Climate change – we name the guilty man
LAST WEEK in Durban, South Africa, negotiations on climate change produced an agreement to negotiate a treaty, binding or not, in 2015. Great. Bernard Wilson seeks an explanation of the problems in a 5 December report in London’s Daily Telegraph: “Chris Huhne has called for Britain to lead the world in cutting carbon emissions,” it says.
“The menus of online merchant Amazon offer us books, e-books, audiobooks and “audible audiobooks”. We share Mike Cook’s puzzlement: are the other kind meditation manuals?”
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The minister, “who is responsible for climate change, will arrive at UN talks in Durban, South Africa, today to lead the charge for an international deal to stop global temperatures rising above 35.6 °F (2 °C).”
Firstly: “Is Huhne about to cause the next ice age?” Bernard asks. How can we begin to surmise the thought process that led to those numbers appearing? Fortunately, the was amended later in the day to describe a quite different deal “to stop global temperatures rising by more than 3.6 °F (2 °C)”.
Crucially: why weren’t we told before that “Huhne is responsible for climate change”? A binding treaty to outlaw him could be negotiated in, what, a year? Two?
Diehard members of the Conservative party – governing Britain in uneasy coalition with Huhne’s Liberal Democrat party – and the climate change sceptics that the Telegraph hosts might prefer to requisition him as alternative fuel even sooner.
REPAIRS to the water supply serving Eve Ousby’s house had the potential to cause the water to look cloudy for a few days. The water company felt the need to reassure her that this was caused by “small water particles”.
“This,” she writes, “left me feeling assuredly unassured.”
RECEIVING gifts is fundamentally more fraught than giving them. Consider the plight of Aaron Watson, puzzled recipient of a “Forpost 1” – claimed to provide protection from “the adverse effects of… electromagnetic radiation of TV sets, PC monitors and other electronic devices”. Er, thanks for the thought.
Website depicts the Forpost 1 as a stick-on disk. The unique selling proposition, distinguishing this from other stick-ons (23 April), is protection against the “torsion (information) component” of the electromagnetic field.
Of 380 web pages turned up by searching “torsion component” and “electromagnetic fields”, many talk of “bioenergy” and “new energy technologies”. We see none from an actual scientist.
The mechanism is – as always with these thingies – mysterious. describes an “outer body, a salt solution, and a ring”. The ring “generates a first right torsion field” and may be a “topological resonator”. Its topology is interesting: it may be “cylindrical in cross-section”.
Aaron offers to send the device to the Feedback Kitchen Lab to find out what is inside it. We accept – as soon as he finds a way of explaining to his mother-in-law where the gift went.
SEVERAL readers remind us that the term feedback long pre-dates the musical phenomenon that we mentioned in discussing the name of this column (26 November). John Faulkner recounts the story that it was coined in 1927 by Harold Black, on the ferry from home in New Jersey to work at Bell Labs in New York City; but Brian Darvell points to the Oxford English Dictionary crediting Wireless Age for using “feed-back” in 1920.
We knew that; or some of it. But we’re fairly sure that, when Feedback saw the light of day on 4 April 1992, musical noise – perhaps post-punk rather than rock ‘n’ roll – was on people’s minds.
FEEDBACK has diversified from the worlds of control systems and gigs. John Faulkner recalls “a senior manager urging staff to provide feedback for his latest project, ‘but it must be positive’.” Then he paused: “That’s what you electronics fellows say, isn’t it?”
John could not help but explain that “negative feedback produced growth and stability and positive feedback produced burnout”.
He “was not asked for any further analogies, ever again”.
And William Baines informs us of the new “neutral feedback”, in which “the output of a process feeds back into the input and nothing happens at all”.
He attributes it to “politics and journalism” but our literature search finds a welter of discussion of online auctions. Can you help?
FINALLY, it remains only to thank the thousands of you who have written to us over the past year, or posted your comments online. We apologise to those who received only our lovingly handcrafted automatic response: it is as impossible for us to correspond humanly with everyone as it is to publish all your stories – but we do read them with pleasure and most of what we publish comes from your skill at spotting the absurd. We wish all our readers an enjoyable holiday break and a happy new year.