Funny weather
If there are any constants in this world, which at the time of writing feels like an increasingly unsafe bet, the status of 1 April as the year鈥檚 least humorous day would be right up there among them. Every year, no matter how hard Feedback prophylactically rolls our eyes, the online journals of the world swell up with wry, tongue-in-cheek papers.
This year, the preprint server known as the arXiv has been the worst offender. To get a feel for the sort of content that the arXiv (pronounced archive) usually hosts, we could do no better than inform you that there is an online parody site known as the snarXiv (pronounced snarkive), which posts such convincing technical-sounding gibberish that even professional physicists struggle to distinguish it from the real thing.
Back to the arXiv. One of its April fools鈥� papers ran under the title 鈥淢aking It Rain: How Giving Me Telescope Time Can Reduce Drought鈥�. In it, physicist Michael Lund at the California Institute of Technology reveals that the days on which he was allowed to use the Palomar Observatory鈥檚 telescope in San Diego experienced higher than average rainfall. The pesky clouds involved sadly ruined his results, but he reckons his own personal misfortune could be turned to the common weal. If he were sent to conduct observations in parts of the world currently hit by drought, the inevitable rainfall would at least bring happiness to others.
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April thirst
More astronomical jokiness was wafted across our path by the University of Oxford physics department. 鈥淎 wide variety of orbital and physical characteristics are detected in the exoplanet population, and much work has been devoted to deciding which of these planets may be suitable for life. Until now, though, little work has been devoted to deciding which of the potentially habitable planets might actually be worth existing on. To this end, we present the Really Habitable Zone, defined as the region around a star where acceptable gins and tonic are likely to be abundant.鈥�
Rhyme time
Feedback doesn鈥檛 normally get excited about upcoming collections of poetry, but when nominative determinism is involved, it鈥檚 another story. The slim volume in question is Randomly Moving Particles, due for publication in October. The versifier responsible? Former UK poet laureate Andrew Motion.
Smoke alarm
Feedback was sad to hear of the recent death of William Frankland, a pioneering allergy scientist who lived to be 108.
Frankland makes an appearance in 快猫短视频鈥榮 archives, courtesy of this 1991 Feedback anecdote, describing his approach of not allowing smokers to return to his clinic until they had quit: 鈥淸One] asthma sufferer, it turned out, was smoking 60 cigarettes a day, but Frankland persuaded him to give up. Result: patient recovers, life is saved, another triumph for medical science.
鈥淎ll this happened 15 years ago, and might normally not even have rated a footnote in medical history. Except that Frankland is not so sure how successful he should have been. His patient was, at the time, the deputy chair of Iraq鈥檚 Revolutionary Command Council.鈥� That ex-smoker is now better known as Iraq鈥檚 former president Saddam Hussein.
Magnetic appeal
Ordinarily, the identity of the world鈥檚 most famous astrophysicist might cause much debate. At the time of writing, however, the answer is beyond doubt. Meet international man of magnetism Daniel Reardon, a 27-year-old Melbourne researcher who, during self-isolation, managed to get four neodymium magnets stuck up his nose.
Reardon was hoping to use the magnets to engineer a necklace that sounds an alarm every time a wearer tries to touch their face, which, with the ongoing pandemic, is a laudable goal. Having limited technical experience with such work, however, he soon ran into difficulties. What happened next is best expressed in Reardon鈥檚 own words. 鈥淚 clipped [the magnets] to my earlobes and then clipped them to my nostril and things went downhill pretty quickly.鈥�
Quantum Nazis
One of the more reliable parts of internet discourse is Godwin鈥檚 law. Coined by US lawyer Mike Godwin in 1990, it states that every online conversation, no matter how sweet or well-intentioned at the outset, will eventually lead to someone calling someone else a Nazi. 鈥淥h what a lovely sourdough you鈥檝e posted on Instagram,鈥� an interaction might begin. 鈥淲hat are you trying to do, make us feel bad about how unproductive we are in our free time? You鈥檇 like to control what we do all the time, wouldn鈥檛 you, Colin 鈥� or should we say Adolf?鈥�
In yet another 1 April paper on the arXiv, Michalis Skotiniotis and Andreas Winter predict the next step for the law. 鈥淎nticipating the quantum internet,鈥� they write, 鈥渨e show under reasonable model assumptions a polynomial quantum speedup of Godwin鈥檚 law. Concretely, in quantum discussions, Hitler will be mentioned on average quadratically earlier.鈥�
Right, well, that鈥檚 something else to look forward to.
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