FEEDBACK readers are becoming notorious for reading the small print. This may be upsetting to those who comfortably assume that no one does, and so believe that threats of failure to comply being dealt with by a “leather winged demon of the night” may suffice (16 December 2006).
“The euro “came under fresh attack… dropping below €1.25” UK newspaper The Guardian . Brian Reffin Smith thinks being 1.01 of itself would be impressive enough”
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Alistair Anderson has thus perused the purchase for this year’s Olympic Games in London. He highlights the part of clause 19.2.3 prohibiting “bottles or containers made of glass or other material” being taken into any venue. “Spectators wishing to bring their own food and drink,” he suggests, “may need to invest in virtual bottles or other containers – barring a better suggestion.”
Interfering with orderly execution
THE problem goes deeper. There is in any case a blanket ban on taking in “food (save for baby food), alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages (save for baby milk and other valid medical reasons)”.
This implies a much more specific problem: how is one to transport baby milk, or other food or drink necessitated by a (valid) allergy to absolutely all the offerings of the Games’s valued partner corporations?
These run to 7140 words by our count, including a “list of prohibited and restricted behaviour” that includes “any activity related to marketing or advertising” and “activity or protest related to unions, political or religious subjects…”
Feedback fears that even if brandishing an immaterial baby-milk container isn’t specifically mentioned in this list, it may still “interfere… with the orderly execution of a Session”.
And what is one to do if the baby milk is contained in a structure which is material, and forms part of one’s chest?
SPOTTED by Mark Long in an advert for Samsung’s SA200 monitor: “The ultimate energy saving measure has been created by Samsung with the new Adaptor On Off mode. By simply flicking the mechanical switch found on the Samsung LED Business monitor SA200, you can cut energy output while not using the monitor down to an amazing 0 Watts.”
“Amazing indeed!” says Mark, lost in admiration. “It’s got an OFF switch!” – as recommended in Feedback (31 March).
ADMIRABLE is the spirit of scientific curiosity evinced by a paper in the Journal of Morphology entitled ““. It sets out to discover whether snakes have necks.
It concludes: “myological features characterising the neck in quadrupedal [scaled reptiles]… are retained in all examined snakes, contradicting the complete lack of the neck in snakes hypothesised in previous studies.”
RADLETT, a settlement north of London, has installed electronic information screens at bus stops. Kay Bagon sends a photo of one, which enables residents to benefit, through state-of-the-art satellite technology, from the message: “Please refer to timetable”.
The metropolis to the south is now almost fully equipped with such signs. Initially, Feedback was occasionally startled to be told that buses were bound for “No destination”. The existential, not to say cosmological, implications were mind-boggling.
Someone behind the scenes presumably concluded that this worked better as a message to the computer program (“we have no destination information for this vehicle”) than to humans. So the non-message now reads: “No information”. What, no bits at all?
FINALLY, Feedback finds it useful, when dealing with digital devices, to bear in mind that there may be an error in the error message. It gets more complicated with the message Kathi Hori saw on her iPod about a “Quantum chronological asynchrony error” (12 May)
Kathi has discovered that the message was not in fact supplied by Apple, but turns up when she tries to open a link in a footnote to an essay on the Mormon blog on the experimental writer Gilda Trillim. We are not sure how it ended up on Kathi’s iThing screen.
Interestingly, Trillim and her nicely titled A Slouch in the Shoulders of Deity appear to exist only on that site. We suspect that may change, just as humorist Flann O’Brien’s much-footnoted fictional authority .
The essay on “Trillim” appears to be by Stephen Peck, an at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. We are now, though, so deeply nested in layers of non-factual literature that we are liable to believe almost anything.
Except we are still a bit doubtful that Apple’s User Experience Quality Control managers would have allowed programmer humour to make its way into production.