Excessive precision at the rugby union World Cup
FEEDBACK doesn’t pretend to understand how the calculates for the rugby union competition. We’re just about aware that the ball is roughly ellipsoid and that in the past the players tended to be posher than in the other kind of rugby (league).
However, we’re deeply intrigued by this update from the World Cup website forwarded by Tim Hely: “Argentina and Samoa both had a rating of 78.71 but when expanded to 15 decimal places the difference between the two was minimal (78.709236088306938 to 78.708853582562098).” This, apparently, enabled the Samoans to become not only “the first Pacific Islanders to occupy a top-eight spot in the rankings”, but even to be one place ahead of Argentina ().
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Reaching for a calculator and subtracting Argentina’s score from Samoa’s, we find that the latter became proud holder of seventh place in the world by a margin of 0.00038250574484 points. So the ranking was decided by a difference of a mere 4 ten-thousandths of a point, or four decimal places.
Are the 15-decimal-place results significant, or a mere spreadsheet artefact? In our naive view, ignoring the mysterious ways in which the scores are weighted, this level of precision would imply the existence of femtotries, in which the ball goes across the line by 0.000000000000001 metres – not much more than the diameter of a proton.
“Is this gobbledegook?” Tony Holkham asks, after reading that support services “excels in the art of customer-focused behaviours as well as the science of risk management
Extinction of humans not worth mentioning
“RESEARCH disconnected from reality” was the subject line of the email Rodney Blackall sent us after reading the “Nature notes” column on the back page of the UK’s Daily Telegraph on 4 December 2012.
The piece described research done by the Institute of Ecology in the Netherlands which reported that in the extreme case of climate change leading to a temperature rise of 6 °C, “great tits would be in danger of being wiped out” because their breeding cycle would get out of sync with the insect population.
“It may have got lost in translation or editing,” Rodney comments, “but the possible extinction of humans and much else in this scenario seems to be overlooked.”
TRYING to start work after an overnight software upgrade, Feedback found Adobe’s InCopy software inexplicably trying to retrieve a draft of a two-month-old document. It failed, and offered us a button to click to cancel the operation.
So we did, and the program naturally produced a message informing us that it was cancelling the retrieval – and offered us a button to click to cancel the cancellation. So we clicked that, out of idle curiosity… and the program crashed, which may be as well for the integrity of the space-time continuum.
AIRSOFT MEGASTORE is advertising that its prices are “125 per cent lower than any other airsoft retailer”, with a money-back guarantee. We are as puzzled as reader George Malone over what this may mean.
Our hopes of gaining endless free money, by not buying products related to a sport resembling paintball, were squashed by the even more confusing that the company “will MATCH the lower price, then discount an ADDITIONAL 25 per cent of the difference”.
TELEPHONE company Vodafone recently ran an expensive series of UK adverts saying: “After being voted the best, there’s only one way to go.”
Feedback cannot help treating this as a problem in measurement theory and suggests the answer must be “down”. The company’s answer was “better”, which is illogical and doesn’t answer the question.
Still, when you’ve painted yourself into a logical corner, there’s only one way you can go. Um, hold on…
IN THE beauty section of Velvet, a magazine sold in Cambridge, UK, Richard Parkins came across an advert by a firm called Dermaplicity. It promised readers: “Replenish, awaken, and regenerate your skin this winter with the help of impressive 3D Stem Cell products.”
“Evidently, ordinary 2D stem cells won’t do,” Richard observes. “But will you need the special glasses?”
Phone that falls through the floor
FINALLY, hand-held computing technology gets more and more wonderful – it’s amazing how much they can pack into small spaces. John Hood sends a review of the “Sony Xperia T” from Computer Shopper magazine’s January 2013 edition, with a fact-panel giving the dimensions of the device as “129 x 67 x 9mm, 139kg”.
From these figures he calculates its density as 1,786,931 kilograms per cubic metre – compare water at 1000 kg/m3 and osmium, with the greatest measured density of any element, at about 22,570 kg/m3. Is this phone a pocket-sized neutron star?
Computer Shopper rather spoils our fun by giving the mass in the article text as 139g. Hmph. Feedback suspects that, just as we often skip verse in Victorian novels, an arts-educated proofreader skipped the fact-panel.