Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Picking a winner
An epidemiologist walks into a casino – what happens next? Feedback is tempted to say he wins the black spot, or some other top-quality pun, but our editor is giving us a long, hard stare, so we had better get on with it.
Epidemiologist and mathematician was recently bemused to learn that the internet is making up stories about him. Two posts on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, told the same tale: that he had walked into a casino for the first time in his life and won “500K”. The currency wasn’t specified in one instance, while in another, it was US dollars.
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One of the X posts even seems to quote Kucharski directly: “One evening I made 500K at a casino. I had never gambled before – but I’d spent my whole life studying probability theory, and I decided to test one formula in practice.” This quote apparently came from Kucharski’s debut popular science book (2016).
So far, so people making stuff up on social media. But mark the sequel: these stories at one point made their way into the AI Overview hosted at the top of Google Search when Kucharski looked up “kucharski 500k” – “with some extra AI invented detail”, . The overview added that Kucharski has made a “lifelong study of roulette dynamics” and that he won by “applying probability theory and physics-based insights to roulette wheels, similar to the principles studied by Claude Shannon”.
Feedback genuinely has no idea what that last bit is about. Shannon was a researcher who laid the theoretical groundwork for digital circuits and modern cryptography. He wasn’t known for spread-betting on roulette.
Yet again, AI systems are readily poisoned with nonsense from somewhere else – and that’s assuming the original X posts were written by humans in the first place, which nobody should assume at this point. It’s a particularly insidious example because Kucharski did write a book about gambling strategies, so the story is plausible enough to pass an initial sniff test: one needs actual knowledge of Kucharski’s life and work to know that it’s not true.
We will give the last word to Kucharski’s wife, entrepreneur Emily Kucharski. Responding to the claim that he had won half a million of some currency or another in one night, Emily , simply, “If only this were true”.
Carry on carrot
How big does an ocean wave need to be to tower over a roadside model of a carrot? This was our question on 29 July, after we saw a wave forecast from New Zealand’s weather service, claiming that “combined wave heights in eastern offshore waters could reach or exceed the height of the Ohakune Carrot”. The Ohakune Carrot proved to be a 7.5-metre-tall fibreglass sculpture placed outside the town of Ohakune to commemorate its carrot-growing industry.
The issue, Feedback felt, was whether or not the Ohakune Carrot was sufficiently well-known in New Zealand that it could be safely used as a unit of wave height. For instance, certain British landmarks could probably be used in a similar way in British weather forecasts, like the London Eye or Blackpool Tower, but was the Ohakune Carrot the New Zealand equivalent? Current and former residents of Aotearoa have now weighed in on this point.
“As an Aotearoan/NZer who hasn’t lived there in over 13 years,” writes Kirsten Cameron, “my immediate reaction and I imagine that of most in Aotearoa/NZ: Yeah quite high. The actual height is irrelevant, it’s enough information to know it’s high enough to be a problem!” Feedback isn’t sure we agree: depending on what kind of watercraft you are using, a 7.5 m wave might be trivial or dangerous. We recently had to transfer between a cruise ship and a zodiac boat, and we can assure you that a swell of a metre or so was enough to turn this into a tricky operation.
On which note, “third-generation NZer” Brenda Solon makes a much more dramatic point. “It occurred to me that while the Carrot might be only 7.5m tall, Ohakune is 582m above sea level,” she writes. “That would be a dangerous ocean wave indeed that could reach its top.” Fortunately, she notes, “this wave didn’t eventuate”, hence she is alive to email us with this thought.
Finally, and with a certain inevitability, Simon Bird suggests that a suitable unit of height for London-based phenomena would be the Camberwell Carrot. Initially, Feedback’s literal-minded brain protested: the notable thing about the Camberwell Carrot, as featured and indeed smoked in Withnail and I, was its width, not its length or height. Then we realised that Simon wasn’t talking about physical height.
Trees galore
Over the years, Feedback has encountered a number of examples of nominative determinism related to trees. Who can forget research forest products technologist Marlin E. Plank, or Tree Hunting author Paul Wood?
A couple more examples have trickled into our inbox over the past few months. First, Andy Maloney directs us to an article in The Guardian about volunteers who are trying to 8 million native trees in Scotland. Inevitably, these virtuous activities are being supervised by Roz Birch.
Meanwhile, Janet Dowle tells us: “I have just had a flyer put through my letterbox from a tree surgeon called Edward Wood.”
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