Greenfinger
No finer monument graces central London’s skyline than the that houses Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. From that edifice emerges the news that, besides cat-stroking villains plotting world domination from their volcano lairs, the spooks of MI6 now have climate polluters in their sights.
Climate change is the “foremost international foreign policy agenda item for this country and for the planet”, the head of the UK spy agency, Richard Moore – known as “C” to his friends – . This is why MI6 has started “green spying” on other nations to make sure they are playing fair and keeping to their climate change commitments.
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Not before time. The world is hot enough. Carbon is forever and we don’t want to fry another day. No time to divest if we are to avoid skyfall… you get our drift.
Ugly ducklings
“What makes a great bird photo?”, ask Katja Thömmes at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and her colleague Gregor Hayn-Leichsenring in a new paper, “, answering their question almost immediately by collecting 23,818 photos from the social media platform, sorting them into 116 bird families and analysing their “likes”.
It turns out that conventional ideas of beauty aren’t all they are cracked up to be. There is a distinct inclination for blue birds – mirroring a general human colour preference – but, on the whole, “interestingness, idiosyncrasy, and the situational context all play their part in the aesthetic appeal of bird photos to the human observer”.
Toucans, cuckoos and flamingos arouse general indifference, while penguins seem positively scorned, although not so much as waders such as sandpipers and oystercatchers – perhaps, the researchers speculate, because they tend to get snapped in the act of guzzling lugworms.
Top, errrm, billed are in fact birds in the frogmouth group, so named because… well, . With the once scorned as “the world’s most unfortunate-looking bird”, there’s hope for all of us yet.
Good hydrations
One colour humans really don’t like, we learn from psychometric insights in the above research, is dark yellow. While blue is linked to good things like a clear sky and clean water, yellow is associated with…
An email plops into our inbox. “For the first time, internationally renowned colour experts Pantone has joined forces with nutritionist Lily Soutter and water producer Highland Spring to reveal a new ‘Pee Healthy’ guide – matching urine colours with Pantone colours – to kickstart a UK-wide conversation amongst Brits to embrace our bodies’ natural health indicators on hydration, by checking the colour of our pee!” it froths.
Feedback isn’t sure this is a conversation we need to start right now. Not least because we first need to work out where to hold the colour chart while in the act. But we don’t disagree with the basic message: drink water, not too little, not too much. Also available from a tap near you.
Dysfunctional shrooms
““, The Guardian asks, reporting that billionaire German investor Christian Angermayer had first been persuaded to invest in cryptocurrency, and then the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, while on a trip to, and subsequently trip in, the Caribbean.
Whether it is the same functionality that reader Ros Hancock discovered in her Facebook feed with an ad for a mushroom coffee that “provides just half the caffeine you’d find in a regular cup of coffee, along with powerful functional mushrooms to help prolong energy levels, improve alertness and concentration” we couldn’t say without self-experimentation. If this column doesn’t appear next week, you will know we have woken up a bitcoin billionaire.
Jam today
“Grieved though I always am to see human ingenuity wasted on the development of weapons,” writes Rachel Cave from glorious County Donegal in Ireland, “I was intrigued by the prospect of a jam-resistant radio” (24 April, p16). “Any household with a toddler in it would consider that a major breakthrough.”
Mayday again
Of which, following our humble contrition (24 April) as we were corrected in our abominable use of “over and out” to end a communication (3 April), John Woodgate writes to say that it was in fact standard procedure in the second world war and later when, in “simplex communication”, you had to switch manually between “transmit” and “receive” modes. “I suppose the ‘Over’ was to remind the operator to switch to receive after out-ing. Or it might have been short for ‘communication over’,” he writes. “Probably someone else knows for sure (for a given value of ‘sure’)”.
Thank you, John: we too are sure, for a possibly differing value. Humming The Dam Busters March while searching for our pot of radio jam, it’s out, over and, just in case, out again.
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