Paul Taylor

John Allen Paulos (LRB, 11 March), explains how psychologists can devise situations which lead unsuspecting subjects to make supposedly irrational choices. This must be entertaining for lovers of practical jokes, but it is not clear what it reveals about human rationality. We are told that, when asked whether ‘r’ occurs more often as the first or the third letter of a word, people answer on the...

The excellent service you provide in pointing out your correspondents’ errors slipped up last week when you allowed Roger Pebody (Letters, 7 September) to write that since gay men are more readily found in London than Northumberland, geographically random sampling was inappropriate to measure the frequency of homosexuality. It is precisely because researchers are alert to systematic biases that they...

John Lanchester (LRB, 20 March) suggests that doctors believe we drink twice as much as we let on. The evidence supports the doctors: according to an article published in the journal Addiction in 1995, no counterfeit production or illegal importation of alcohol exists on the island of Spitzbergen, so a comparison of figures for the sale of alcohol with the islanders’ self-reported consumption allows...

Peter Campbell’s piece on medical imaging (LRB, 31 July) expressed a wish to know more about the mathematics of tomography. The problem is to reconstruct an image of a slice through a body from a set of readings, known as projections, taken as an X-ray source and detector are routed in a circle around the slice. If we know what is in a body we can calculate what will happen to an X-ray that passes...

John Sturrock (LRB, 29 April) might be interested to learn that one anagram of ‘London Review of Books’ is ‘no wind of rebel Kosovo’.