(Image: Paul McDevitt)
Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
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Dutch ships’ quantum manifest
QUANTUM uncertainty plagues the rivers, canals and harbours of the Netherlands. Henk Rijneveld reports confusion among those working with a government system to monitor ship movements.
The system aims to record details of every vessel that passes through a lock, so that the authorities are prepared in the event of a disaster. A newly drafted document requires Henk to log the number of stowaways, as well as the number of passengers and crew.
However, Henk says, a stowaway is only a stowaway so long as nobody knows he or she is there. Once discovered, a stowaway is recorded as a passenger, or just possibly a crew member. “Just like Schrödinger’s cat, the stowaway is gone when we open the place where they have been sitting, but afterwards we have an extra member on the passenger list. So we never fill in the ‘stowaways’ number,” he adds.
All this makes Henk wonder why the authorities have included a box for recording stowaways at all. Perhaps it’s another example of the Heisenberg-like “unfunctionality principle” at work (19 September).
John Davnall writes: “Good to see that Omar Sultan’s archaeological team at Mes Aynak includes ‘a skeleton crew'” (26 September, p 35)
A wider shade of pale
A PROMOTIONAL magazine insert offers Alick Barnett a light with “a 360° wider beam angle than traditional LED bulbs”. Alick ponders: “I can’t recall seeing LED bulbs with a 0°-wide beam.” Feedback thinks that would be a laser, and best not looked into.
Hair is not for ignoramuses
PREVIOUSLY, Feedback discussed Athene Donald’s claim that girls’ science aspirations are harmed by toys fostering passive play, such as “combing the hair of Barbie” (19 September). Giuseppe Sollazzo is reminded of a passage in Linda Grant’s novel on the danger of using perming agents on hair dyed with copper compounds. “People think that hairdressing is a puerile, superficial art,” Grant wrote, “but if you don’t know your chemistry you’re in trouble.”
Arctic foxes stalk physics
IN RESPONSE to our search for amusing and pithy research paper titles, Tony King harks back to 1965 to offer ““.
Published in the Journal of Applied Physics, the paper concerns the magnetic properties of thin films, but the reference to Arctic foxes is more mysterious.
“It is recalled that random number sequences appear to have a periodicity of about 3.5 units,” say the authors, “a phenomenon now recognized as having led to the assignment of a periodicity in the population of Arctic foxes.” Seeing patterns where there are none is a well-documented human pastime; but what is so special about 3.5? If anyone knows, please tell.
Taxonomic bunny business
CONTINUING the animal theme, John Dobson recalls a 1957 paper by Albert E. Wood on where rabbits ought to be placed in the phylogenetic tree, and in particular whether they share an ancestral bough with rodents or with hoofed mammals. The question seems to have so challenged Wood that he appears to have contemplated a third possibility. His treatise was published under the title “”
Dessert in the lithosphere
THE study of Earth’s crust threatens to be a dry endeavour, so thanks to Jeanette Harmmann for offering two delicious papers from the field of geology. Discussing the strength of the continental lithosphere, James Jackson asks “” This led two of his colleagues to ponder “” Did someone say “lunch”?
Blanket ban omits thuribles
THE UK government is forging ahead with its proposed blanket ban on psychoactive substances (20 June). Some are concerned that its wording is so expansive that it is not clear what substances it would leave unbanned.
Mike Penning, minister of state for policing and justice, has to allay fears that incense would be prohibited by the legislation, insisting that “we do not believe it right to equate the effect of incense wafting through the air with the direct inhalation of fumes, for example from a solvent.”
Feedback extends its sympathy to the Right Honourable Mike Penning: if the plan really is to ban all psychoactive substances except in stated cases, he has a lot of letters to write. In this instance, altar boys can once more swing those censers with aplomb. We are now diverted by of what altar girls, , may do.
The train at Platform -1…
FURTHER to stories of things that are so stupid they are “beyond wrong” (29 August), Roger Leitch writes with a story he heard as a student. A British Rail employee was collared by a frustrated commuter who told him: “I notice that the carriages at the front of the train are crowded, with standing room only, while those at the back are nearly empty. This seems to happen nearly every day. Why not take the carriages at the back and put them at the front?”
More Truly Horrible Ideas
FINALLY, Henry Carpenter writes with a Truly Horrible Idea to Save the Planet. “To offset the effects of global warming, we should lower comets such as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on to the surface of Earth,” he says. Like titanic ice cubes, this celestial bounty could be used to restore cold ocean currents or top up reservoirs, explains Henry. There’s just the small matter of coaxing them down to Earth.
