Feedback is 91av’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
Pure as the driven…
When it comes to TikTok trends, Feedback is a few news cycles behind. We know there was a vogue for sea shanties, and something about buckets of ice cubes, but we rather lost track after that.
So we were unprepared when Mrs Feedback introduced us to “CleanTok”. This is a subgenre of TikTok videos dedicated to cleaning. Search the hashtag #CleanTok and you will find seemingly endless videos of people descaling their dishwashers, scrubbing their toilets and reorganising their shelves.
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It seems innocuous, but, like all social media, it has turned into a war of escalation. We previously described YouTubers spending hours cleaning ridiculously filthy rugs: well, the CleanTok influencers use ever more extreme and bizarre methods to clean up their messes, for instance deploying up to a dozen cleaning products to simply scrub a bathtub.
And then there are the people . To be clear, we aren’t talking about artificial snow or snow a rogue dog tracked into your house that is now melting on your Persian rug. We are talking about outdoor snow that has fallen and landed on the ground. Yet people are using mops, buckets and oodles of cleaning chemicals to clean it up.
Feedback could talk about the environmental consequences of chucking bleach and who knows what else into your back garden. But we worry that would just lead to a series of follow-up videos in which the CleanTokers clean up the snow using all-natural products, perhaps tipping organic apple cider vinegar onto the snow and wiping up the mess with a fair-trade cotton towel.
In short, Feedback can’t be doing with these people. Especially if the snow-cleaning turns out to be a cynical, rage-bait stunt to get engagement.
Woodlands pining
A large number of examples of nominative determinism are trapped in Feedback’s inbox, and we feel the urge to release them into their natural habitat.
Joan Hardingham highlights an article in, er, 91av about the neurological benefits of birdwatching. Expert birders, it seems, have “brain differences that may underlie their remarkable ability to identify unfamiliar birds”. This may help the brain resist ageing, says a team led by Erik Wing.
John Carpenter (apt name) read a BBC News article about down near a north London restaurant, despite apparently being healthy. The article quoted a despairing and angry “Dr Ed Pyne, senior conservation adviser at the Woodland Trust”.
Finally, not being from the US Midwest, Feedback was unfamiliar with , a regional fast-food chain serving cheese curds and frozen custard alongside burgers and fries. To find out about the company’s plans, a website called the Culver’s “head of culinary”, who is inevitably called Kasey McDonald.
We learned of this from a reader called (and if this isn’t his name, he went to the bother of setting up a fake email address to make it look extra convincing) Jeff Burger.
Bit of a blunder
In February, a South Korean cryptocurrency firm called Bithumb tried to give its regular customers a small cash reward of 2000 won, or about $1.37 each. Due to a clerical error, however, it gave each of them 2000 bitcoins, a total of 620,000 bitcoins with an overall value of about $40 billion. The company says it recovered almost all of it, but the mistake was enough to cause .
BBC News’s contained this indelible sentence: “The incident is likely to spark discussion around tighter regulatory controls in finance.” Feedback was going to respond “you think?”, but decided that probably nothing short of another financial crash would spark such discussions.
Good thing nobody has done anything that might interfere with oil prices recently.
See ya, smeghead
Feedback was saddened to hear of the death of comedy writer Rob Grant. Grant and Doug Naylor co-created the legendary British sci-fi comedy series Red Dwarf. The show told the story of Dave Lister, the last human being, and his misadventures in deep space alongside a hologram of his dead roommate, a neurotic android, a dimwitted computer and a spectacularly vain and self-centred humanoid evolved from cats.
Readers unfamiliar with Red Dwarf are advised to check out series 1 to 6. (Grant left after series 6 and it was never the same.) We recommend series 3’s “Polymorph” episode, which manages to simultaneously parody Alien and The Thing while also giving the cast an opportunity to act wildly out of character.
Connoisseurs of ingenious film-making should also check out an early episode, “Future Echoes”, which pulls off a surprisingly complicated time-travel story using the simplest possible visual effects, for basically no money. If you don’t watch the show, Mr Flibble will get very cross.
Perhaps the simplest measure of the show’s legacy is its contribution to the English language. Friends gave us “the friend zone”, Game of Thrones gave us “sweet summer child”, Gaslight gave us, er, well, you can probably guess – and Red Dwarf gave us “smeghead”. Created so characters could swear without actually swearing, the word was added to the in 2013.
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.
