PROGRAMMERS, when bored, sometimes like to be sarcastically vigilant in ensuring that their work covers all conceivable eventualities. Feedback thinks this might explain the actions of those who created AutoCAD, a program used to edit designs for everything from window frames to jet engine components. It even allows you to print the designs in three dimensions (12 December 2009).
Andy Howse has spotted that you can set the units in which your design is drawn up in light years. As he observes, this would be particularly useful for designing universes: “Perhaps there is something in this intelligent design thing after all?”
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Feedback cannot be the first to imagine winding up a colleague working on a project scaled in millimetres, by setting their program to interpret the units in imported drawings in light years and thus showing them galactic quantities of white space.
Does using Facebook cause cancer?
LAST summer Feedback lamented the short life of the blog The Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project (11 July 2009). As readers fluent in sciency pseudo-Greek will know, this set out to document the truth of the claim that the British newspaper in question has an “ongoing mission to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into those that cause or cure cancer”. We are therefore delighted to have been anonymously alerted to a similar project at the self-explanatory address .
Back then, Feedback made a preliminary estimate of the prevalence of causes and cures by searching the website of Middle England’s favourite newspaper for stories in 2008 that mentioned “cancer” and “cure” (269) or, conversely, “cancer” and “cause” (66). The new site has a more thorough approach. It presented its readers with stories from the newspaper that mentioned cancer and asked them to categorise them as claims of a cure or cause. This provided a far more extensive haul. Hence we find, for example, that false nails, fatherhood and using Facebook cause cancer, while fatty acids prevent it. Feedback’s method missed the first three because the stories do not include the word “cause”.
So now we know what to avoid: it is there in print, so it must be true. We are less sure of the life lesson to take from another manifestation of British geeks’ fascination with this newspaper. A blog called The Poke gives us a variation on the topological marvel that is the London Underground map (13 February), calling this version The Moral Underground ().
This builds on the success of the automatic Daily Mail headline generator at – a website that, when we visited, asked “Will Brussels bureaucrats give England swine flu?” and proceeded at the next click to “Have working mothers made Britain’s swans obese?”. The Moral Underground maps such key “be very afraid” concepts to the London Underground, showing the District line, for example, connecting Brussels, Paris Hilton, the euro, CCTV, wind turbines, sex education, Elton John and speed cameras. This is the secret formula to the paper’s editorial success, the blog claims.
“The automated response to Nia Faulder’s email inquiry to a recruitment agency concluded: “I will not return until 05/08/2050.” Nice work if you can get it.”
Shave your beard to save the planet
ACCORDING to a , the local government of the Japanese city Isesaki has taken an innovative but controversial approach to the problem of global warming. It has forbidden employees to grow beards.
A spokesman said the ban is part of the “Cool Biz” campaign, an initiative that aims to reduce the use of air conditioning in government offices. As well as being asked to cut off their beards, civil servants are being encouraged not to wear jackets and ties in hot weather. But a local human rights lawyer, Fumio Haruyama, has claimed the ban on beards is a violation of personal freedom.
MEANWHILE, in the UK a notice on the wall by the kettle at Paul Bader’s workplace admonishes: “Do you need to fill the kettle? When you make a hot drink, boil just the amount of water you need, and in a day we could save enough energy to light every street lamp in the UK.”
Paul says he knew the kettle was inefficient, but he didn’t realise it was that bad.
VISITING the American store Kohl’s at , Allen Lutins spotted that the “American Flyer Suiter 26-inch Wardrobe Valet” suitcase has “quiet, 360-degree spinning wheels” that “allow you to move quickly through terminals”.
Allen is pleased, because, he says, “I hate wheels that spin less than 360 degrees.”
Secret of the philosophy storeroom
FINALLY, there are two adjacent rooms at the University of Reading in the UK marked “Philosophy Storeroom” and “History Storeroom”.
“What on earth do they put in them?” asks Peter Toye. “Discarded ethics in the former, perhaps?”