OUR colleague Jim Giles subscribes to Google Voice, the Google service which, among other things, transcribes incoming telephone messages and sends them to you as an email. Jim forwards on to Feedback a transcript of a call from the owners of the apartment he rents in London. The message was to enquire about some work being carried out there. It is, he suggests, evidence that computerised dictation has not reached maximum verisimilitude quite yet.
“Good Morning to you on Michael for French forces area so will you go out. Workman in your flight 046 44 life. Pace, Elco we must install a new phone working. I’m coming to tell the cats. I could please celebrate the contract. It’s not working. M A D late. Thank you. If you can leave me. Another [phone number]. Thank you.”
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As you can imagine, Jim was particularly pleased that the cats were being kept in the loop.
“The sack of organic potatoes that Richard Jennings bought bears a stark message – “Warning: potatoes – handle with care”. Do they, he wonders, know something we don’t?”
IN A report on packaging overkill, we noted recently that Derek Woodroffe received a tiny integrated circuit in a large padded envelope that gave a ratio of product volume to packaging volume of 1:11,947. “Can anyone beat that?” we asked (16 January).
John Purser thinks he can, and by a factor of four. Mail-order firm Screwfix Direct sent him two screwdriver bits that they had omitted from a previous order. They were about 6 millimetres in diameter by 15 millimetres long. A nifty calculation involving pi gave John an estimated volume for the two of them of 0.85 cubic centimetres. They arrived in a cardboard box about 50 × 50 × 15 centimetres, giving a volume of 37,500 cubic centimetres and a ratio of goods volume to packaging volume of about 1:44,000.
So John beats Derek. But wait. Enter Maurice Childs. Dell sent him a single stick-on barcode label measuring about 10 × 25 × 0.05 millimetres, or 12.5 cubic millimetres. It was delivered in a box measuring about 350 × 350 × 25 millimetres, or 3,062,500 cubic millimetres. That’s a ratio of 1:245,000. Maurice’s figures are from memory, but if they’re close – and we believe Maurice when he says they are – then he clearly beats both John and Derek.
So that settles it. Or does it? Enter Geoff Robinson. The nicely wrapped box he received at Christmas was “not particularly large but unfortunately, and presumably accidentally, it was empty”. That, Geoff reckons, yields a goods-to-packaging ratio of infinity.
“Difficult to beat,” he points out, “unless a larger empty box means a larger infinity.”
Yes. Well. Perhaps it’s time to stop this thread.
HOW nice to be an adperson, dreaming up wonderful worlds where the boring constraints of scientific precision can be gleefully ignored.
Despite repeated raps over the knuckles, telecoms companies still advertise broadband speeds of “up to” however many megabits-per-second the person writing the advert cares to pluck from the sky. So the world has had to learn that “up to 8 Mb/s” means nothing more than “anything above a couple of kilobits per second and guaranteed never to exceed 8 Mb/s”.
Meanwhile, Korean company Samsung was recently by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority for as LED (light emitting diode) TVs, when in fact they are LCD (liquid crystal display) TVs that are backlit by LEDs instead of the normal fluorescent lamps. But we are still seeing publicity for LED TVs and LED monitors. Says Samsung: “Samsung will continue to use the term LED as we believe it will continue to be a commonly used industry term.”
So the world will now have to learn that LED TVs do not have screens made from LEDs.
As for the new generation of LED torches, these do indeed use white-light-emitting diodes instead of filament bulbs. But Duracell’s advertising people seem to have been taking lessons from the broadband folk. The latest LED torch from Duracell boasts “TrueBeam Optics” and “captures up to 100 per cent of light”. So could that mean anything above a mere couple of per cent efficiency? Perhaps Duracell could tell us.
FINALLY, one of the Christmas presents Patrick Fox-Roberts received was a Mensa calendar with a daily brain-teaser. Mensa, as readers will know, is an organisation for very brainy people – but is the Mensa brain-teaser compiled by people who are also very brainy?
Each morning since receiving the calendar Patrick has dutifully solved the day’s puzzle as his “daily workout for the brain” – until the Friday morning last month when he found himself utterly stumped by the question “Rearrange the letters ‘RUSTLED LIKE TARZAN’ to give three amphibians”.
Flicking forward to the Sunday page, which gave the answer, he saw what the problem was. The answer given for the Friday question was “Turtle, lizard and snake” – but most people, brainy or otherwise, know that these are reptiles, not amphibians.