Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Stick to the rules, worldwide
REQUESTS to "adhere" to instructional signs are spreading. Hugh Carter was told in Toronto, Canada, that he "must adhere to traffic personnel" (14 December 2013). Now Henry Shipley informs us that carriages run by Arriva Trains Wales contain no-smoking signs with the rider that "Failure to adhere to this notice may result in prosecution." What a quandary: risk arrest or get well and truly stuck on a train?
Packets of barbecue flavour Arnotts Shapes biscuits announce "Biscuits not actual size". Philip Ross wonders: do they ever achieve actual size, or are they Schrödinger's biscuits?
Trying train translation
SIGNS on Arriva Trains Wales are, naturally, bilingual. We asked a famous web search engine to translate the Welsh rendering of the "Failure to adhere..." notice, "Gallwch gael eich erlyn am beidio ag ufuddhau'r hysbysiad hwn". Prosaically, it replied: "You can be sued for failing to obey this notice." But by the pricking in our thumbs – and remembering the same translation engine's camel/beauty mix-up (21/28 December 2013) – we mildly suspect that this may be correct only by accident: is it right to ask allwch chi helpu?
Average performance
AVERAGES continue to mean trouble – and the example that Matt Ashmore sends is at a rather higher level than the BBC's report that "nearly half of the co-educational state-funded schools... are actually doing worse than average" at countering gender bias in science subjects (4 January).
The UK's House of Commons Select Committee on Education was questioning the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove. Committee chair Graham Stuart asked: "If 'good' requires pupil performance to exceed the national average, and if all schools must be good, how is this mathematically possible?"
Gove replied: "By getting better all the time." And to the rejoinder, "So it is possible, is it?" insisted: "It is possible to get better all the time." Stuart then asked: "Were you better at literacy than numeracy, Secretary of State?" only to receive the strange reply, "I cannot remember."
Feedback accepts that it is possible for all schools to be better this year than last year's average. But we suspect that if results were "getting better all the time" in this way, the minister would be inveighing against grade inflation, or even railing against the Flynn Effect, which is the steady rise in unadjusted IQ scores (8 September 2012, p 26).
A tweet in time
TIME travellers: are they about to have existed? How could we tell? Feedback shares the pleasure of other commentators at the innovative method reported in a paper "Searching the Internet for evidence of time travellers" by Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson of Michigan Technological University, at bit.ly/TweetInTime.
The authors hypothesised that time travellers from the future might, either to tease us or by accident, refer in social media to events that have not yet occurred. Rather than enter into the resource-intensive and will-to-live-sapping enterprise of reading the whole internet, they searched for Twitter hashtags such as #cometison and #popefrancis, looking for any that popped up prematurely. They found none.
Never too late
THE Time Tweet study above replicates, in a sense, the possibly more elegant search initiated by Emily Singer's invitation to the first and only Time Traveler Convention, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 8 May 2005. As we noted on 14 May 2005, were you to be a time traveller, whenever you read this wasn't too late to remind you to attend, though you'll have to change the past in which you didn't.
Beyond briefer blogging
MEANWHILE, reports that Facebook is "dying out" as do plagues, or even "dead and buried", reached us just as we gathered courage to refer to the site without explaining what it was. Apparently it's cooler to use Twitter (a "micro-blogging service", Your Honour).
This prompted a contributor to a discussion site (urban75.net) to mention a business plan for "blurt" – a nano-blogging service characterised by a maximum of eight characters per message, plus an optional three-character suffix. The internet name blurt.com is already taken, so one might have to fork out for a top-level "dot blurt" domain, alongside the new-ish-fangled ".name" addresses.
Name, rank and title
FINALLY, research papers sometimes have titles that just jump out at you. Consider "Foundations of the Crazy Bastard Hypothesis" in the January issue of Evolution and Human Behavior. Said "bastard" men take extreme risks, apparently making other men consider them physically larger. The Crazy Bastard hypothesis holds that they take such risks to signal to other men that they are formidable competitors, writes anthropologist Daniel Fessler of the University of California, Los Angeles.
The aggressive title, designed to draw the attention of journalists looking for easy news stories, thus appears to Feedback to be an example of what it describes.
- New Scientist
- Not just a website!
- Subscribe to New Scientist and get:
- New Scientist magazine delivered every week
- Unlimited online access to articles from over 500 back issues
- Subscribe Now and Save
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.