Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Cosmic signals lunched out
FEEDBACK recently mused on the significance of the recurring number 187.5 in the frequency distribution of fast radio bursts (18 April). Was it a message from the beyond? As the ink was drying on that question, more mundane news about radio bursts , in a paper from the in New South Wales, Australia, on 9 April. You will observe that Feedback’s ink takes a while to dry.
The paper concludes that signals resembling cosmic radio bursts “can be generated at 1.4 GHz when a microwave oven door is opened prematurely and the telescope is at an appropriate relative angle”. It shows an impressive correlation between some signals and local lunchtime.
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Parkes people were impatient for their soup, in short. But the “fast radio bursts” in the original puzzle remain.
Over the emergency-exit window of a Cardiff bus, Mike Alcock finds a hammer behind glass labelled “For access strike here”, and the warning: “Do not break glass with the hand.” So with what?
Cosmic numerology is a thing
COSMIC numerology is still a thing, then. We reported Chris Conklin’s thoughts about crystal oscillators being a possible source of mysteriously-proportioned fast radio bursts (18 April). Since then Alan Wilson has thought about the possibility of a radio source moving away from us, or of space expanding between us and it. David King noted sceptically that “the beams were observed in completely different regions of the sky”. Our mailbox fills with more suggestions as we write.
New challenge to the universe
CHALLENGES to our understanding of the universe continue to arrive. Paul Segal sends that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation initially captioned “żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs at the LHC celebrate after colliding protons at record power, mimicking conditions close to the Big Bang that created the universe in 2010.” Proponents of the notion that the universe was created recently: Paul notes that nowadays “you can find them anywhere”.
Their way is strait
FEEDBACK’s inbox is regularly graced with missives from organisations under the name “Christian Concern”. Last week they were angry about the biblical scholarship of Judge Shamim Ahmed Qureshi (25 April). This week they turn to attempts to forbid “conversion” – in the sense of “therapy” claiming to set gay people on the way of the straight.
Their way is, as King James’s translators put it, “strait”. They have therefore as one for the human rights of “young people facing unwanted same-sex attraction”.
On first reading, that looks like a campaign to “protect” young people from others. We read it again, and it seems that Christian Concern wants to protect gay youngsters from themselves, but not to be clear about their archaic views, which shows that society has made progress of a sort.
Common as muck and joyous
WHAT could go wrong with an organisation such as “Christian Concern” sending regular messages to Feedback? Certainly, unexpected things. Even more unexpected, perhaps, than the things that can go wrong when people reach for metaphors for unexpected things.
David Smith notes our mention of Nassim Taleb’s use of “black swans” (11 April). “Purveyors of this notion have probably never visited New Zealand or Australia,” he writes, “where black swans are as common as muck and a white swan is simply not to be seen – well, probably not!”
Digging into the archive, we discover that, after an interview with Taleb (1 July 2006, p 50), Elizabeth Bromham noted that to her “a black swan is a joyous, and common, sign of a healthy ecosystem” (29 July 2006, p 22). So the unusual issue reoccurs…
Monetarist-geometrist tinkering
THINKING of things going wrong, Chris Curnow is worried about the new design for the UK pound coin – announced coincidentally, no doubt, in the run-up to the election on 7 May. It has 12 sides. He provides the delightful information that “faceted” coins such as the existing seven-sided 50p coin, with each side an arc centred on the opposite corner, are “Reuleaux polygons”. The images of the new coins we have seen have straight sides. Is this a cunning plan to achieve the same effect as the “monetarist” policy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher by reducing what economists call the “velocity of money” – or at least the part of the money supply whose shape may now cause it to become wedged in coin-operated machines?
Press 8 for an infinite loop
FINALLY, we hear that no one uses voicemail any more. Explanations vary between experts: people are texting, using social media, or are annoyed by telemarketer messages.
But attempts to reach a professor at George Washington University in Washington DC reminded us of another reason – the voicemail systems themselves. The phone went unanswered after four rings. We were switched to voicemail and a robotic voice asked for the mailbox number. We guessed this referred to the last four digits: the robotic voice said that was not a valid mailbox. We tried the last five digits and the phone started ringing. After four rings, it transferred to a robotic voice, which asked…
This is not the first infinite voicemail loop we have met. Does anybody ever notice that they are no longer getting voicemail?