Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Mars attacks sore throats
FEEDBACK was rather surprised, on opening a press release entitled "Mysterious rock on Mars identified", to discover a new interpretation of a "doughnut-like" rock that appeared in front of the rover Opportunity. It was, we were informed, actually "a discarded bag of... Throat Drops" and referred us to "twin scientists" who had made the identification.
After a famous web search engine could find no trace of said researchers, we emailed the manufacturer of the throat drops. The company chair confirmed that they had issued the press release – "written at the behest of my 6-year-old twins, budding scientists who thought the recent rover image looked like [our] bag".
Feedback has anonymised this exchange. We do this not only because the other end of the office frowns on our succumbing to ploys that get free advertising, but to save this company chair from parricide when the twins spot this item online in a few years' time.
A sign in Sharon Howard's local shopping centre reads "Female Ambulant Toilet". Should we worry whether there is a male one out there, or if they walk out together?
Aversive auction attempt
SEARCHING for images of the aforementioned throat drops, Feedback was disturbed to find three instances of them offered on auction site eBay as "used".
District Court for Mars invoked
PUZZLEMENT over the object captured last month by Opportunity's cameras, mentioned above, only increases after reading a report that a person who news.com.au describes as "self-described scientist and author Rhawn Joseph" has filed a lawsuit (bit.ly/MarsInCourt) in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. Apparently Joseph is "claiming the white rock was a living thing" and seeking an order forcing NASA to investigate (mentioned on 8 February, p 7).
Joseph doesn't mention this, as far as we can see, on his own website cosmology.com, where he complains that "NASA's Mars rover project directors... ignored and refused this author's demands to take close-up photos or any photos down into and inside the 'bowl' of the structure." We're now trying to get hold of the court papers, for more insight into this striking approach to independent scientific investigation.
Signs and portents
SIGNS and portents abound, apparently. Peter Scott writes to ask whether he is "the only person who sees a vaguely demonic cat" in the photo of lightning over a volcano that accompanied our story about researchers mimicking the phenomenon in the laboratory (4 January, p 14)
Well... on the day the letter arrived Feedback could see only a volcano and lightning. We wondered if a pint of refreshment might help. Then the next day our head-cold got worse, and we could see the cat, too. What it portends, beyond sneezing, we have no idea.
Global loaf
THE nutritional information on a packet of bread mix from Wrights startled Richard Lawson by giving the energy supplied by 100 grams, about two slices, as "987g".
Assuming that they did mean this as a measure of energy in grams, and applying the infamous equation "E = mc2" to convert mass to energy, by Richard's calculation his breakfast should supply 9 x 1016 joules: enough to power a tenth of the world for the rest of the day.
Just our little joke
REPAIRS to footpaths in Margate, Tasmania, prompted signs on both sides of the road, each saying "Pedestrians use other footpath". Martin Greenwood trusts that we will agree that "it is fortunate that most humans are not entirely rational beings".
Feedback was about to contemplate the possibilities open to quantum pedestrians confronted with these signs, but then we opened a message from Keith Morgan suggesting that such quantum jokes constitute "the smallest quantity of humour". So we shan't.
A pedestrian manual
WE WILL, however, marvel at the thoroughness of the authorities in Vancouver, Canada. Mark Stoakes sends a photo of a sign beside a pedestrian crossing. Next to an image of a person walking are the words "START CROSSING watch for vehicles". A red hand above the word "flashing" is labelled "DON'T START finish crossing if started" and a steady red hand is explained: "DON'T CROSS".
This seems to be an extreme example of North American mistrust of ideographic signs. Europeans are expected to understand these images without explanation – perhaps because in many countries the alternative is giving written instructions in several languages... how do they manage in bilingual and trilingual parts of Canada?
By any means necessary
FINALLY, as is his custom, Ben Garrod recently went to buy "my weekly hit of all things science" from a W. H. Smith shop in Cambridge, UK. "When I left the store," he reports, "(after paying, I might add), I beeped at the door." After staff had checked through various bags, they discovered that his copy of New Scientist had a pink stick-on security tag on the Feedback page.
Staff said all of their New Scientist copies are tagged and they still frequently "go missing". Ben, being at a loose end, checked: the New Scientists, and no other magazines, were indeed tagged. This leads him to two distressing conclusions: first that the scientific world is a den of thieves, and, worse, that some of us "can be out-foxed by a sticker".
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