Brutkey

Jonty Wareing
@jonty@chaos.social
Saved by Stoppard

Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: "If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?" With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of "adjuvant systemic chemotherapy", and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients' survival.

Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.

Michael Baum

Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL e8882eae563b369a.jpg A row of boxes which all look delighted due to the holes looking like faces fdcfb15cc8469b40.jpg A screenshot of a Wikipedia article:

Credit card fraud

Black neon tetras committed credit card fraud during a 2023 livestream by "Mutekimaru Channel" on YouTube. The owner was using motion-tracking software to turn the fishes' movements into Nintendo Switch inputs, letting them "play" video games.[8] In 2020, the fish beat Pokemon Sapphire after 3,195 hours, a feat that takes about 30 hours for a typical human.[9][8] On January 14, 2023, PokΓ©mon Violet crashed at 1,144 hours, giving the fish free access to the main menu. They entered inputs that opened Nintendo eShop, added 500 yen ($3.85 USD) to their owner's account, and exposed his credit card details on the livestream.[10][11] Mutekimaru later requested a refund of the 500 yen from Nintendo.[12]

"Fish eagerly read the terms and conditions. Many of us humans don't read the terms of service, but fish are smarter than we are"

– caption from Mutekimaru in a video about the incident[12]
The fish also downloaded an N64 emulator, set up PayPal, used reward points to buy an avatar, and changed Mutekimaru's Nintendo account name to "ROWAWAWAWAΒ₯".[13] After about seven hours, their movements shut down the Switch. 5537fbe5316df3f6.png A car park, with cars in it. Between the cars is a square patch of grass with a chain-link fence around it, containing six large palm trees d112738a7f09a3a2.jpg