Terror of the targeted army bands
THE field manual for the US army’s music bands has been leaked to , the blog by Steven Aftergood published by the Federation of American Scientists as part of its Project on Government Secrecy.
Army bands, which Aftergood says are known to some as “music performance teams”, are the subject of a newly updated field manual dated 7 July 2010. This states: “Bands provide music for ceremonial and morale support within full spectrum operations to sustain warriors and to inspire leaders… Army bands of the 21st century are organized, trained, and equipped to conduct concurrent operations in supporting multiple objectives with targeted musical styles.”
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Sadly, we are not told any more about these musical styles or who they are targeted at, so we will never know if, for example, a medley of tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan operas is the US army’s chosen musical style to strike fear into the hearts of certain types of enemy. But then again, perhaps that particular choice would contravene the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war.
“Last month, the online astronomy magazine Universe Today ran two images of the planet Jupiter captioned with the instruction “Click for full size”. “Do I dare?” asks Jenny Narraway”
This product does not contain camel dung
LYLE’S Golden Syrup may need some explanation for readers outside the UK. It is made entirely from cane sugar – “partially inverted” to convert some of the sucrose to fructose and glucose – so its makers are not required to list ingredients. Despite attempts to sell it in modern plastic bottles, many consumers still insist on buying the traditional tinplate can with a rather wonderful . Some English people put it, sacrilegiously, on porridge, which any Scot will tell you should only be seasoned with salt.
Recently, the classic design has been tweaked to add the information that the contents are “suitable for vegetarians” and “gluten-free”. Feedback can foresee a rich seam of food marketing claims stemming from this. This particular product is also free – just to make a start on the list – of salt, cholesterol, lactose, nuts, deadly nightshade and camel droppings – except, perhaps, in homeopathic doses.
FEEDBACK has proposed the hypothesis that out-of-context use of the word “quantum” is a guaranteed indicator of fruitloopery (see 10 June 2006 issue, and many more). But in the light of new evidence, we find ourselves mired in uncertainty.
William Bains, formerly a member of the editorial board of Medical Hypotheses (owned by 91av‘s parent company Reed Elsevier), and now editor of Hypotheses in the Life Sciences, writes to alert us to the existence at of a fully peer-reviewed quarterly, the Interdisciplinary Journal of Neuroscience and Quantum Physics. The current issue, when we looked, opens with an editorial entitled “What neuroquantology is up against: deconstruction of a negative editorial”, and includes such learned contributions as “Near death experiences: a new algorithmic approach to verifying consciousness outside the brain” and “Non local effects in the process of dying: can quantum mechanics help?”
Not being among the peers of the contributing researchers, we borrow the words of philosopher : “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.”
Let’s have that in gigadollars
UNUSUAL units are all very well as fodder for Feedback, but what of the units that should be more usual than they are?
Journalists grasping for a way to convey a sense of a 750-tonne pile of plastic wrapping may be forgiven for translating it into blue whales (17 July). But politicians and their officials routinely expect the public to comprehend currency in hundreds of thousands of millions of units.
Peter Banks, while watching yet another TV news report based on the massive numbers involved in big banking, asked himself – and us – “Why do they not use Système Internationale (SI) prefixes?” Feedback, too, likes the idea of economics reporters announcing the UK budget deficit in gigapounds, global trade in teraeuros, and so on. “Surely,” he concludes, “this would be a more economic way to talk: time is money, as you know.”
KEEN to share the footage shot with his new Canon Vixia HF200 camcorder, Steve Wood plugged it into his computer. Click, whirr… and a message appeared in the viewfinder: “Do not disconnect the USB cable or the power source while the camcorder is connected to a computer.” Which would be now – and, logically, forever. Steve’s friends can now expect to receive lots of exciting moving pictures of him, er, sitting at his computer.
FINALLY, the upgrade to Andy Best’s Norton home security software automatically sets up renewals that he can cancel online if he wants to. The suggested method of doing this is causing him problems, though. Norton told him: “You may cancel the automatic renewal feature of Norton Ongoing Protection at any time by singing into your Norton Account at .” Andy is worried. His PC doesn’t have a microphone, and anyway, he can barely remember any tunes.