FIRST impressions can get things so wrong. Bruce Skinner tells us about a caravan parked on the edge of a public sporting ground just outside Adelaide, South Australia. In two lines of large letters on the side of the caravan were the words “ARKS, GARDENS & CREATION”.
Bruce’s first thought was that the caravan was part of some sort of evangelical religious event. Then he realised that it was a mobile site office for the local council’s works department. Its open door, folded back against the side of the van, was concealing the initials “P” at the beginning of the first line, and “RE” at the beginning of the second.
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No hurry. Relax. A notice in Louise Tondeur’s local surgery reads: “Heart failure patients please wait here for the nurse
AS A manager in a local government office, Colin Cox has to authorise staff leave requests that come through on an electronic system. When authorising one such request recently, he noticed that the staff member concerned was listed as having 28.5499992370605 days of annual leave left to take. He worked out that this was accurate to something like 1/100,000 of a second.
He went ahead and authorised the leave but warned his colleague that he would be monitoring things very carefully to make sure she didn’t take any more time than she was entitled to.
Record numbers of physics authors
INFALLIBLE interweb sources suggested to us that the 3062 authors of the paper “A search for new physics in dijet mass and angular distributions in pp collisions at sqrt{s}=7 TeV measured with the ATLAS detector” constituted a record (16 July).
Reader Bob Beasley has consulted the proper authorities, in the shape of the UK Institute for Engineering and Technology’s Inspec database (), and found five recent papers with more authors. The record-holder at the time of his search appeared to be “Charged-particle multiplicities in pp interactions at sqrt{s}=900 GeV measured with the ATLAS detector at the LHC” () with, by his count, 3213 authors – though the first is “ATLAS collaboration”, which must expand to several hundred people at least.
Bob notes that in particle physics every researcher, whatever their degree of involvement, appears to be added as an author. As more researchers join and leave these long-term projects the lists are only likely to grow.
Frank Cross, meanwhile, provides a data point early in the author inflation curve, mentioning that in the 1980s he would get a laugh by showing a slide of a paper on lasers, also from CERN, with 102 authors – which his surgical colleagues then regarded as a ridiculously large number. He suggests that reviewers in particle physics can determine “either the quality of the paper or the number of authors; never both at the same time”.
Credit for program-code contributors
OH DEAR… some things get more complicated the more Feedback looks at them. Were we, as Frank suggests, “just a little bit sad” for sitting and counting the 3062 authors mentioned in the item above? Of course we didn’t do that: we reformatted the author list into an Open Office spreadsheet and read off the number of rows.
But… does that mean we should now credit the entire team of Open Office program-code contributors as authors of that item? A quick reformatting of the Open Office credits page () shows that there were, at the time of writing, 845 contributors. Some of these, as with the CERN papers’ authors, are groups – whose lists of members may also include groups. Will such recursive authorship make it impossible ever to declare a record-holder?
Calorie Restriction Society banquet
SADLY, we were unable to make it to last month’s , held in Las Vegas on Wednesday 26 to Saturday 29 October. We were particularly sorry to miss the “banquet-style lunches” on the Thursday and Saturday and the “banquet dinner” on the Friday.
Elephants, blue whales and French fries
“ELEPHANT units, blue whale units, Ben-Hur units (29 October), and now a new caloric unit… the French fry,” complains Sue Vicente.
Eh? Where did Sue get that from? The answer is , which told us on 7 September: “Each year, more than 170 million people visit national forests for recreation. And the physical activity associated with these visits burns 290 billion food calories. That equals enough French fries laid end to end to reach the moon and back – twice – according to a recent study in the Journal of Forestry.”
All we need to know now is the conversion rate from French fries to Ben Hurs.