Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Forgotten dolls of science
COLLEAGUES were recently racking their brains to remember the names of women whose contribution to science has been forgotten – as has happened to Marthe Gautier (see “Who really decoded Down’s syndrome?“). Conversation turned to reasons why girls might be discouraged from becoming scientists and, bang on cue, an article appeared, entitled ““, about a paper concluding just that – see .
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So who played with Barbies, yet still reached the exalted heights of working at 91av? A hand went up: “I mummified my Barbies at the age of 11 using a combination of spices and oils I made up out of thin air after my class learned about the Egyptians,” one of us confessed. “My mother found the mouldering mess in the recesses of her closet three years later.”
It may not be playing with Barbies that does the damage: perhaps it is how you play.
Jim Ainsworth pleads for assistance interpreting the labels on the bars of French soap he was given, declaring them “72% extra pur“: 72 per cent pure he can handle, but “extra“?
Spam of all nations
OCCASIONALLY, spam emails can cast light on human behaviour and internet trends. Those we receive in Korean, for example, seem to be as obsessed with penile metrics as were the English messages of yesteryear. In English, we now receive mostly financial scams and offers to make our website the best friend of a famous web search engine.
According to that same service, we have been recently informed in Chinese that “Coffee also can bring you health and wealth freedom”. This was deeply encouraging, until we realised it was the same pitch as “After work, drinking coffee + Internet entrepreneurs can have a substantial income” – which would be a home-work scam.
We no longer get spam in Hebrew, but we have just received the first Arabic spam we can remember: it promises email addresses and phone numbers for sale, which looks unfortunately like a harbinger of much more spam to come.
Filter feeding
ON THE subject of spam, one of Feedback’s correspondents noticed that Gmail’s spam filters tend to eat press releases when they aren’t fed enough genuine spam from his many friends in Nigeria. So he periodically checks to see what they have caught.
The latest batch includes a press release announcing that Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt had given a “New Digital Age” grant to the Open Technology Institute. At least, our correspondent notes, Google’s spam filter doesn’t discriminate in favour of its own press releases.
Shelve that idea!
NOT for the first time, Feedback groans at the tenuous connection of marketing practice to empirical data. This week’s outburst is occasioned by Peter Debney’s observation that the branch of the sells 91av on a shelf marked “men’s interest”.
We recommend putting some next to the dolls. Or the embalming oils. Or somewhere, anywhere, else.
The future as it used to be
FEEDBACK now returns to 91av‘s 1964 vision of The World in 1984 (11 January). Many of the 99 eminent contributors got quite a lot right, although missile engineer Wernher von Braun got almost everything wrong (1 March).
We turn to some, er, enthusiasts for futures that now seem decidedly retro. Edwin Link of the Sea Diver Corporation of New York proposed revolutionising marine transport with “inflatable submarine tankers” – possibly nuclear-powered – to ship cargo, including oil from the Arctic.
Christopher Cockrell proposed nuclear-powered ocean-going hovercraft – and hover-trains doing 550 kilometres per hour on “an elevated track… to prevent small boys throwing old bicycles on the track just to see what happens”.
The prize for lyrical futurism, though, must go to marine biologist Alistair Hardy. Proposing “artificial whales” to gather the small fry of the sea, he was moved to ask: “Can we not save the starving children of the world with krill?”
Peerless arithmetic
FINALLY, Feedback is intrigued by the arithmetic of the UK peerage. When Peter Slessenger went to discover the number of Scottish members of the House of Lords in February at he was helpfully informed that the web page was showing him Lords “781 out of 780”. That would include the Bishops, known as the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal – and who else? “Do the Lords Spiritual,” Peter asks, “know something we don’t about Lucan?” The latter following the murder of his children’s nanny.
Feedback had a more temporal theory. We recall arriving early for a function in their Lordships’ House and observing that two of the three Lords already there – and gathering up probably the best fishpaste sandwiches in the world – had recently been released from prison. Could the recording of their return lead to a hiccup in the total? When we checked back in March the web page gave us “results 779 out of 779”. Some authority, higher or mundane, had for the while restored normal arithmetical rules.