FOR marvellous reasons, which unfortunately this column is too narrow to contain, Feedback has been reading the Republic of Ghana’s . It is wonderfully clear and concise, probably fitting more content into 34 pages than the manages in 324 (though we didn’t like the answer we got on who owns commissioned films…)
“”Illegal dumping prohibited,” reads the road sign in the photo that Clifford Latta sends from Coquille, Oregon. And the other kind…?”
Advertisement
The Act also defines the “term” of copyright in anonymous works as “70 years from the date on which the work was either made, first made available to the public, or first published, whichever date is the later”.
Clearly the drafters were far-sighted, taking into account, in 2005, results suggesting faster-than-light communication (1 October 2011, p 6). If these hold up, it could indeed be possible for a piece of writing, say, to be made available to the public before it is published, or before it has been written.
A chrono-synclastic infundibulum
EVEN more marvellously, we actually read the Ghanaian Copyright Act in the small French town of Ferney-Voltaire, just above the tunnel that houses the CERN particle physics laboratory, which generated the speed-limit-breaking neutrinos in question. Almost certainly, we should next week have re-read the Act on our return to London, to see whether this has been a local effect – or whether the Act is about to have been worded in the same way as it will be last week.
FEEDBACK’s near-visit to CERN was accidental. We were at a UN meeting in Geneva, across the border in Switzerland, and had picked a random hotel in France to avoid the ruinous exchange rate for the Swiss Franc.
Appropriately, given the way that CERN detects interesting particles indirectly by tracking the secondary particles they emit, our suspicions that there might be more to this small town than was meeting our eye began when we detected plain chocolate digestive biscuits – a kind of cookie that is one of the few summits of British culinary achievement – in the town’s Carrefour supermarket. We made a fleeting and inconclusive observation of Marmite, another British speciality, allegedly edible but inexplicable.
Either of these could have been traced back to other Brit particles in the many international institutions in Geneva – though, in our experience, plain chocolate digestives are suggestive of all-night computer-coding sessions, as a sort of transatlantic translation of pizza.
The proximity of the nuclear lab – and the British geeks who are among its emissions – was, sadly, confirmed by our detection in le Bar du Soleil of the musical genre “British blues”. Were it not for that, we could have remained in ignorance of what was going on in the tunnel a hundred metres beneath our feet.
STAFFORDSHIRE Moorlands District Council in the north of England has urged local organisations to apply for support from its . Jeremy Condliffe sends us its statement explaining that the first step in making an application is to gain the support of the relevant local councillor, whose contact details can be found by clicking on a “Your Council” link on the council’s website.
“Applicants without internet access,” the statement concludes, “should email ruth.reeves@staffsmoorlands.gov.uk“.
LONDON’s Imperial College may have a problem with terms and conditions. A reader who gives his name as Nick applied to the august institution for accommodation and received an informing him that there had been a “database failure” involving an “SQL DateTime overflow”. It went on to state: “Must be between 1/1/1753 12.00.00 AM and 12/31/9999 11.59.59 PM”.
Nick is hoping that the fees for his degree will stay the same until 9999: ideally, the few guineas that they would have been in 1753, had Imperial College existed then.
VAUXHALL is so confident in its cars’ quality and reliability that it is “A warranty could now last a lifetime!” How long is that, Hannah Needham wants to know? Vauxhall clarifies: “Available to the first owner of all new Vauxhall passenger cars, it’s valid for the lifetime of the vehicle up to a maximum of 100,000 miles.”
So let’s be clear. “Your car is dead. So it’s out of warranty.” Will that be it?
FINALLY, Feedback is in favour of consistency in units, as regular readers may have gathered. But how far should it go?
Peter Carr asks whether he has “spotted metrication of an old imperial expression” in the phrase “databases that contain tonnes of species” in 91av (20 August, p 20). That’s metric tonnes with two “n”s and an “e”, unlike the imperial unit.
What would that be in metric shedloads, then? “We use metric tonnes for most things, so why not?” say our sub-editors. Give them 25.4 millimetres and they’ll take 1609.3 metres…