SEND in the marine geologists!
The Seattle Times reports a skilful assertion by University of Washington marine geologist John Delaney about the relevance of his work – or is it a disguised plea for funding? The ST summarises Delaney’s argument thus: “The ability to grow food on land is directly tied to the ocean’s motion. The ocean’s health will determine whether the planet can feed humanity. The chasm between the haves and the have-nots has historically fomented political dissent, and in the future the divide could widen between wealthy nations and developing nations that can’t feed their populations. Therefore, studying the ocean could prevent the conflicts that can lead to terrorism.”
We wonder if there are readers in other research disciplines who can offer a similarly persuasive justification of the importance of their work in the “war on terror”. Come on you silkworm larvae specialists. You know you can do it.
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HERE’S a euphemism the military PR people would be proud of. “How does a marketing department describe a problem with exploding batteries?” asks Al Cosand. He then goes on to pass on the answer provided in this press release from Kyocera Wireless Corp: “It has come to Kyocera Wireless Corp’s attention that an allotment of batteries to be used with the Kyocera 7135 smartphone might contain a risk hazard… Of the 50,731 units shipped in the United States, Kyocera has received four (4) confirmed reports of rapid disassembly. Of these four (4) reports one involved personal injury in the form of a second-degree burn and two (2) reported incidents resulted in minor property damage.”
REMEMBER the scare over the millennium bug? Computers, we were told, would not be able to handle the new century dates, and the world as we knew it would collapse into chaos.
The scare proved largely unfounded but a colleague has just found the bug alive and living in Portugal. He was flying to Portugal for a technical seminar with Philips. Stranded at an airport for a whole day by cancelled flights, he whiled away some time by trying out a portable DAB digital radio that Philips has developed.
The radio found five digital stations in Portugal, and automatically set its time and date from the signals that are broadcast along with the audio. The time, day and month were correct. But the date came up as 1904.
Which reminded Feedback of an incident a couple of years ago when an American airline pilot cracked a joke over the intercom after landing at Heathrow. “Welcome to the UK,” he announced cheerfully. “Let me remind you to adjust your watches. You’ll need to put them back by around a hundred years.”
How dare he be so rude, people complained. But if the same pilot now flies into Portugal and cracks the same joke, who could possibly object?
NO AREA of our lives attracts such a plethora of unusual units of measurement as waste disposal. Milford Harrison edits what he describes as a “thrilling” journal called Waste Planning, and he was so struck by the units that kept appearing in the press releases he received that he wrote an article about them. It includes such gems as: “Londoners are producing enough domestic rubbish to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool every 4 hours” (Museum of London, July 2003), and “About half of the tyres disposed of in Wales each year – enough to fill 444 double-decker buses – just disappear” (Environment Agency, April 2003).
Harrison published his article late last year, but the tide of idiosyncratic waste disposal units continues unabated. “In a year, we fill enough rubbish bins to stretch to the moon,” claimed BBC TV’s Countryfile on Sunday 21 March. And just in case viewers found this unit a little unwieldy, the programme gave an alternative, explaining that every hour the UK produces enough rubbish to fill the Royal Albert Hall in London.
So, that’s a conversion factor of 8766 Albert Halls per moon-high rubbish-bin column. All we need to know now is the conversion rate of Albert Halls to double-decker buses and Olympic swimming pools – bearing in mind, of course, that, as the Beatles once told us, now we know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
USING Google to search for papers on some measurement problems he was tackling, Stephen Barker got the truncated hyperlink: “Tolerance of females to head-supported devices during simulated…”
For a long time he resisted, but in the end he just had to know, so he hit the link to discover that the crucial missing words were “…helicopter vibration”.
FINALLY, is the City of London full of virtual executives? Claire Hunt was surprised to learn on the emarketer.com news site of a recent report by Bitpipe and Forbes that states: “Over 77 per cent of corporate and IT executives have passed a white paper or case study on to a colleague that they’ve downloaded online.”
The pot of “Herbes de Provence” from Rye Spice that John Osborne recently purchased states: “Produce of several countries”
