Philippa Kaur

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

23 February 2022

Josie Ford
First hands on the moon
Oh, what fun it must be to sit in a tank, and think! It is a thought that strikes Feedback with full vigour as we sit in our stationery cupboard tank – does anyone know how to drive this thing, etc. – surveying the recent paper from UK-based neoliberal think tank the Adam Smith Institute, “Space invaders: Property rights on the moon”.
Feedback isn’t one of those unkind partisans who reflexively associates the word “swivel-eyed” with the output of neoliberal think tanks. Nor are we so unnuanced as to say the paper advocates “privatising the moon”, as some more agitated commentators have. To privatise something, we assume it must be in public ownership first.
No, it primarily addresses the question of what a Lockean-type classical liberal rights-based approach to economic justice demands in terms of adjudicating problems of the individual ownership of land in space. It also argues that the current rules-based international order, based mainly on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, is no longer fit for purpose when various private and national interests are engaged in a new space race and “everyday space tourism is just around the corner”.Advertisement
That’s a mighty long corner, we’ll warrant. But if we are sceptical of the competitive tendering process to allocate land rights on the moon advocated by the institute, it is only because it also suggests a new international treaty underpinning it. This seems to us far too wet and statist. Several frothy free-enterprise outfits will already give you title to a parcel of the lunar surface for top dollar (3 April 2021).We suggest they could be awarded the contract for administering the scheme through some thrustingly free-and-easy “VIP lane” process.
Statistically thin ice
Russell Waugh writes from the Western Australian version of Perth bedazzled by the scoring system in the figure skating at the Beijing Winter Olympics. “The judges were able to add, and even subtract, points for good or poor execution of many different skills, with no common unit of measurement on any of the different skills (sometimes from a negative minimum point and a positive maximum point), add together all points given by seven or eight different judges, and then produce a final ‘measure’ to two decimal places,” he marvels.
We agree that statisticians would also wonder at the lack of any margin of error on the result. But then, that doesn’t appear to be the dodgiest thing going on at the figure skating this year.
However, we were more exercised by the margin of error on the final medal tally of the Great Britain team. We were pleased when, rather late in the day, that turned out not to be zero.
Carbon wormprint
Anyone who, like Feedback, has ever caught themselves wondering how large carbon emissions actually are should look no further than a communication from the Labour party in Hastings, UK, sent in by Gabriel Carlyle.
It celebrates an initiative of the local council to replace every light bulb in Hastings with low-energy LED bulbs. This will lead to an annual saving in just one town-centre car park of 1 tonne of carbon, “the equivalent of 300,000 worms. Layed [sic] end to end they would reach from Hastings to Eastbourne.”
We make that a distance of about 30 kilometres if the worms are laid out by road. This could be messy for all sorts of reasons. We are left wondering whether, if the worms are less than cooperative and just form a writhing ball in the centre of Hastings, that reduces the carbon savings in any way.
Long in the rings
We have a new benchmark in our occasional series on “how old the internet thinks you can be”. Natalie Roberts reports going to the Open University website to order a poster about plants accompanying the new BBC series The Green Planet and finding that the drop-down menu for date of birth allows options back to 1582.
Good for elderly tree sprites who have piled on the rings, we imagine, although it still excludes the most ancient of yews. Our vague concern, prompted by Natalie, about whether birth dates need to be in the Julian or Gregorian calendar leads us to the revelation that the papal bull advocating calendar reform was issued by Pope Gregory XIII in… 1582. We are now wondering whether this is a coincidence, a learned joke by computer elves at the Open University or has some other origin in the deep history of computer programming.
Quantum cat spin
Charles Warren wonders whether a physics-violating perpetual motion machine formed of a slice of falling buttered toast strapped to a cat’s back (29 January) would violate physics if the cat in question were Schrödinger’s cat.
Yes… no… maybe, Charles. We assume the premise of the cat always landing on its feet applies only to live cats. Introducing a potentially dead cat is possibly a new spin too far.
The usual…
It is only recent events that have made it at all notable that Douglas Jabs is the director of the Center for Clinical Trials and Evidence Synthesis at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. But many of you have now noted it, so we note it while on our way out of the room.
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. More

A statistical tool borrowed from ecology suggests that there were originally 40,600 copies of stories about King Arthur and other western European heroes – but only 3648 survive

Humans

17 February 2022

By Chris Stokel-Walker
A scene from the Romance of Lancelot of the LakeThe Print Collector/Alamy
Nine in 10 medieval manuscripts telling tales of chivalry and heroism have been lost to time, according to a new estimate that uses ecological statistical models to understand the volume of literature produced.
Katarzyna Anna Kapitan and Daniel Sawyer at the University of Oxford and their colleagues from around Europe borrowed the ecological concept of the “unseen species model” to understand the volume of medieval literature in the genre of narrative fiction that once existed. These medieval texts include the famous stories of King Arthur and of Lancelot.
An unseen species model is a statistical tool that ecologists can use to estimate biological diversity after surveying an area. Chances are that the survey won’t uncover all of the species in the area, but the model can use the number of observed species and their abundances to estimate how many additional species are present.Advertisement
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“These models use the pattern of the observed evidence to estimate what we’re not seeing,” says Sawyer.
In the manuscript study, the researchers looked at the number of surviving copies of each manuscript – which is a little bit like the abundance of a biological species. Their model states that once all copies are missing, the manuscript is lost – a little like a species vanishing from the study area.
They gathered records of 3648 copies of 799 works written in Dutch, French, Icelandic, Irish, English and German. The model then suggested that these copies are part of a population that originally contained 40,614 copies of 1170 works.
“It’s very valuable for our research that we’re stepping beyond the case studies that dominate our field,” says Kapitan – in other words, it is important to engage with the manuscripts that have been lost as well as those that survive.

Using the statistical data produced, the researchers were able to estimate that 62 per cent of copies of English romance and adventure tales have disappeared, compared with 19 per cent of copies of similar manuscripts in Irish, and 23 per cent in Icelandic.
Finding a way to quantify the missing literature is a “holy grail”, says Kathleen Kennedy at the University of Bristol, UK, because it fills the knowledge gaps medieval scholars have about the context of existing work. “Applying statistical models from ecology offers a tantalising workaround, and the team’s findings generally support existing scholarly assessments,” she adds.
However, Kennedy points out it is still just an estimate – even if it is one rooted in statistical rigour. “In the end, we cannot ever prove or disprove either traditional or statistical estimates of lost literary works, or the manuscripts containing them,” she says.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abl7655

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By Sam Wong
StockFood
WHEN cooking food, we need heat to diffuse from the outside to its centre. If we want food to be evenly cooked throughout, this can be a problem: by the time heat reaches the centre, the outside may be overcooked. But in some cases, we can use the slow diffusion of heat to our advantage, to create foods with a surprise in the middle.
One example is a molten chocolate cake, aka a chocolate fondant. Essentially, this is an undercooked cake. The key is to bake it just long enough so that the outside is firm while the centre … More

Petrov’s Flu is an ode to Russian sci-fi and absurdist artSergey Ponomarev/Sovereign Films
Petrov’s Flu
Kirill Serebrennikov
In UK cinemas nowAdvertisement
PETROV (Semyon Serzin) is riding a trolleybus home across the snowbound city of Yekaterinburg when a fellow passenger mutters that the rich deserve to be shot. Seconds later, the bus stops, Petrov is pulled onto the street and a rifle is pressed into his hands. Street executions follow. Then, he is back on the bus and it is unclear how much of that actually happened.
Petrov’s Flu is an ambitious, mischievous film, one that is rich in allusions to Russian history, literature and cinema. It is also a painfully precise, gut-wrenching depiction of what it is like to run a high fever. Seeing everything from Petrov’s sick, disjointed point of view, we find the real world sliding away again and again, often into violent absurdity.
Petrov’s fever gradually breaks over the course of the film, but it is a while before we can be confident about what is real and what isn’t: whether his friend, the drunken mischief-maker Igor (Yuri Kolokolnikov), is real and whether Sergey (Ivan Dorn), the struggling writer who browbeats poor Petrov on every point, is a figment of Petrov’s febrile imagination.
At the start, Petrov’s Flu is very much a sci-fi movie. The city is languishing under an epidemic that arrived accompanied by lights in the sky; Petrova (Chulpan Khamatova), Petrov’s estranged wife, is possessed by a demonic alien force during a library poetry reading; UFO-themed street graffiti comes to life and wiggles across the screen.
As reality and hallucination part company, however, it becomes something different: a film about parents and children; about creative work, pretension and ambition; and also, strongly, about Russia’s love of science fiction.
“Petrov’s fever gradually breaks, but it is a while before we can be confident about what is real and what isn’t”
At its birth, Western science fiction, and especially US science fiction, celebrated adventure and exploration. Russian sci-fi has always been more about finding and building homes in a hostile environment. It is also strongly religious in spirit, and was indeed for many years one of Russia’s very few outlets for spiritual expression.
The aliens in Russian science fiction invariably offer some form of redemption to a struggling humanity, and Petrov’s Flu is no exception. One of the most affecting scenes in the film is when Petrov, overcome with fear, dashes with his son to a local hospital, only for the pair to be intercepted by a kindly UFO.
Such are Petrov’s fever dreams, coloured by his space-loving childhood and his adult career drawing comic books. At one point, he remembers his mum and dad decorating a Christmas tree with festive plastic astronauts; at another, Petrova goes on a murderous rampage among the climbing-frame rockets and spaceships of a dilapidated playground.
Fans of Andrei Tarkovsky, director of 1970s science-fiction classics Solaris and Stalker, will enjoy the nods to key moments in those films. But it would be a mistake, I think, to watch this film for the sci-fi in-jokes. True, Petrov’s Flu is a shocking and funny contribution to Russia’s centuries-old tradition of absurdist art. But it is also a film about people, not to mention an extraordinary evocation of febrile delirium and its assault on the mind.
In the end, as fantasy and reality separate, what might have seemed to be a disconnected bag of bits (some tender, some shocking, all horribly entertaining) turns out to be a puzzle that, once complete, leaves us exhausted but satisfied. More

Dan Bradica
Visit
A New Nature at White Cube Bermondsey in London spotlights the work of the late Isamu Noguchi, whose sculptures in galvanised steel and other industrial materials explore the fundamental structures of nature.
Chris Reardon/EPIX EntertainmentAdvertisement
Watch
From is a new sci-fi horror show made by the executive producers of Lost. It sees unfortunate travellers trapped in a small town in Middle America, terrorised by strange creatures that only come out at night. The series streams on Epix from 20 February.

Read
A Little Book About the Big Bang by Tony Rothman, a former editor at Scientific American, explores arguably the most evidenced – and at the same time most mysterious – idea in modern cosmology.

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Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

16 February 2022

Josie Ford
Sleep, perchance to diet
That April is the cruellest month has yet to pass peer review, but there is little doubt February is the shortest. Feedback considers this just as well. Some of our more southerly readers may be sunning themselves on the beach, but in our pre-Arctic stationery cupboard hole, we are just waiting for the winter murk to clear.
It is at this time of year, when we are thinking about getting fit for the bikini season and doing nothing about it, that we want to read, and not question too deeply, headlines such as our own “Getting enough sleep may lower the amount of calories you eat”. The study in question, from a team at the University of Chicago Sleep Research Center, found that an extra hour’s sleep at night allowed participants to cut their energy intake by 270 calories a day – “the equivalent of around three chocolate digestive biscuits”, as the Press Association helpfully put it in its story on the research.
Why stop there? A comforting graph swims into our head of a rising line of hours not consuming calories, crossing over a falling line of calories consumed. The most effective weight-loss mechanism is surely to never get out of bed at all.Advertisement
Getting up the nose
As we take some horizontal exercise, a PR puff is popped our way by a svelte, overslept-looking colleague with a straw hanging from their nose. “To inspire those who struggle to reach their recommended daily intake of water, air up is a world first in food technology that utilises retronasal smell to provide a zero-calorie, zero sugar, zero additive way to drink 100% pure water which tastes flavoured,” we read.
Flavours “from Lime and Orange-Passionfruit to Cola and Iced Coffee” are created by using a special widget to inject bubbles of scented air into the previously 100 per cent blameless water. “We’ve revolutionised the way we drink water. You still have to use your mouth, but the taste has changed!” the company’s website continues. A welcome release for those of us who had been attempting to discover flavour by snorting our water.
Smell my cheese
We note merely in passing a press conference held on 7 February by New York City’s new mayor, Eric Adams, in which he claimed that people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between “someone hooked on heroin” and “someone hooked on cheese”.
Entirely our experience too. Meanwhile, Adams’s own claim that he eats a vegan diet has been called into question after he was seen eating fish. Given that phylogenetically there is no such thing as a fish, we can’t rule out a plant-based variety. As to the cheese thing, as Twitter user Tyler Conway remarked, “let he who has not snorted grated parmesan off the countertop cast the first stone”.
Sperm waving
If not cheese, SpermTree – “a species-level database of sperm morphology spanning the animal tree of life”, recently described in the journal Scientific Data-promises some real, hard science.
What researchers get up to with descriptions of more than 4700 types of sperm, we hardly need to know. We are busy following an atavistic impulse by downloading the spreadsheet and reordering in descending order of sperm length.
Top of the list by some margin is the fruit fly Drosophila bifurca, with sperm over 5.8 centimetres in length when fully unfurled. This strikes us as a mite exhausting for an insect just a few millimetres long. We aren’t surprised to learn elsewhere that this limits its output to a few hundred cells in its lifetime, an apparent limitation on its reproductive chances that has been dubbed the “big sperm paradox”. This is clearly a sticky problem. Still, we are pleased to learn via a graph in the SpermTree paper that publications on sperm morphology are on the up and up.
Toast’s flip side
“Dear Professor Feedback,” Jonty Rix writes, warming the cockles of our heart. “As a social scientist,” he continues, chilling our blood again, “I am perplexed (and a little disappointed) by the failure of your discussions about the landing outcomes of ‘toast’ to fully consider socio-cultural or post-materialist understandings of the possibilities.”
We are beginning to regret reopening correspondence on the fate of falling buttered toast (8 January). But pray continue. “For example, the nature of upness seems a fundamental problem, as does a lack of a rich consideration of the numerous spaces in which toast is experienced, and of course our underlying definitions of toast and butter and the power relations inherent in their production and usage.”
We nod uneasily, wary of saying the wrong thing. We hope some opening into this whole new metalevel of debate is given by Toby Bateson. He disagrees with our assertion, backed up with references, that toast will always land butter-side down in any universe that supports intelligent bipeds (29 January). “By simply making the toast twice as long it will rotate at half the speed and so will land butter side up,” he writes. “The problem arises due to a fundamental flaw in the proportions of toast which can be adapted to solve the problem in any universe, regardless of table height and the intelligence of the bipeds who made the toast.”
We’re off to have a lie-down and burn some calories.
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