AT A time when the Hutton enquiry into the death of British government scientist David Kelly is very much in the public eye, Feedback was intrigued to be reminded that Kelly co-wrote a letter about anthrax that was published in 51¶ŻÂţ back in 1986.
What’s more, reader Adrian Smith informs us that the letter is now on an Institute for Scientific Information database, so it’s officially part of the great web of citations that is science. Unfortunately, because of a confusion over the last words of the published letter, which, like the names of the authors, are in italics, the ISI lists the lead author as “Anthracis, B”, whose address is given as “Chem Def Estab, Salisbury SP4 0JQ, Wilts, England”.
It seems this is something that the relevant security authorities should be informed about. If the bacillus was authoring letters about itself back then, what has it learned to do by now?
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ARE you too being deluged with a new kind of spam email that buries a sales pitch in a welter of gibberish text?
A typical one we just received promises a “Bachelor, Master or PhD” in 30 days for the price of a few dinners out, and signs off with some paragraphs unashamedly labelled “random data”.
The gibberish that follows defeats junk mail filters, which work by looking for a high percentage of telltale words like “free”, “make money” or “Viagra”.
It is hard not to have a sneaking admiration for the spammers who keep one step ahead of the filter designers. It’s just a pity they couldn’t do something more useful with their talent.
Be warned, though. On no account be tempted to “click here” and reply with congratulations, sarcasm or abuse. The spammers often send bulk emails to guessed addresses. The one thing they want more than anything in the world is a reply which proves that a guessed address is “active” and owned by a real human.
MEANWHILE, here is the first verse of a poem that reader Bob Johnson has compiled from the subject lines of spam emails he has received. We like the way it seems to hover on the brink of meaning something without ever actually doing so.
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Your degree is close
AND here is another new unit of measurement. The website has this to say when explaining the capacity of ADSL lines: “1GB represents 200 MP3 songs (average 5MB per song) or 100 two-to-three minute MPEG videos.”
So the preferred new unit of measure for computer storage is the MP3Song – but given its relatively small size, reader Ross Bradley points out that perhaps the K-MP3Song or M-MP3Song would be a better unit.
THE Southern Daily Echo, a newspaper in the English port town of Southampton, has been waging a campaign against the local authority’s plans to collect rubbish less often.
This, the paper notes, “could spark an explosion of flies across the city”. And that, it goes on, is not a good thing: “Many of man’s primary diseases are transmitted by flies. These include typhoid, cholera, gangrene, tuberculosis, gonorrhoea, bubonic plague, leprosy, diphtheria, scarlet fever and amoebic dysentery.”
The entomologists, pathologists and bacteriologists among you may pick nits (so to speak) with some of that list. But gonorrhoea? As reader Mike Page notes, a lot of people are going to welcome that excuse. It’ll certainly make a change from claims to have caught it off a towel.
ANOTHER research paper title that leaves you wondering – and, as reader Eddie Price says, surely a contender for an IgNobel prize: “Chocolate eating in healthy men during experimentally induced sadness and joy” (Appetite, vol 39, p 147). We can’t help wondering: how did they do that, then?
THERE are daft product warnings, and there are those which we suspect were the result of managers failing an irony test set by underlings. For example, reader Chris Belcher insists that the bottom of a box of “Celebrations” mini-chocolates bears the dire warning: “Do not read this whilst box is open”.
FINALLY, reader Roman Sznober was intrigued earlier this month to see an advertisement in his local newspaper, the Shropshire Star, for a “Past Prevention Technician”. He is thinking of applying for the job, as he says there are several incidents in his past that he would like to prevent.
And, no, we don’t know what it means.
From the department of confident advertising. Reader Dave Smith tells us that a discount bedding store in Adelaide is proclaiming: “Our January sale only happens once a year”
