50 YEARS AGO

Wittgenstein once argued that no paper read to a scientific society should last more than fifteen minutes, because anyone who had anything to say on any subject could easily say it in that time. He would probably have regarded with some horror the Twelfth International Congress of Applied Psychology, which met in London during July 18–23. Few of the speakers named on the programme took less than half an hour, and there were more than a hundred of them. Yet only four special lecturers had been asked to talk for more than twenty minutes. Perhaps many of the others felt that, having come from the ends of the earth, or thereabouts, they could justify themselves... only by going on and on. Nor was the unbargained-for time always well spent. In fact, and as usual, the people who spoke the longest had the least to say.

From Nature 3 September 1955.

100 years ago

Mr. W. E. Cooke, Government astronomer for Western Australia, has sent us a communication explaining a novel plan that he has adopted for giving more definiteness to the weather forecasts issued in that colony. Each forecast for a definite district is subdivided into specific items, to each of which a figure is attached, “1” representing that the occurrence prognosticated has only the barest possibility of being successful, and so on, up to “5”, which indicates that the prediction may be relied upon with almost absolute certainty. Each item of the forecast has therefore a “weight” attached to it; on the whole, Mr. Cooke states that the new method has proved a distinct success, and that while people find that whenever the figure 5 appears the forecast is fulfilled in 99 cases out of 100, they do not feel so disappointed in case of failure when the lower numbers are attached...

From Nature 31 August 1905.