I like the sound of kamikaze engineering. It involves the reckless abandonment of pernickety mathematical models, coupled with unfettered optimism that just getting on with things will do the trick. And very often, says Professor Orrin Pilkey, a coastal geologist at Duke University in North Carolina, the kamikaze approach works just fine.

He cites the example of dredging sand to dump it on an eroded beach: don’t bother calculating how much sand is required, or the rate the tide will move it. Just dredge and dump until it’s thick enough for a deckchair.

In Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future (Columbia University Press), a book co-written with his geologist daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, Pilkey challenges the widespread use of computer models to simulate natural phenomena. Nature is too complex, her ways too wily, to be captured by simple equations. Models require fixed values to be assigned to quantities that vary; models require the knitting together of processes that are, separately, poorly understood and little measured. The effect is to produce a shaky simulation whose credulity is strained to breaking point to make predictions — and shape science policy — far into the future. Coefficients, he thunders, are really fudge factors.

For example, North Atlantic fishing stocks were modelled extensively — but still collapsed in the early Nineties. Unexpected outcomes are dismissed by modellers as anomalies; the very prevalence of such anomalies points, of course, to inherent limitations.

But this book is not a licence for knocking climate modelling. Instead, Pilkey recommends that climate scientists regularly check their models against reality. They might, for example, discover that real glaciers don’t melt with mathematical precision but can snap off in chunks.

Pilkey prefers “adaptive management” to the idolatry of models — let Nature unravel, he infers, and we’ll stitch her up as we go along. I don’t think this quite cuts the mustard, either.

Brace yourselves for a new rock band, the Amygdaloids, who write songs about science. Their frontman is Professor Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University (the amygdala is the brain’s seat of emotion). A correspondent from The Scientist went to see them perform in the city’s Cornelia Street Café.

Their music has been characterised, rather wittily, as “heavy mental”. Here is a lyric from the Mind Body Problem: “My body wants you so, but my mind just says no.” Memory Pill is inspired by LeDoux’s recent paper in Nature Neuroscience about a method of erasing memories in rats. “Old girlfriends, algebra, playground bullies and achievement tests,” he croons. “Just give me a pill, wash away my memories.”

I understand that the Amygdaloids are taking bookings. Don’t all rush.

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