Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Unsolvable puzzle (9)
Our thanks to Richard Weeks for his email enquiring about the puzzles section of the 快猫短视频 website. 鈥淚鈥檓 glad to see you say 鈥極ur crosswords are now solvable online鈥�,鈥� says Richard. 鈥淭o level the playing field, could you please offer that guarantee for the print versions, too?鈥�
Euphemismatism
Some weeks ago, Feedback hitched up the reader engagement wagon and paraded through the streets of this column asking for your best examples of scientific euphemism. Many thanks to those of you who replied, often with unprintable specimens. Among a particularly strong showing we are deeply grateful to Scott McNeil for reminding us of the phrase 鈥渞apid unscheduled disassembly鈥�, variations of which have been used for decades by rocketry pioneers to describe a hazard of the job. As Scott puts it: 鈥淪o much simpler to say 鈥榯he rocket blew up鈥�.鈥�
Advertisement
Time after time
Time flies like an arrow, the saying goes, while fruit flies like a banana. Well, sometimes time flies in odd ways, too.
For Exhibit A, we turn to the Financial Times, which reports that the Public Health Department of the state of Georgia has been misleading in its . The offending item is a graph showing a slow decline in case counts over time, with a y-axis running from 0 to 150 and an x-axis spanning from 28 April to 9 May. So far, so conventional. The weirdness starts when you move along the x-axis and encounter, in order, 28 April, 27 April, 29 April, 1 May, 30 April, 4 May, 6 May, 5 May, 2 May, 7 May 鈥� and then, to show you just can鈥檛 keep a good month down, 26 April 鈥� followed by 3 May, 8 May and 9 May.
Regular readers of this magazine will be all too familiar with unusual theories regarding the flow of time. Some physicists say that its passage is dictated by the direction of entropy; others assert that it is governed by the pull of cosmic inflation. But until now, we at Feedback had never come across a model yoking time鈥檚 flow to the public relations needs of the government of Georgia.
Taking the pi
If you can鈥檛 do something efficiently, Feedback always says, then do it inefficiently 鈥� but with style. That鈥檚 why we doff our hats (in a roundabout fashion involving two crocodile clips and a handstand) to MIT postdoc Carl-Johan Haster, who has devised what must be the least practical and most costly method yet known for calculating pi.
Pi, as every schoolchild once knew but has forgotten since the start of home-schooling, is a mathematical constant of infinite digits often approximated as 3.14 in order to save paper. It can be calculated in many ingenious ways, with its value known to well past the 50 trillionth digit.
In a recent paper uploaded to the preprint website arXiv, Haster attempted to gild the lily. As a cosmologist on the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration, he had access to data from three incredibly precise interferometers hunting for gravitational waves in the cosmos. By doing a little light-fingered analysis, he could plead ignorance of the value of pi and ask the universe to tell him what it was.
The answer, he revealed, was (give or take about 0.06). In Feedback鈥檚 view, using multibillion-dollar apparatus to produce an answer that could be bettered by a freehand drawing of a circle is inefficiency of such monstrously stylish proportions that we stand in awe.
Amusical intelligence
Switching from stylish inefficiency to unstylishness proper for a moment, the Eurovision song contest is a staple of Feedback鈥檚 springtime television schedule. This year, alas, the pleasure of a 4-hour exercise in the douze times table was denied us by the global pandemic. But, you will be pleased to hear, that didn鈥檛 stop us from enjoying some classic Europop.
To coincide with the dates that the music festival was scheduled to be held in Rotterdam, a Dutch broadcaster ran a contest for the best AI-produced song. Well, given that it鈥檚 Eurovision, 鈥渂est鈥� might not be the proper adjective. We suppose that Eurovisioniest would be more appropriate. The winning entry, produced by Australian team Uncanny Valley, is a classic of the genre. Called Alcohol You, lyrics include 鈥淚f this is just a dream / Don鈥檛 wake me in between / I mean it / You lied so many times / But right between the lines / I read it鈥�.
Oh hang on 鈥� apologies, that was actually Romania鈥檚 2020 entry to Eurovision itself. The real AI masterpiece, called Beautiful the World, runs: 鈥渄reams still live on the wings of happiness鈥�. Much less embarrassing.
Name game
Our electronic larder cupboards are overflowing once again with the self-raising flour of your nominative determinism submissions. Feedback is overjoyed to learn of the existence of architect and urban visionary Carolyn Steel, Radio 4 food journalist Dan Saladino and London-based estate agent Lucy Roome. A special mention also goes to Gwynne Shotwell, the president of successful rocket-launching company Space X.
Got a story for Feedback?
Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or 快猫短视频, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES. Please include your home address. Consideration of items sent in the post will be delayed.聽This week鈥檚 and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.