READERS continue to send examples of signs that they feel instruct them to exhibit quantum behaviour. Dermot Bradley, in a café in Edinburgh, UK, was instructed to “queue both sides”. In contrast, Mark Manning, visiting the beach at the Welsh village of Llangennith, was abjured “Strictly no parking on both sides of the road”.
A mathematically eminent reader, meanwhile, tells Feedback that such signs, including the “use all doors” on a train (16 June 2007), do in fact make sense. We pondered this, and realised that, to the people writing the instructions, traffic – whether vehicular or passenger – is much like a gas. It is only when we, as individual “particles” in the traffic, “collapse” the meaning of the sign into an instruction to us personally, that confusion arises. Probably.
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A sign near London Bridge station informs us that “Narrow lanes do not overtake cyclists”. Steve Wilson wants to know whether narrow lanes overtake cars or buses
ARRIVING at the Crown Plaza hotel in Liverpool, UK, Karen Ashworth was confronted with a different quantum phenomenon. She was a little alarmed to face a sign instructing her to turn left for rooms 605 to 628 and right for rooms 601 to 606 – especially since she had been allocated one of the two rooms with indeterminate location. She tried turning left by default and, thankfully, found her room without problem. But if she had turned to the right to look for her room would it have been there as well?
“Do they revert, to some sort of quantum superposition state when not being actively observed?” she muses. “And would that mean I might end up inadvertently sharing with whoever is in the other one as soon as we both go to sleep?”
Football’s responsibility for climate change
CLIMATE change: we name the guilty parties. London’s Daily Telegraph may have been premature in fingering the UK’s energy and climate change minister Chris Huhne, as Feedback reported last year (24/31 December 2011). The subject, of course, rouses fierce passions. The latest fashion is for those who would call themselves “sceptics” to demand raw data and computer code from climate researchers.
Then they play with the numbers in their spreadsheets, aiming resolutely at the target of convincing themselves that whatever is causing the world to warm, it is not their carbon dioxide emissions – a process cruelly labelled “mathturbation”.
Blogger Michael Brown decided to do his own fiddling. And lo! At you will find a demonstration that each appearance by the Manchester United football team in the FA Cup over an 11-year period raised global temperatures by 0.1°C. There are graphs and everything.
So it must be true: the 11 players of Man U are between them responsible for at least half of global warming. Even better, adding cup appearances by Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool explained a whopping 180 per cent of the temperature change.
Implausible? Brown argues that the claims of climate sceptics are no more convincing.
Controlling crowds with damp clergy
SENIOR officers from London’s Metropolitan Police Service are, according to , reviewing how the force deals with large-scale disorder.
Possible techniques under discussion include “wider use of water canons and baton guns”.
Ian Moseley suspects that the “cannon” mentioned in the headline would be rather more effective than the collection of damp clergy referred to in the story.
How to construct a non-doofy snowman
THE description of the invention covered by : “The following is not a joke patent. It’s completely serious.” Feedback finds this promising.
In the deep winter of 2006 Ignacio Asperas of Melville, New York, filed his application to patent an “apparatus for facilitating the construction of a snow man/woman”. He treats us to engaging details of his efforts to build snowpeople, which have generally looked “sort of doofy”. He goes on to describe his solution: a Van de Graaff generator inside a plastic sphere covered with dimples.
Roll this through dry snow, and electrostatic charge from the generator should make the snow stick to the sphere and form the perfect body for a snow figure.
There should be a circuit for automatically cutting off the charge generator “to prevent shock” the inventor writes with concern, because “it would not do to zap little kiddies”. But then as an afterthought he adds: “I am sure it would not harm them, but I am thinking of greedy product liability attorneys.”
Atheist’s afterlife appearance
FINALLY, while taken by the idea of a Global Atheist Convention, due to take place from 13 to 15 April, as advertised in our holiday issue (24/31 December 2011, p 7), Paul Griffiths notes that if Christopher Hitchens were to make his advertised appearance “it might rather put a dampener on the event”.
We imagine that the militant atheist Hitchens, who died on 15 December, would himself be put out to find himself making an afterlife appearance. Sadly, the unavoidable time lag between preparation of the advert and the ink drying provides a mundane explanation for the error.