Josie Ford
Ancient aromas
It can sometimes get a little – what’s the word – “close” in Feedback’s stationery cupboard cave. It is to this that we attribute a colleague advancing with pegged nose, thrusting our way on a pair of tongs an advert for the perfume line “Neandertal ® for modern human”.
“This pair of fragrances take us on an olfactory journey deep into humanity’s past giving voice to a lost civilisation whose DNA lives on today only through ourselves, while also celebrating the future they were never able to see,” we read among very many other words, not all of which necessarily make much sense to us. “The results are contemporary, highly original, and experimental fragrance structures, free from conventional and traditional perfumery standards.”
“With notes of BO and tooth decay?” a colleague asks, unkindly. Foliage, ginger, pink pepper, grapefruit and pine, apparently.
A temporary blimp
Keith Macpherson from Somerset, UK, reports being informed by DHL of the imminent arrival of a parcel with a weight of 1 kilogram and a volume of 32,884 cubic metres and wondering who ordered a blimp. He later found this corrected to a weight of 1 kg, but a volume of 0 cubic metres, and wondered who had ordered a black hole singularity. “My daughter asked if we had been given a delivery window. My son replied no, an event horizon,” Keith reports – proof that, whatever it was that eventually arrived in Somerset, the dad joke seems safe for another generation.
Gorilla journalism
Many thanks to the many of you who allowed yourselves – and us – a chuckle at an erratum in a recent edition of The Economist: “Correction: Last week, in a chart accompanying a piece on nuclear power, we said Britain produced 235 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. That should have been 235 grams. We apologise for the rather large error.”
Indeed, fifteen orders of magnitude large. Our schadenfreude is tempered with a healthy dose of “there but for the grace…”. With weary experience, we call into being the journalistic version of the gorilla effect, where you don’t see the big thing because you are too busy concentrating on the small things.
Motions in the dark
Balance being another great journalistic trait, we are compelled to give space to Graeme Flint, who professes no financial interest in the matter, but writes in defence of motion-sensor toilet bowl lights (27 November). He points out that they enable you to do night-time business in low-light conditions while not activating noisy bathroom fans. “I think they are an energy and sleep saving triumph and more people should give them a try,” he says. Right of reply granted, Graeme – we aren’t entirely convinced, but we are at least going through the motions.
In their element
Ilpo Salonen writes in from Espoo, Finland, deploring the lack in our pages of late of a certain deterministic name phenomenon we shall not name. It being December and the season of goodwill, we hold back from sending the usual cease-and-desist letter. Especially as, by way of compensation for our oversight, Ilpo points us to the existence of a now sadly retired science correspondent at the Finnish Broadcasting Company, Yleisradio Oy, called Maija Typpi.
That’s Mary Nitrogen to her English fans. It is fair to say we are enjoying rolling these departures from Indo-European word roots around our tongue. We also find naming people after chemical elements, rather than the other way round, a fun excursion. Although by no means a unique one, come to think of it. The computer scientist Stephen Wolfram is a reminder of why there is a W in the periodic table, although no element officially beginning with W. We welcome other examples of elementary names from across the globe to enrich our cultural experience.
While we’re there…
The former captain of the Geneva firefighting force was Marc Feuardent (or Captain Strong Fire), there is a BBC wildlife documentary producer called Giles Badger and a 2004 paper in the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering was “Structure and mechanics of nonpiscine control surfaces” by Frank E. Fish.
We are mentioning these purely on the principle of not fouling our own nest. Or, as the French say, don’t piscine the…
All aflutter
Moving swiftly onwards, backwards and almost undoubtedly inwards to black holes, Jon Sparks raises suspicions that we are now trying to generate our own column inches with a choice experiential unit. He notes that our colleague Leah Crane, discussing the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy in her Launchpad newsletter, writes “Sagittarius A* is more than 4 million times as massive as the sun. An NBA basketball has a mass of 0.62 kilograms. So if Sagittarius A* had the mass of a basketball, the sun’s mass would be 0.16 milligrams – about the average mass of two eyelashes.”
Eye-watering. The thing is, Jon, you might have been wondering about the eyelash thing, but while everyone was distracted by the basketball, a gorilla waltzed across the back of the page.
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Source: Humans - newscientist.com
