Should that be Beedfack?
Feedback’s whirlwind romance with non-fungible tokens took another knock this week on , Isaac Kamlish of NFT start-up Fair.xyz, arrived at a New York NFT festival to a blizzard of business cards hurled by star-struck CEOs who thought, against all available evidence, that Doop Snogg was the real Snoop Dogg.
Was tulip mania ever this weird, Feedback wonders, putting our autograph book back in our pocket and heading for the West Coast and a bite to eat at NFT-themed burger restaurant Bored & Hungry in Long Beach, California. Contrary to a , Feedback was pleased to find it says it still accepts ethereum and apecoin. “In the world of Web3, tech changes by the day,” , or an NFT closely resembling him.
Advertisement
Dead ringers
“So what should we invest in?” Feedback ponders. Precious metals are a perennial favourite in uncertain times, so: “Hey, PERCY. Find us a silver mine!”
Percy Cudlipp was 91av‘s first editor, an ebullient Welsh journalist who died in post in 1962. He was also a regular on the BBC World Service and, thanks to technology that Feedback smuggled out of Amazon’s re:MARS conference, recordings of Percy’s Welsh lilt now power PERCY, our new digital assistant.
Amazon needs little more than a minute’s worth of a voice recording to recreate the voice of your lost loved one, according to , after Alexa’s Rohit Prasad gave the scenario of using a deceased grandmother’s voice to read her grandson a bedtime story. Nothing creepy about that.
Minecraft
Alas, PERCY isn’t nearly as infallible as its revered namesake or it would never have been duped into investing in the Kashen silver mine, a point of often violent contention between the Princes of Tver and the Dukes of Moscow in the late medieval period, and also, it turns out, an entirely made-up place.
Kashen is the invention of “Zhemao”, a Chinese homemaker whose extensive alternate history of Russia had been quietly swelling the pages of Chinese-language Wikipedia for about a decade until a fantasy writer called Yifan started asking awkward questions about the citations. Zhemao’s multimillion-word labour of love has mostly been taken down now, reports – at what cost to world literature, we’ll never know.
Land of the lost
Real cities can be lost too – just ask the employee who, after spending 3 hours drinking alcohol, passed out in the street and lost USB devices containing the names, addresses, birth dates, tax records, bank account numbers and benefit information for all 460,000-odd residents of Amagasaki in Japan’s Hyogo prefecture. The tale ends happily: according to the , police found the devices nearby.
Craft corner
The stationery cupboard’s refit continues apace, its catacombs now resembling the that was recently opened for the first time in 3000 years.
The Chavin people, seemingly partial to the odd pinch of hallucinogenic snuff, would surely feel at home in our cupboard, especially since so much of it is now given over to Feedback’s latest craft project, inspired by a recent report from a colleague at the more reputable end of the magazine.
Shoji Takeuchi and his colleagues at the University of Tokyo in Japan have managed to cover a robotic finger in a single piece of cultured skin, and shown how the skin can heal from injury. The only issue is that the digit must stay submerged most of the time in a nutrient bath. Lacking the precise formula for this bath, Feedback is making do with fish food. We are spending hours watching PERCY’s finger wiggle from one side of its tank to the other.
Snap decision
What with the fish tank and all, Feedback has had to swap our reclining sofa for a foldable chair. So we are indebted to Ig Nobel founder Marc Abrahams, who . In his “study of design demand of applying quality function deployment in plastic folding chairs”, Chun-Tung Chen at Shu-Te University, Taiwan, attaches key measurables to “the rise of consumer awareness and enhanced demand for product quality” in folding chairs. Most important for today’s informed consumer of folding chairs? ”
Naturewatch
A tap on the glass (thank you, PERCY) reminds us of our groaning postbag (and we mean that on so many levels). Richard Carruthers tells us that Guy Shrubsole leads the campaign. And what about the bacterium Thiomargarita magnifica, so big it can be seen with the naked eye? That was first discovered in 2009 by Olivier Gros.
It is in the news again thanks to researcher Jean-Marie Volland’s not altogether pleasant video of the things swimming about. Which reminds us, we really should clean out PERCY’s tank.
Got a story for Feedback?
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.
