A DISGRUNTLED 91av space correspondent asks: if they can put a rover on Mars, why can’t they put a listing on the internet?
As he points out, it has been a month of triumph for NASA, after a year spent reeling from the loss of the shuttle Columbia and the unflattering investigation that followed. But with two rovers now successfully exploring the Red Planet, the agency is on display at its best, sending back one set of spectacular images after another.
And people have noticed, as everyone at NASA keeps reminding us: 5 billion web hits and counting so far, which is probably a new record of some kind.
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So once those millions of people have finished downloading the latest images, where do they turn for more information? Perhaps the best source is the news conference from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shown live on NASA-TV and then replayed several times during the day. All you need to know if you want to see and hear the latest developments is when to tune in.
Ah, but there’s the rub. While NASA spends millions of dollars annually to operate a 24-hour TV channel and boasts about how it is providing education and inspiration to young people, it has failed to spend the few extra dollars it would take to provide listings of when these news briefings are on.
If you ask, they tell you that the listings are on the web. But when you check, it’s just a decoy: a combination of partial, contradictory listings, vague, indecipherable titles and downright misinformation. NASA can get pictures back in minutes across hundreds of millions of kilometres of space, but apparently cannot figure out how to get listings information from one cubicle to the next so someone can post it online.
So, on behalf of our correspondent and countless other frustrated Mars-watchers, here’s an offer from the goodness of our hearts. NASA, if you tell Feedback what programmes are on when, we’ll post them on the web for you daily, gratis.
After all, it’s really not rocket science.
FEEDBACK is, as all readers who can count birthdays should be, increasingly concerned about the ageism that prevents older people using the internet. As we noted on 22 November last year, for example, the online Washington Post refuses to register people over 103.
Reader Liz Chow raises an equally serious, if opposite, problem. She is worried about the unborn using the net. Are they ready for it? Shouldn’t they have a period of innocent, media-free amniotic floating before they are thrown into the confusing maelstrom that is logged-on infancy?
But using it they clearly are. When Chow tried to register for the Weatherzone forums at she had to select a birth year from a drop-down list, which started with 2013.
MEANWHILE, when filling in an online form for child tax credit on the UK Inland Revenue website, reader Jim King encountered a different kind of age problem.
He entered the expected date of birth of his forthcoming bundle of joy, and got this utterly baffling error message: “Your child’s date of birth can only be dated 3 months in the future (and cannot be more than 120 years in the past). Please re-enter the correct date.”
THE library at reader Shaun Plumb’s place of work helpfully sends out notices of new books – in this case Masters of Doom: How two guys created an empire and transformed pop culture”.
“This,” the memo said, “is the story of the Lenin and McCartney of the video game industry…” and so Plumb and friends set up leninandmccartney.blogspot.com, as one does, in tribute.
Feedback, meanwhile, can at last confess to being a long-standing Marxist-Lennonist, of the Groucho variety, of course.
CONFUSED about navigation? You are not alone. The outdoor gear catalogue from Scotts of Stow offers this: “Using a compass can be confusing, as it always points north. This ingeniously-designed new compass is far easier to read, as it always points in the direction you are heading.”
If we want to know which way we’re heading, we generally just glance down to see which way the Feedback navel is pointing – and that comes as standard equipment. But maybe they mean that the compass points out the direction you told it you are supposed to be heading in – but probably aren’t.
FINALLY, returning to the topic of Mars, we have reason to believe that a UFO cover-up is taking place there. A press release circulating last month round NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, home of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, stated: “A spokesbeing for the Mars Air Force denounced as false the rumours that an alien spacecraft crashed recently in the desert outside of Ares Vallis.”
From the department of the unsurprising. Reader Bob Malcolm tells us that a recent announcement on London Underground reassured passengers that: “There are no trains travelling in both directions between Victoria and Brixton”
