Are wind turbines really fans?
WHY didn’t we think of that? The only way we can do justice to a that John Gledhill forwards from the Leamington Courier newspaper is to reproduce it in full:
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“It is blindingly obvious and I am amazed that an ‘expert’ has not pointed this out.
“Fact 1: Most of the ash trees in Denmark have died, or are dying from the fungal disease, Chalara fraxinea.
“Fact 2: The Danish company Vestas is the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines.
“As a country, we purchase and erect these huge fans all over our rural landscape, from where they then spread the fungal plague indiscriminately. It’s an ill wind indeed!”
It may be best not to credit the author here. All we can add is: Huge fans – no thanks!
BALLYGOWAN mineral water, Barry Cash was startled to read, is “filtered through calcium-enriched limestone”. Barry asks, “How can you enrich it with more calcium?”
“KEEP back from the platform edge,” begins a sign from Penrith railway station sent by Alan Storer from Victoria, Australia, who assigns it to Penrith, New South Wales, Australia. Feedback’s fine eye for typography and railway architecture places it firmly in Penrith, Cumbria, UK, in the time of standardised British Rail signs using the Helvetica font. Searching, we find readers of The Guardian newspaper in 2006 of its location.
And why might it have gone viral all over the interweb and undergone such memetic mutation? Because we more frequently see a sign that assumes some knowledge of physics in expressing the reason for keeping back, such as: “Passing trains cause air turbulence.”
The sign in Alan’s photo is in plain English and finishes, simply, with: “…or you may get sucked off”. Feedback wants an explanation for the giggling we hear. This is serious.
FEEDBACK reported John Gledhill’s confusion over whether “don’t know” fits into the continuum of ordinal numbers (1 December). The notion of “don’t know” as a number reminded a colleague of the UK government’s thoughts on the subject of the cost to authors of rules that allow other people to use their work without asking or paying – so-called “private copying”.
When he looked for info on such costs, our colleague found that civil servants in the Intellectual Property Office had that they don’t know. The IPO estimated the gross business benefits to be about £141 million a year and so proceeded to subtract “don’t know” – the amount of authors’ losses – from this, coming up with an estimate for a net benefit of, guess what, £141 million. This seemingly places the value of “don’t know” at zero.
Our colleague felt pretty confident that, in this context, even if the value of “don’t know” could not be specified, it was certainly not zero. So about the role in applied mathematics of the special value “Not a Number”, or “NaN” – as specified in the from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In fact, the correct answer to “£141 million minus NaN” is “NaN”.
It was at this point, we understand, that the IPO’s collective eyes glazed over.
THE above-mentioned colleague hears that the same Intellectual Property Office civil servants have since moved on from mangling applied mathematics to logic.
A scurrilous rumour spread by a former civil servant holds that their recalculation of the costs and benefits of permitting use of authors’ works for the purposes of parody starts from the assumption that “there is currently no parody in the UK”.
If true, this would be a fine example of a sentence which is its own disproof.
OUR piling system throws up in Canada’s Globe and Mail online telling us that in October President Bashar al-Assad of Syria “approved a law on the health security of genetically modified organisms… to regulate their use and production”.
SANA, the state-run news agency, explained that the law’s purpose was to “preserve the health of human beings, animals, vegetables and the environment”.
The same report mentions that “more than 33,000 people have been killed in 19 months of conflict” in Syria, “most of them civilians”. Clearly, al-Assad is, despite that, the kind of guy who cares.
FINALLY, several readers were inspired to respond to our report of a psychic fair “cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances” (6 October). Tony Lang is reminded of the organisers of similar “psychic” events in Ewell, Surrey, UK putting up large banners – and he wonders, “Why do they need to advertise?”
Barrie Wells, meanwhile, wonders whether the organisers of such events may have an arrangement with Virgin Trains, the railway operator that sent a promotional email advising him to, “Book before today, and save for tomorrow”.