars to piece together the facts surrounding his life and character. Yet this issue is exacerbated further with the presence of the Alexander Romance which is believed to have begun shortly after his death and progressed through to the Middle Ages. Within these romances, the weird and wonderful creep into some of the narratives of Alexander’s life, often shifting story telling from historical chronicles to outright fantasy. Yet whilst the study of romances is unhelpful when trying to establish the original Alexander, they are interesting insights into the culture and motives of those who wrote them. Indeed, the work of Charles Martindale has been hugely influential in this form of study, as he notes aptly that through the constant manipulation of source material and evidence, through a multitude of cultures and motives of each author, ‘we cannot get back to a...

The dawn of the integrated circuit

SAKSHAM SIDANA Cue 1958. World War 2 has settled, peacetime has been restored, with the help of a computer less powerful than the smartphone we use today. Computing has so far seen significant advancements, from the Enigma machine all the way to ENIAC - the world’s first general-purpose computer. Groundbreaking as the ENIAC was, it involved huge numbers of discrete components laboriously connected to each other by over 17000 vacuum tubes(which transferred electrons from a heated cathode to an anode in a glass body). As a result, the computer occupied a whole room, notwithstanding the fact that the tubes were highly vulnerable to damage and required regular replacement. Consequently, the transistor was invented in 1947 - a piece that would act as ‘on’ and ‘off’ switches when given specific signals. Although this was an extraordinary breakthrough, it still didn’t solve the space problem. Components still had to be wired together individually, taking up time, and stopping digital systems ...

Tarantulas - the unexpected cure for oil spills

[Image credit Michael Willinger on pexels] JAMIE BARRETT A spider’s exoskeleton - a hard yet flexible armour made of chitin - doesn’t grow along with the arachnid. Up to a dozen times in the spider’s life, this covering is disposed of to allow for growth. After recyclable nutrients have been absorbed, a new exoskeleton is constructed and the spider pushes out of its old exoskeleton, completing the moulting process. Although the moulted skin is now of no use to the land-dwelling organism, it has certain properties that are perfect for countering a threat to sea life. A decade after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the environmental effects are still being felt. In June 2017, Craig McClain and his colleagues at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium surveyed the Gulf of Mexico and found that species like sea cucumbers, sponges, and giant isopods had disappeared from the site. Some creatures, such as the Atlantic deep sea red crab and Nematocarcinus red shrimp, were found in...

Why Twitter is so polarised, and other social media stories

JAMIE BARRETT The online world can be a harsh place. Wars rage through packets and bits over matters from politics to puppy names. Everywhere you turn there seems to be someone with conflicting views. It may be easy to think that humankind harbours an integral aggression that leads such rows - or maybe no matter how kind we are, this is to be expected, and perhaps there is a way our kindness can still show through. Contentious threads on Twitter are a far cry from face-to-face conversations. Such passionate, continued arguments are rarely seen outside of those who are naturally argumentative and environments built specifically for intense debate. But threads on Twitter always begin with a single tweet, which could itself be the cause. Politics itself always leads to annual dinner-table arguments, and it is true that many heated discussions on and outside social media stem from political opinions. However, even innocent-sounding starting points - the colour of a dress, say - can fuel su...

The R0 value and why it matters for COVID-19

MR G.W. ROWE, HEAD OF BIOLOGY What is it? In simple terms the R0 is a disease’s basic reproductive ratio - the number of cases at time zero measured compared to the number of cases at a future date. If there were 100 cases of disease X last week and 500 this week this would give a ratio of 1:5 and the R0 would be given as 5. Therefore, an R0 of 1.0 means the epidemic is infecting the same number of people over time and is not accelerating. An R0 of above 1.0 will lead to an exponential increase in the numbers infected and an R0 below 1.0 will lead to a decline in the numbers infected by the disease. There are many complex interacting factors which determine R0 for example, method of transmission (airborne droplet = generally lead to higher R0 values than sexual transmission), period of time where those infected are able to transmit the disease and success in isolating those infected from the general population. But, in a nutshell, the first paragraph describes what most people need to ...

Loki’s Castle and the Future of Evolutionary History

JAMIE BARRETT Thousands of metres beneath the waves of the Norwegian Sea, on a throne of iron and sulphur, a strange family of microbes thrives among 300°C waters. Their very existence may force us to rewrite the tree of life. Since the discovery of archaea in the 1970s, the predominant picture of life was split into three distinct domains: bacteria, archaea (a type of single-celled organism without a nucleus), and eukaryotes. James Lake at the University of California noticed that eocytes, a type of archaea discovered in the 1980s, had cellular features that were similar to those of eukaryotes. He argued that these similarities suggested a more recent evolutionary connection between archaea and eukaryotes. He proposed that eukaryotes are a branch within archaea, rather than a separate domain. Lake’s idea - known as the eocyte hypothesis - was largely ignored. However, a decade ago, Martin Embley and his team at Newcastle University attempted to see how bacteria, archaea, and eukaryote...

The Influence of Chemistry on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Habitability

RAFI BRISTER In the search for both extraterrestrial life and possible habitable extraterrestrial bodies, there are many contributing factors but one of the most important ones is the chemical composition of the body. All life on Earth needs water as a solvent for biological reactions to take place and about 95% of all living matter is built on carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur with all other elements being found in trace amounts and a total of 29 playing an active role in biological reactions. However, while modern life has evolved to live with the atmospheric concentrations of gases (primarily oxygen and nitrogen) as they are, this means that they could not or would struggle to survive on a planet where this balance was not present (including for example the Earth during the Cretaceous Period). This means that in the search for extraterrestrial life, planets which have the required concentrations of these elements detectable are higher priority candidates. Ho...

The COVID-19 pandemic – shifts in people’s values and trust

The outbreak of a novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 disease has meant that the world has had to take precautionary public health measures to help eliminate the spread of the virus (Heymann and Shindo 2020) however this pathogen threat can also translate into willingness to distance ourselves from others on a psychological level. Will the ongoing pandemic of Coronavirus affect attitudes toward foreign nationalities? The COVID-19 virus outbreak has dominated the news and the constant processing of information about it can be highly arousing and eliciting anxiety (Al-Rabiaah et al. 2020), thereby influencing the level of any potential prejudice. Research by Sorokowski et al. (2020) has examined whether Polish and UK participants’ media exposure predicts their level of prejudice toward four nationalities. China and Italy were used, representing one culturally close and one culturally distant nation with a large outbreak of the virus, and Hungary and Mongolia, representing one culturally c...

Morality and Alignment: What makes a hero?

JAMIE BARRETT As anyone that has heard of genetic engineering or artificial intelligence can attest, ethics are often messy, with a grey area for every thin line. But the difference between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” is often very clear among books, films, and games. Knowing what exactly it is that sets apart the heroes from the villains may help us to navigate these grey areas. There are many definitions of a “hero” or a “villain”, but starting from the basics and using examples to derive a definition will help us discover why the defining traits matter, as well as what those traits are. Protagonists - the leading character or characters - are ubiquitous in literature. Someone needs to be there to drive the story forward, for the story to be told about. Antagonists, meanwhile, create conflict and challenge our hero. Automatically describing protagonists as “heroes” in this way may be a misconception, however - let us explore further and find out. In tabletop roleplaying games,...

How might GCSE and A Level results be generated? A machine learning perspective.

Since the announcement of the cancellation of the GCSE and A Level examinations, Year 11 and 13 students have been faced with plenty of time on their hands. Having spent mine so far pursuing an online machine learning course [1] at the suggestion of Dr Hedges, I thought it might be interesting to apply the result of these endeavours back to their causation, namely in explaining a possible method for exam grade generation. Before proceeding, I’d like to point out that this is not based on any evidence other than my own thought experiment, and so should be treated as such. To begin with, what is machine learning and why does it apply to this problem? Well machine learning is the science of getting computers to perform tasks without being explicitly programmed, specifically those involving data and predictions. For example, we might train a machine learning algorithm to predict some result, e.g. banana prices, based on some input data such as supply, demand and quality. In our case...