FEEDBACK has always admired those intrepid sniffer dogs we see on the telly after a disaster like the Oklahoma City bombing: they clamber boldly over the rubble, sniffing away, then bark to summon their handlers to the buried victim â whether he or she is dead or alive.
But how are such animals trained? In films, bloodhounds are usually shown the escaped prisonerâs socks, whereupon they nod sagely and trot off to find the man who smells like the socks. This is all very well, but how do you teach a dog what an unidentified corpse smells like?
Until recently, the answer was rather unpleasant. Trainers introduced the dogs to real dead people to learn what they smelt like. The dogs probably didnât mind this, but the trainers did. So enter Sigma Chemical Company of St. Louis, one of the worldâs largest suppliers of laboratory reagents.
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Sigmaâs first customers were customs officials, whose dogs needed to be trained to locate heroin and cocaine â but the officials preferred to use a âpseudonarcoticâ, for obvious reasons. Sigma came up with the goods, and following its success with pseudonarcotics it has now developed âPseudo Corpseâ, âPseudo Drowned Victimâ, and âPseudo Distressed Bodyâ. All are formulated to smell just right to a dog â whose nose is between a thousand and a million times more sensitive than ours â yet be odourless to humans.
Sigma has also developed âPseudo Gunpowderâ, which doesnât explode, and is currently working on âPseudo Plastic Explosivesâ. The list could probably go on.
THE MONTHLY bulletin of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India, is called Khagol. A recent issue contains the following story, which, it says, âillustrates the consequences of taking Newtonian laws of motion too seriouslyâ:
A newcomer to Bombayâs overcrowded transport system got into a train only to discover too late that it would not stop at his destination. A more experienced fellow passenger advised him to stand near the door â the train would surely slow down as the station approached, even if it did not stop, and he could take a chance and jump off the moving train.
âKeep running for a while after you jump,â the experienced one suggested. Our novice remembered the laws of motion. As the train slowed down, he jumped and kept running alongside the train.
However, the train slowed down even more and he overtook his own compartment and found himself alongside the next. The passengers in that compartment thought that he was trying to get on board and gave him a helping hand, pulling him back onto the train as it gathered speed again.
A COLLEAGUE of Feedbackâs has a house near Cambridge which is slightly âdownhillâ of the main sewer pipe at the end of the road. Consequently, he relies on a pump to assist in the removal of waste water, as do all the houses âdownhillâ of the pipe.
At least once a month, however, he has to alert the water authorities that the pump has failed (first signs: smelly loos and bubbling noises) so that they can send a team of experts out to hammer the right valves, kick the starter motor, and so on.
Recently, he cornered one of the water engineers as he was applying a steel toecap to a particularly heavy-duty metal casement in the pump house and asked him what he thought the recurrent problem might be. âSanitary towels,â was the predictable reply, qualified with, ââspecially them with wings, they float like fish, see?â
But what came next was more of a surprise. âThe other thing,â the engineer added, âis damned recycled toilet paper. It just donât break up the way the old stuff used to.â
THE WORLD is now waiting for the inevitable spate of books on the âtrial of the centuryâ, in which O. J. Simpson was acquitted of murder. But will there be a book on the telecommunications infrastructure which TV news stations built in the car park outside the Hall of Justice?
As a teaser for such a book, the Radio and Television News Association of Southern California has just given the trade magazine International Broadcasting its final audit of the TV equipment deployed.
The single camera in the courtroom was connected by 125 kilometres of cable to 121 microwave, satellite and fibre-optic links, which relayed pictures to the outside world. Nearly 2000 journalists relied on 900 telephone lines and most of the journalists were camped in 29 trailers parked in the Hall of Justice car park.
Los Angeles County was obviously happy about this. Between them the campers paid a total of $22 900 a month for the privilege of using the car park.
BRITISH TELECOM take note. The Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan is to have its telecommunications system upgraded with digital switching and transmission from the Western company GPT. This, GPT informs us, follows the setting up of a joint venture company called Buzton.
And what does the Uzbek word buzton mean? Not, as you might expect, something like âUzbek Telecomâ, but âblossoming flowerâ. Feedback looks forward to BT being given an equally poetic new name.
WE RECENTLY came across a splendidly informative book called Sex Appeal: The Art and Science of Sexual Attraction by Kate and Douglas Botting. Among many titbits which Feedback hopes to put to good use one of these days is advice on how to tell whether a woman is sexually interested in a man. âIn a survey of sexual signalling in singles bars in America by researchers N. Allan and D. Fishel,â the authors tell us, âa number of men were asked to evaluate 103 sexual signals employed by women in order of their effectiveness. The following were rated as having the highest impact: offering to have sex with a man; rubbing the breasts or pelvis against a man; running the hands through a manâs hair; looking at a man in a blatantly seductive way.â
Itâs a subtle old business, this science of sexual attraction âŠ
WOULD you feel encouraged by this announcement from the pilot of a plane you were about to fly in? Bob Doolittle tells us over the Internet that he was on an internal flight in the US not so long ago. After the plane had taxied away from and back to the departure gate twice, and having been shuffled off and back onto the plane, the passengers were finally told:
âWe still donât know what was causing the loss in power to the engines, but it appears to have cleared up. We are cleared for takeoff on runway 2.â
