The armchair reasoner, the person who watches and solves the world’s great and small problems while never budging from an armchair, is rare. One of the most famous, Mycroft Holmes, brother of the detective Sherlock Holmes, is fictional and of a past era. But at least one great armchair reasoner is practising her art now. This personage is probably quite real. She is Katherine Barlow, of Vienna, Austria. We, the public, know her through the many letters she writes to newspapers in Britain and America….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.