The 17th Feedback
Feedback is feeling peculiar. The mood swings are even more drastic than usual, to the point of constituting a whole new personality. It is as if, like a Time Lord, Feedback has taken an insufficiently homeopathic dose of strychnine and been forced to regenerate into a whole new body with a radically different mind.
One immediate mood alteration is that Feedback is now suffering from severe FOMO. Specifically, we have the FOMO that comes of living slightly too far south to see the recent aurora borealis displays. Happily, those selfless people at Meta (owners of Facebook, Instagram and all your personal data) provided some for those of us that didn’t see them. A fake image is definitely a good substitute for seeing a beautiful natural phenomenon, so thank you Meta.
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Anyway, please bear with us as we go through this unsettling transition. Feedback is not entirely sure what it is going to look like from now on, so we asked for suggestions from our nearest and dearest. Mrs Feedback suggested the all-too-practicable approach of ripping off a load of jokes from social media sites that most readers won’t look at. Meanwhile, Feedback Jr gave a blank stare, asked why on Earth anyone would call a column “Feedback” when it isn’t the letters page and then demanded food. (“It’s because it is on the back page. You see, there are these things called print magazines…”) Feedback’s Felines were similarly unhelpful and even more insistent upon nutrition.
High midnight
Feedback is pleased to report a happy accident. By making what can only be described as a rock-stupid mistake, Feedback has inadvertently discovered a way to massively reduce inefficiency in the global economy. All it will take is an enormous amount of developer time.
Needing to book an online appointment, we used one of those websites where you pick a slot on a calendar. Feedback went for noon. But when we sat down at the computer a few minutes beforehand, the website said we were a “no show”. This seemed presumptuous, as we were early. But then Feedback realised the slot was labelled “12:00 am”, which is midnight, not noon. Feedback is a twit.
After rebooking, Feedback apologised to the person on the other end – who admitted they recently did the exact same thing. This got Feedback thinking. How much time is wasted by booking websites that make it too easy to timetable something for midnight when you mean noon? The costs to the economy in lost productivity and laptops hurled at walls must be staggering. Surely it wouldn’t be too difficult to have a pop-up any time somebody books at midnight, saying “Are you sure you didn’t mean noon?” User experience designers, your time has come.
Booksellers gone rogue
Writer was passing through London’s Heathrow Airport when she spotted a copy of Unleashed, the autobiography of Boris Johnson, one of the UK’s many recent former prime ministers. The unusual manner in which the book was displayed prompted Dean to and share it on BlueSky, which if you haven’t used it is like X but with fewer white supremacists. This is one of those cases where a picture is worth a thousand words, but Feedback has a word count to fill, so: Johnson’s tome was sandwiched between two books by Thomas Erikson, called Surrounded by Liars and Surrounded by Idiots.
Two matters arise from this. First, Feedback wonders about other eccentric or malevolent ways to display science or science-adjacent books. A few obvious possibilities present themselves, like moving Graham Hancock’s books into the science fiction section. Booksellers might also consider inventing some new genres within which to display themed sets of popular titles. Feedback has identified a few emergent trends, including “perennial claims that string theory will fix physics”, “radical solutions to the consciousness problem that unsurprisingly turn out to involve quantum mechanics” and “writers too famous to allow themselves to be edited for length”. Readers who have noticed similar clusters of titles are invited to submit them to feedback@newscientist.com.
Feedback was also curious about Erikson’s Surrounded by… books, displayed in our local bookshops in the self-help and business sections. It turns out Surrounded by Idiots promotes a hypothesis that personalities can be divided into four types, labelled with colours. This was developed by psychologist William Moulton Marston, better known as the creator of Wonder Woman, and formalised into a system called (, or possibly , depending where you look).
Our spidey sense tingled upon reading this. Most commercial personality tests are notoriously unreliable. Might this be a load of cobblers? Feedback found a detailed Medium by a psychologist, which said: “the four-colour model is based on a theory that has no scientific basis, has been subject to no rigorous testing and gives confusing and contradictory results.” Yup, likely shoe repair practitioners.
In sum, Johnson’s book is surrounded by books about being surrounded by idiots that are themselves idiotic. It’s almost too perfect.
Got a story for Feedback?
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.