On the scent
It turns out that drinking coffee will unlock Feedback’s wallet faster than rumours of a hot new crypto offering. A study in the reports that consuming a caffeinated drink before shopping gets us to spend one-and-a-half times the amount we would have done had we chosen decaffeinated coffee or water instead. Lead author blames the dopamine released as a result of the stimulant, which in turn boosts impulsivity, lowers self-control and (quite specifically) sends the sale of scented candles (see page 16) rocketing.
Internet bubbles
Alas, this insight came too late for Feedback, who may have overdone the stationery cupboard facelift. Should scented candles be shelved under “S” or “C”? And was it really necessary to buy a hot tub that connects to the mobile network? Of course it was, says SmartTub, a Jacuzzi brand whose gewgaws allow you to set the jets, lights and temperature of your bath when you are out of the room.
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The downside to this (beyond implying you aren’t around to enjoy your own bath) is a familiar one: security. Ethical hacker EatonWorks stumbled on multiple weaknesses on the SmartTub site (which have since been, er, plugged). “As for remotely controlling tubs,” EatonWorks , “I think the worst you could probably do is turn the heat all the way up.” As we write this, Jacuzzi had yet to comment on the leak. (Sorry.)
When words don’t count
A more pressing problem is how we are going to afford this blessed thing. Feedback’s go-to solution -write a bestseller from within the tub – shrivelled after spotting Marc Abrahams’s of a recent paper in the Open Journal of Statistics. “The Temporal Making of a Great Literary Corpus by a XX-Century Mystic: Statistics of daily words and writing time” captures, as few more critical works have ever captured, the sheer labour involved in setting words down on paper.
Between 1943 and 1951, Maria Valtorta, an Italian mystic who was confined to bed, wrote about 2.64 million words in notebooks, dating every entry. Matricciani has calculated that Valtorta, armed “with a set of fountain pens always filled with ink because she did not know when the alleged visions would come”, wrote for the equivalent of 1340 days – or about 3.67 years of constant writing.
What he doesn’t mention is that Valtorta’s four-volume The Poem of the Man-God was placed on the List of Forbidden Books; the called it “a badly fictionalised life of Jesus… written rather inappropriately and recalling certain descriptions and scenes from modern romance novels”. Some writers can’t get a break.
Lost in translation
We could automate the creative process, of course – though experiments in that line are getting creepier by the day. that DALL-E 2, the latest AI system from OpenAI, can not only generate images from prompts (like, say, “Two people talking about vegetables, with subtitles”), it will also describe that image back to us in a (fairly) stable language it has invented.
at the University of Texas at Austin have begun to decode this modern Rosetta Stone. When DALL-E 2 talks about “vicootes”, it means vegetables, while birds are “apoploe vesrreaitais” – which is a little too Lovecraftian for comfort.
One-way trip
With a shudder, therefore, we turn from literary endeavour to more reliable means of earning money. Are we willing to have cockroaches run riot in our house for a month? asks , a US pest control and media company. For a $2000 consideration, we jolly well are. But so were 2500 others, all rushing to apply for just half a dozen opportunities. So that’s out.
The cockroaches’ Airbnb-like experience will not, in any case, end happily. The Pest Informer will be testing out extermination techniques. So it is with empty pockets, but a clear conscience, that Feedback settles back and glances through the mail, while that barely affordable hot tub hots up.
A little too steamy
In light of our hunt for words for anti-expert, Chris Arnold recalls his father’s stint as an educator in the 1960s in what is now Eswatini, but was then a British colony. This involved fielding a great many learned visitors from his home country. His local colleagues very quickly established a definition for an expert as “an ordinary person from very far away”.
Quick check of the phone app… This tub is taking an inordinate amount of time to heat up, but, meanwhile, reader Peter Calver reckons the opposite of expert is “polymyth” – a simple yet endearing conceit. David Evans lowers the tone with news that the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra has a timpanist called Neil Hitt…
Ah, and with a ping of the app, we are set free! Off with the jodhpurs and the Christmas cardigan. My it’s steamy in here. Too steamy by half, I reckon, and – GOOD GRIEF, what kind of temperature is this?! You could poach a flock of apoploe vesrreaitais in here.
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