Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
A song for a satellite gone
PLUCKY little Philae’s epic and lonely struggle against the absence of gravity ensures that at least some of us are gripped by its stalled quest (6 December 2014). Will it wake? The most hopeful estimates are that now is the time to listen (see “Asteroid ahoy!“).
Feedback will not join what one journalist colleague called “the idle speculation”. Instead we turn, not for the first time, to the words of John Lennon: “Please, don’t spoil my day, I’m miles away / And after all I’m only sleeping.” Now we know why these lyrics on the album Revolver.
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Peter Gunn sends an ad, hinting at a revolution in biology, for ““. “Green technology cosmetic science containing ancient mysteries”, it goes on…
New dimensions in burglary
CLOSER to Earth – indeed, several metres beneath it – we have the raid on the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company in London, which netted a quantity of valuables that is undisclosed, not least to the tax authorities. The BBC captioned a photo thus: “The image shows the hole made using a heavy-duty drill, a Hilti DD350. It measured 50cm (1.64ft) deep, 25cm (0.8ft) high, 45cm (1.5ft) wide and 89cm (2.9ft) tall.” Within minutes four readers had written in. Arthur Chance’s representative query was: “The only question is, if they can make 4D holes, how come they didn’t just step round the wall?” We refer readers to any good book on multidimensional topology for explanation.
The BBC naturally retro-proofread its caption smartish. Paul Cooper, however, found that had the rather more interesting version.
More numerology of cosmology
MOVING away from Earth again, probably, we have further thoughts to report on the numerological or other significance of 187.5. This number seems mysteriously to recur in measures of the frequency dispersion of fast radio bursts (18 April).
Richard Chapman responds to Chris Conklin’s observation that 1.875 is the smallest positive solution of the equation cos(x)cosh(x) = –1 by suggesting investigation of a 10-dimensional analogue of this formula, which we shall not write out. “It could shed some light on a possible metric amongst the 10 dimensions of string space,” he proposes.
Fiona Vincent suggests that, contrary to our first assumption that 187.5 is a pure number, it has units: centimetres-3 parsecs, which she describes as “the sort of convoluted unit that astronomers love”. Had they chosen to express it instead in, say, inches-3 light-years, Fiona says, “the common factor would have been 10,020”. We’re looking into that.
Falling for the metaphor peril
SEARCHING for references to 187.5 in our comprehensive piling system led it to throw up instead a thought about the challenge of presenting numerically based news. Consider the plight of Geraldine Bedell, founding editor of , a website for grandparents, asked to comment on a policy proposal floated in 2012 by George Osborne, then chancellor of the UK’s exchequer. This boiled down to replacing the policy “if you are a pensioner, then you are entitled to a winter fuel allowance” with… well, with an arithmetically complicated set of means-testing calculations to decide eligibility.
Geraldine : “We know that whenever you have means testing you get a cliff edge”, which is a reasonable summary of the arithmetic effect. “And very often the wrong people fall off the cliff,” she went on. So which grannies would fall off?
A new source of randomness
INATTENTION has led us to discover an accidental random-text generator. We went to an online translation engine and started typing English into the “source” field on the left – not noticing that it was expecting Arabic. Typing “This is not Arabic” produced a string of Arabic text on the left and “This Is Whoosh Net wears” on the right-hand side.
This doesn’t seem to work in Hebrew – although typing in “This is not Hebrew” produces “This is not English”, which suggests someone somewhere has been thinking about how it might work if it did. In Russian we start to get a direct transliteration of “This is not Russian”, which is amended as we type, in the style of “did you mean…” suggestions, then translated as “This IP chickpeas Rusin”. Probably, there’s a use for this… maybe.
Demo in doctrinal dispute
THE latest missive from oh-so-caring Christian Concern arrives: “Demo at hustings to protestanti-free speech Diane Abbott”. The Freudian typo blunts the group’s objection to the MP’s objection to pickets outside abortion clinics…
The naming of small things
FINALLY, another email caused us a double-take: its coming from the address info@rna.org made us expect something biomedical. Instead we read: “Students: submit religion news stories for $600 award.”
It seems is the site of the Religion Newswriters Association, and has been since 1997. Three-letter domains are quite the thing on the web these days: but the Religion Newswriters got to before, for example, .
They are not the only obscure virtual claim-staker. We note that is owned not by the famed research labs, but, since 7 August 1995, by Bell Laboratories Inc. of Madison, Wisconsin, which bills itself as “the world leader in rodent control technology”. The more famous labs registered on 10 January 1996. We wonder how many other organisations that should have known better wound up stuck with second-choice domain names.